The Once-and-for-All, Very Last Town in Michigan

This is it…Michigan’s very last town…and it doesn’t even have a downtown anymore. No businesses…well, there’s a church and a branch of a dairy truck manufacturer, but that’s about it. There’s a good handful of homes and the countryside is very pretty.

It seems like a pleasant enough place, so why is it called “The Very Last Town in Michigan”?

First of all, I searched for alphabetical lists of Michigan towns…and they usually came up with a couple of answers for the last town…and both of them are wrong. The towns they came up with are ‘Zeeland’ and ‘Zilwaukee’…..but the VERY last Michigan town – once-and-for-all and alphabetically, that is – is Zutphen, a little village in Ottawa County.

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Zutphen was settled by the Dutch approximately in the 1860’s and named after a town in the Netherlands. When you think of all the other communities in western Michigan, it makes more sense: places like Zeeland, Vriesland, Overisel, Noordeloos, Holland, Drenthe, and Brouwer Farms just to name a few.

When a post office began operating in 1882, Dutch settler Johannes Glupker became first postmaster. The post office finally closed for good in 1906.

A new church was eventually built and the old parsonage was moved and renovated into "The Dominie House” where visitors could get a good meal and a tour of the house. It is currently a private residence.

Zutphen – the very last town in Michigan (alphabetically) - is close to being wiped out of the history books, as there is extremely little written about it, and many Ottawa County history articles do not even mention it.

The gallery below shows you the location as well as a few old photos from over one hundred years ago.

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