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, when 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, hoping 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, or 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 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.