Unionville, Michigan: Tuscola County Village History for Genealogists

One Log House in 1854

Unionville’s origin story is short enough to fit in a paragraph, which is more than you can say for most Thumb-region villages. Horace C. Marvin and Andrew Marshall arrived in 1854 and started clearing land on what became the village site; Marvin built the first log house and opened a general store not long after. He’s credited with naming the place after his own hometown, Union, Ohio. A post office followed — first under the name “Akron” in 1857, then reorganized as the Unionville post office by the Civil War years, with Marvin himself serving as postmaster.

The village grew the way most 1850s Michigan settlements did: slowly, then a little faster once there was something to trade. In 1856, merchants Samuel Covey and William J. Davis brought in a stock of general merchandise — mosquito netting among the first items to sell, by more than one account — and Marvin’s own operation expanded into a proper hotel, the Unionville House. The community sits in Columbia Township, near what was then called Wessacaugen Creek and is known today as the Wiscoggin Drain, not far inland from Saginaw Bay.

What Kept the Village Running

Pine paid the earliest bills. Loggers worked the timber along the local creeks through the 1850s and into the ’60s, the same pattern that built half the Thumb’s early villages. As the big pine thinned out, families already on the ground shifted to farming — an 1872 description of the area called it “heavily timbered” with “rich and fertile” soil, and by 1880 the surrounding fields were producing wheat, oats, corn, potatoes, and orchard fruit in enough volume that Unionville had become a genuine produce market, even without a railroad yet to move it.

That last part mattered more than it sounds. Without rail access, Unionville’s grain and wheat trade lost ground through the 1870s to Sebewaing, a few miles off with better shipping. The fix came in 1881, when local subscriptions raised the right-of-way funding to bring the Saginaw, Tuscola & Huron Railroad through the village. A depot followed, and with it the J.H. Kemp & Co. grain elevator, whose “American Beauty Flour” became a regional brand. Wheat, oats, and — as farming diversified further into the 1890s — sugar beets rolled out by rail toward Detroit and Flint. A local coal mine and the Unionville Milling Company rounded out the village’s late-19th-century economy, an unusually varied mix for a town this size.

What Records Survive, and Where They Sit

Four congregations organized in Unionville within a roughly 25-year span, and each one is a distinct genealogical thread. Methodist and Moravian meetings both trace to the 1850s and ’60s, with a Moravian church building going up in 1872 and a Methodist building completed not long after. Unionville’s Baptist congregation incorporated in 1875 and dedicated its own building in 1877. St. Paul’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church organized in 1876, serving the area’s German settler families specifically. Baptism, marriage, and burial entries from any of these four predate the county clerk’s own paperwork for plenty of families — worth checking directly with each denomination’s regional archive or successor congregation before assuming a record doesn’t exist.

Schools are the other early paper trail. Unionville’s first school opened in 1858-59, and Columbia Township — the township containing the village — had grown to five schoolhouses serving more than 300 students by 1882. School censuses and enrollment records, where they survive, can place a family in the township years before a vital record would.

For the printed record, two local papers covered Unionville directly: the Unionville Sun, founded April 14, 1883 by Robert S. Tolland and continued for a few years under John Haible, and its successor, the Unionville Crescent, which launched around 1892 and ran until 1958, when it merged into the Sebewaing Blade and Unionville Crescent. The Library of Michigan holds microfilm for the Crescent’s run, and the merged paper’s later years are cataloged at the Library of Congress — both worth a look for an obituary, a wedding announcement, or a stray mention of a family business.

Cemetery records are the piece most likely to require legwork rather than a database search. Village and township burying grounds in this part of Tuscola County are typically kept locally rather than centralized at the county level, so a Columbia Township contact — or the Caro Area District Library’s broader county cemetery listings — is usually the faster route than a general online search.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Unionville, Michigan founded? Horace C. Marvin and Andrew Marshall began clearing the site in 1854; the village incorporated formally on April 1, 1879.

Who was Unionville named after? Horace C. Marvin’s hometown of Union, Ohio, is the source of the name, dating to the community’s early post office years.

What did Unionville’s economy depend on? Pine logging first, then wheat and orchard farming, then sugar beets once the 1881 railroad gave the village a way to ship crops out.

What genealogical records exist for early Unionville families? Four church congregations organizing between the 1850s and 1876, Columbia Township’s schools (five by 1882), and two successive local newspapers running from 1883 to 1958.

Is Unionville its own county, or part of Tuscola County? It’s an unincorporated village within Columbia Township, Tuscola County — records are filed at the county level, not by the village itself.