Imlay City: Gateway to the Thumb

Before eighteen seventy, this spot in Lapeer County was farmland. Then Charles Palmer, chief engineer of the Port Huron and Lake Michigan Railroad, surveyed two hundred forty acres here and laid out a town designed to serve as a produce market for the Thumb region's farmers. The town was named for William Imlay, an eastern investor who had bought land in the area decades earlier.

It was incorporated as a village in eighteen seventy-one, just a year after the first train arrived. Within months the population reached five hundred. Farmers from across the Thumb could load grain and sugar beets onto railcars and receive goods in return.

By nineteen fourteen the city had even added its own streetcar line, a rare luxury for a town this size. Today Imlay City still calls itself the Gateway to the Thumb.