Dimondale: The Diamond-Shaped Mill Village
Near Lansing, Michigan
Dimondale sits along the Grand River in Eaton County and owes its existence entirely to one man's industrial ambition. Isaac M. Dimond arrived in eighteen forty-eight, and within two years had begun building a dam on the river just east of Silver Creek.
By eighteen fifty-two the dam was finished and a sawmill was running. He added a grist mill in eighteen fifty-six, the same year surveyor Hosey Harvey laid out the village plat and gave it Dimond's name. What makes the plat unusual is that its streets run northeast to southwest and northwest to southeast, giving the village footprint a rough diamond shape on any map, a happy accident that rhymes with the founder's name.
By eighteen eighty, Dimondale had seven stores, millinery shops, a planing mill, and several machine shops. It incorporated as a village in nineteen oh six and remains one today.
