County: Crawford (20)

Created from: 

Boundary finalized: 

Population: 1900 = 2,943 |  2000 = 12,988

The county is named for Col. William Crawford, a Revolutionary War officer captured by Native Americans near Sandusky, Ohio and burned at the stake in 1792. Created by the Michigan Legislature as Shawono County in 1840, before being renamed in 1843 as Crawford County. "Shawono" was derived from an Ojibwe word, zhaawanong, meaning "from the south". The area was administered by other Michigan counties before 1879 when the county government was organized.

Due to the location in rural northern Michigan, Crawford County's greatest economic growth occurred in the 1800s when lumbering clear-cut most of the extensive forests of Norway pine, birch, maple, beech and hemlock. With the trees gone, tourism became the center of the economy. In the 1870s Crawford County became a popular destination for recreational fishing. The Michigan grayling, found in the Au Sable River, first gained the attention of anglers. The Crawford County Avalanche began publishing a weekly paper in 1879. Their first edition featured a fishing story on the front-page. By the end of the century, the grayling species vanished due to a combination of overfishing, river degradation due to logging, and the impact of human-introduced brown trout. The Au Sable River of today boasts large populations of brown and rainbow trout and remains a premiere trout fishing area in both Michigan and the nation. [Wiki]