The Baron Who Named the Town

This city carries the name of a man who, by most accounts, never actually lived here. James Ludington was born in New York in eighteen twenty seven, and as a teenager his family moved west to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He built his fortune in timber, and his eye fell on a small mill village on the Michigan shore called Pere Marquette, at the mouth of the river of the same name.

Ludington acquired a sawmill there and began turning a rough logging camp into a real town. In eighteen sixty seven he platted about three hundred and sixty acres, sold off lots to settlers, put up a large general store known as the Big Store, and even founded the area's first newspaper, the Mason County Record. Two years later, in eighteen sixty nine, he sold his local interests to a lumber company for about half a million dollars, a staggering sum that made him a wealthy man.

The community he had shaped kept climbing, and when it was chartered as a city in eighteen seventy three, it took his name. He remained largely an absentee founder, a Milwaukee businessman whose money and ambition built a Michigan town he mostly watched from across the lake.