Kent County’s Lost & Forgotten Places

Presented by Dana Kenneth Johnson
Photojournalist, Historian, Author, Editor, Publisher, Educational Media Producer, Audiovisual Specialist, Lecturer.

Kent County certainly has its share of obscure places. Some of them thrive under a different name, others have been swallowed up by urban sprawl, and still others have practically disappeared. Discover, for instance, that the ghost town of White Swan was named after the notorious Chief Wabasis; that Sheffield, Evans and Harvard were all established along the same set of railroad tracks; and that Michigan’s first village named Ashley was in Kent County, not Gratiot.

Most of those towns started with a mill, whether a saw mill or a grist mill, some of them named for their mills - such as Goulds Mill, Imperial Mill, Spencer Mill, or Thomas Mill.

Several changed their names - Austerlitz became Plainfield, Mill Creek became Comstock Park - and others - such as Vergennes - just moved from one place to another.

You’re likely familiar with the surnames DeVos and VanAndel, but you might not know that the village of Ada wouldn’t exist today without Rich DeVos and Jay VanAndel, founders of Amway, whose worldwide headquarters are located there.

The village of Alaska got its name soon after U. S. Secretary of State William H. Seward arranged for the purchase of the Russian territory of that name for $7,000,000 - about 2 cents an acre - in 1867. You can visit places with faraway names without even leaving the county - places like Corinth, Egypt, Lisbon, (East) Paris and Sparta.

What all these places have in common is that they each tell a story of boom and bust, growth and demise, success and failure, and above all, the ability - or lack thereof - to change with the times or suffer the consequences of disappearing from the map and from history.

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Author of:

MICHIGAN PIONEERS SERIES
• The 1864 Diary of Stephen A. Staines: A year in the life of a Michigan Pioneer
• The 1883 Diary of Captain Robert Walter Hoy: A year in the life of a Fenwick, Michigan, pioneer
• The 1879 Diary of Adelbert Worden
• Michigan Pioneer Chronicles: Nineteenth Century Michigan Diaries
• The 1881 Diary of Sophronia Agatha (Burney) Frayer: A year in the life of a Michigan pioneer, with history and genealogy

FORGOTTEN MICHIGAN
• Kent County: Lost Towns, Abandoned Sites, and Forgotten History
• Forgotten Towns: Montcalm County, Michigan: Ghost Towns, Proposed Villages, and Lost Locales
• Ionia County: Lost and Forgotten Towns and Sites
• Newaygo County, Michigan: Lost & Forgotten Towns and Sites

OLD SCHOOL PROJECT
• Historic Schools of Ionia County
• Historic Schools of Montcalm County, Michigan
• Historic Schools of Barry County
• Historic Schools of Muskegon County
• Historic Schools of Kent County, Michigan
• Historic Schools of Ottawa County, Michigan
• Historic Schools of Oceana County
• Historic Schools of Gratiot County, Michigan
• Historic Schools of Marquette County, Michigan
• Historic Schools of Alger County, Michigan
• Historic Schools of Mason County, Michigan