Vogel Center: a Dutch farm colony older than the lumber towns

In 1869, a man named Jan Vogel and three companions walked into the woods of what is now Riverside Township, east of McBain, and started clearing farms. They were Dutch, and they got there early — before the railroads, before most of the lumber towns. Their settlement, Vogel Center, claims to be the oldest European settlement in the whole stretch of country between Manistee, Traverse City, and Big Rapids.

For a Dutch farming community, the church came almost as fast as the plows. The congregation organized in 1872, raised its first log church in 1878, and called its first minister, Rev. J. Schepers, in 1881. By the early 1900s the neighborhood had grown to around 115 families, all of them clustered around that church on the corner. The services were in Dutch for decades; English came later, the way it did in every one of these West Michigan Dutch colonies.

That church is still the thing that holds Vogel Center together. In 2022 the Vogel Center Christian Reformed Church marked 150 years — a century and a half of the same congregation farming the same land east of McBain, baptizing and burying generations of the same families. There’s no real downtown out here, no business district to speak of. The church is the town hall, the social center, and the landmark all at once.

It’s an easy place to drive past on a county road and see nothing but corn and a steeple. But that steeple sits over the oldest roots in this part of northern Michigan — a farm colony that was already a generation old by the time the sawmills showed up and started cutting everything around it.