Huron County History

Named after a boulder in Lake Huron that was used as a landmark in the Indian Treaty of 1807, the village was settled about 1860. Destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871, the town was soon rebuilt, including a schoolhouse. The present building was constructed in 1909.

On July 1, 1845, three Lutheran missionaries, Reverend Johann J. F. Auch, Reverend J. Simon Dumser, and Reverend George Sinke, arrived to evangelize the Chippewa Indians. A log chapel was built here later that summer.

Stagecoaches played an important part in developing the Midwest. Michigan’s frontier “fever” peaked in the decade from 1830 to 1840 with a 600 percent population increase. Stagecoaches attempted to fill the demand for fast and relatively comfortable transportation.

The Polish refugees who immigrated to Dwight Township in the 1840s in order to escape Prussian domination worshipped at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Port Austin. In 1903, in an effort to retain their Polish identity, they established their own parish and built St. Mary of Czestochowa Church, named for “the Queen of Poland.”

Sebewaing Township was organized in 1853. In 1877 the board resolved to use “liquor money” to build this township hall. The atypical two-story town hall included voting booths, a courtroom, a jury room, a jail, and a meeting hall.

The Pointe aux Barques Lighthouse and Lifesaving Station aided mariners for over a century, beginning in 1847. That year the U.S. Lighthouse Service built the first lighthouse on this site to mark the turning point of Lake Huron into Saginaw Bay and to warn of shallow waters.

The Pigeon Depot was constructed in 1908 and served two railroad lines. In 1883 the Pontiac, Oxford, and Port Austin Railroad, a north-south line, had been extended to Caseville and a depot was built at Berne, one mile north of here.

In 1882, as three new railroads began to lay track in Huron County, two cousins from Saginaw, John G., and John S. Owen, bought land in the Columbia Swamp. The following year, they opened a sawmill to harvest the native oak.

In 1868 the Reverend Manasseh Hickey and twelve settlers organized a Methodist Episcopal church in Caseville. Services were held in a schoolhouse until the present church was built. Upon its dedication on November 15, 1874, the Gothic-inspired structure, with its 70-foot-high steeple, became a focal point for the community.

One of Sebewaing’s most prominent citizens, John C. Liken (1832-1920) came here in 1865 from New York State lured by Michigan’s bountiful forests, he opened stave and sawmills in Sebewaing, Unionville, Akron, and Fairgrove. His firm, John C. Liken and Company, dealt in a variety of commodities that the company’s fleet of ships transported to Bay City and markets in New York.

During the mid-1850s the firm of R. B. Hubbard and Company, which included Connecticut-born entrepreneurs Langdon Hubbard, his brother Watson, and cousin Rollin B., built a steam-powered sawmill on Willow Creek. The company town they developed was named Huron City in 1861.

Small fires were burning in the forests of the Thumb, tinder-dry after a long, hot summer, when a gale swept in from the southwest on September 5, 1881. Fanned into an inferno, the fires raged for three days. A million acres were devastated in Sanilac and Huron Counties alone.

Frank Murphy was Associate Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court from 1940 until his death in 1949. His earlier career included service as a Judge in the Detroit Recorder’s Court and instructor in law at the University of Detroit in the twenties. In the following decade, he was Mayor of Detroit, U. S. Governor-General in the Philippines, Governor of Michigan, and Attorney General of the United States.

Built in 1907 by local contractor David Pierce, the Citizens Bank Block also housed a harness shop and a library. Albert Sleeper (1862-1934), who served in the Michigan State Senate and as governor, co-founded the bank with his uncle A. W. Merrell, taking sole ownership in 1900. Sleeper owned several other banks and extensive real estate.

Around 1857 Charles G. Learned purchased several thousand acres of pine land in Michigan’s Thumb area. With profits from his lumbering and farming enterprises, Learned enlarged and updated this house in the French Second Empire style. In the 1860s Ohio congressman, later president, James A. Garfield, a family friend, was a frequent guest here.