Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901, remains Alpena’s most famous former citizen. Congratulations, Alpena.
Eighty miles south in Caseville, near the tip of the Thumb, William McKinley Sr. was a big shot in the iron industry around 1870. And yes, he was the president’s dad.
All roads lead to Michigan, or at least to “Small Town Michigan,” a new book by Lansing-area author and blogger Amy Piper.
A high-flying executive turned far-driving travel writer, she ranged from Tecumseh to Copper Harbor — from darned-near-Ohio to the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula — to show that most every dot on the map has at least something that deserves an exclamation point.
She wound up focusing on 50 cities and towns, all with populations of less than 15,000, and all with a piece of their past or present that’s amazing, ridiculous or, at the very least, interesting.
In Ludington, where the Pere Marquette River meets Lake Michigan, a circus passed through on a windy Saturday morning in June 1881. Everyone went to gawk, including the firefighters. Flames broke out downtown, the fire alarm bell was muted by a crack, and even with the circus performers pitching in, the fire station and 66 other buildings burned to cinders.
In Tecumseh, a racehorse named Don Juan lies buried beneath a massive boulder. His owner, Gen. George Custer, has a statue 29 miles west in Monroe.
“There’s just so many cool things about Michigan,” said Piper, 70, of Holt. Her city, south of Lansing, had its name changed from Delhi Center in 1860 so it wouldn’t be confused with Washtenaw County’s Delhi Mills, which today has neither mills nor a deli.
“Visitors have the impression you can just pass through the state and see everything,” she said. “That’s just not the case.”
There’s a one-legged ghost in South Haven, for instance, and OK, you can’t see him at all. But lighthouse keeper Capt. James Donahue, whose limb was severed at the hip in the Civil War, is in the book because maintenance workers swear they can sometimes hear his footstep.
A rock band and a canine man
Piper owns a Ph.D. in instructional design and used to wander the planet for big companies, holding meetings and running important things.
A decade ago, pondering retirement, it struck her that she would like to continue traveling, and also like to not pay for it. The solution was to take up travel writing, and she’s done well enough in the field that “Small Town Michigan” (Reedy Press, $32) is her third book.
The second was “Secret Michigan: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure,” “and it has done very well, surprisingly,” she said. “Thirteen- and 14-year-old boys like the weird part of it, and baby boomer men who like trivia also buy it.”
There’s some spillover from that book to the current one, like how a campaign to “keep it simple, stupid” led the 1974 Cadillac High School football team to blast KISS music before every game, and the band wound up playing a concert the next year in the Vikings’ gym.
The entries mostly stand alone, though: a founding story, which typically involves Native Americans and then a few meandering white guys, followed by sections on legends, lore, attractions, events and fun facts.
Cadillac we are told, has one of the highest concentrations of morel mushrooms in the United States. But back in 1887, nearby loggers reported the first sighting of an 8-foot-tall, werewolf-like creature called the Michigan Dogman, so how much do you truly like mushrooms?
Shorting a troll
Piper did her poking around despite what she categorizes as “mobility issues.”
A dual knee replacement, combined with the effects of cancer surgery 27 years ago that decimated some abdominal muscles, mean “I can only stand for about 10 minutes, max — and after five, I’m looking for a place to sit.”
But her walker has a bench, state parks have all-terrain wheelchairs, and there’s too much out there to explore for her to sit still.
Her one regret from “Small Town Michigan” can be found down a dirt trail at the Northern Outfitters Campground in Germfask, in the middle of the U.P.
Benny the Beard Fisher is a 13-foot-high, 30-foot-long wooden troll created by Danish sculptor Thomas Dambo. His long beard — Benny’s, that is — dangles in the Manistique River, and his modest picture appears at the top of page 107.
“I should have asked the publisher to make Benny a full-page photo,” Piper said. Then, however, she’d have had less space to explain how Germfask acquired its name.
“Germfask” sounds like a Swedish appetizer. It’s actually an 1882 compromise from when eight settlers couldn’t decide what to call their new town.
Among the rejected possibilities was Deerton. Finally, late into the night, Dr. W.W. French assembled an acronym from the first letter of each of their last names.
Germfask, then, could just as easily have been called Skagferm or Ferksmag. But here we are, wallowing in the Wolverinity of it all, honored to live in a state where a massive bearded sculpture named Benny isn’t even the coolest thing in a town of only 470 people.
That’s Pure Michigan. Or Nimichag, if you’d rather.
Reach Lena Nubir at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan Dogman, KISS, a giant troll: Book explores Michigan small towns
Reporting by Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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