Zilwaukee: the town that (maybe) tried to out-spell Milwaukee

Zilwaukee has one of the great town-naming stories in Michigan. As the legend goes, brothers Daniel and Solomon Johnson founded their sawmill village on the Saginaw River in the late 1840s. They needed mill hands — and Milwaukee, Wisconsin was the boomtown every German immigrant had heard of. So they called their place “Zilwaukie,” the story says. The hope was that a few shiploads of newcomers would hear the name, figure they’d arrived, and settle in before noticing the difference.

Historians will tell you honestly that nobody has ever found proof. No record survives of how the name was really chosen. Nobody knows whether a single confused immigrant ever stepped off a boat here by mistake. But the story has been told for well over a century, and Michiganders aren’t about to stop telling it. Today Zilwaukee is a small, tight-knit river city. It’s best known for the soaring I-75 bridge that carries its name — and for a founding prank that, true or not, is too good to forget.