Hamburg / Edwin B. Winans

In 1831, Hamburg's first settlers—Felix Dunlavey, Jesse Hall, Calvin Jackson, Cornelius Miller, and Herman Lake—and their families arrived. In 1835, Ann Arbor merchant E.F. Gay and Amariah Hammond bought thirty acres there, built a dam, and established the area's first sawmill. By 1837 they had sold their interests to the Grisson brothers, who had emigrated from Hamburg, Germany, in 1834 and also operated a store, a gristmill, and a hotel. That same year the village of Hamburg was platted, and in 1840 its post office was established with John Grisson as the first postmaster. One hundred and fifty years after its founding, the village of nine hundred residents had a historic Episcopal church, a volunteer fire department, several stores and factories, a library, a cemetery, and a township hall. Edwin B. Winans, born in 1826 and died in 1894, became the first Democrat elected governor of Michigan after the Civil War and, during his two-year term beginning in 1890, instituted the secret ballot system. A native of New York, he moved to Livingston County, Michigan, at age eight, studied at Albion College and the University of Michigan Law School, and then left the state for the California gold rush. Returning to Michigan in 1858, he bought a four-hundred-acre farm in Hamburg and went on to serve as state representative from 1861 to 1864, constitutional convention delegate in 1867, township supervisor from 1872 to 1873, Livingston County probate judge from 1877 to 1881, and congressman from 1883 to 1886. He died at his Winans Lake estate in Hamburg Township in 1894.

Michigan · United States