Potterville: Named for the Man Who Built It
Near Lansing, Michigan
Potterville, in Eaton County just south of Lansing, was settled in November of eighteen forty-four when Linus Potter arrived with his wife Diana and their seven children. The Potters had already made one westward journey, traveling from Cayuga County, New York, to Michigan by way of the Erie Canal and a Lake Erie steamboat back in eighteen thirty. Linus became supervisor of Benton Township in eighteen forty-six, and the settlement that gathered around his family naturally took his name.
A sawmill arrived in eighteen sixty-eight, the village incorporated in eighteen eighty-one, and Potterville became a city in nineteen sixty-two. A family of eight from upstate New York left a name on a corner of the Michigan prairie that has now stood for nearly two hundred years.
