In the mid-1850s, the firm of R. B. Hubbard and Company, including Connecticut-born entrepreneurs Langdon Hubbard, his brother Watson, and cousin Rollin B., built a steam-powered sawmill on Willow Creek and developed a company town named Huron City in 1861. A horse-drawn tram carried the mill’s products to a nearby dock in Lake Huron for transport to the firm’s lumber yard in Sandusky, Ohio. Huge forest fires in 1871 and 1881 entirely destroyed Huron City, but each time the town was rebuilt. Its surviving buildings, including Langdon Hubbard’s house, now called Seven Gables, the general store, the hotel, and the church, all date from the early 1880s. After Langdon Hubbard died in 1892, William Lyon Phelps, who had married Hubbard’s daughter Annabel that year, spent most summers at Seven Gables until 1938 and did much of his writing there while also serving as the summer minister at the Huron City Church. Phelps, the Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale University until his retirement in 1933, had a national following for four decades as an author, critic, and lecturer. In 1939 he turned the town over to his niece Carolyn Hubbard Parcells, and she and her husband, Charles A. Parcells Sr., established the William Lyon Phelps Foundation in 1946 to preserve Huron City. The foundation built the brick museum in 1952, restored the store, the hotel, and the church during the 1950s, and moved the Point aux Barques Life-Saving Station building to Huron City in 1964 to preserve it. In 1995 Huron City was listed as a historic district in the National Register of Historic Places.