Exploring our Heritage through our Ancestors

Sears, Charles Herbert

Local History

Colonel Isaac Barnes and his sons built a sawmill here in the winter of 1836-37.  The settlement was given a post office as Wayland on May 10, 1844, with George Barnes as its first postmaster.  It was named after its township which had been named after Wayland, N.Y.  Three and a half miles east, Nelson Chambers had founded Chambers' Corners in 1838.  When the Kalamazoo & Grand Rapids Plank Road came through in 1854, the post office was transferred to Chambers' Corners but retained the name Wayland.  Isaac Kellogg platted the village and recorded it as Lomax City in 1861, but it was incorporated as the village of Wayland in 1858.

Informational excerpts from Michigan Place Names, by Walter Romig, L.H.D.

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