Grayling, Michigan

Grayling sits at the geographic center of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, on the Au Sable River in Crawford County. It was platted in eighteen seventy-two and named for the Arctic grayling, a trout-like fish native to the Au Sable. The grayling was prized by sport fishermen who rode the new railroad north to catch it, but intensive logging of the surrounding white pine forests in the eighteen seventies and eighties silted the river and the species was gone from Michigan by the nineteen thirties.

Camp Grayling, established in nineteen thirteen, grew into the largest National Guard training facility in the United States, covering nearly one hundred fifty thousand acres. The town today numbers about nineteen hundred people and leans on Camp Grayling, outdoor recreation, and the fly-fishing culture that has returned to the restored Au Sable.