How Vandalia got its name

Vandalia, Mich. Some town names explain themselves, and some are explained in every county history. Vandalia is neither. It grew up around a grist mill on a creek in Penn Township, it had a post office called Vandalia by 1850, and its plat was filed early in 1851. Who chose the name, and why, no source we have read explains.

So this is a story about what the record does show, and about the guesses that fill the gap. We went back to the county histories of 1875, 1882 and 1906, Michigan’s first gazetteer of 1838 and the post-office lists.

The case in brief

Story or record? Play along

Here are eight things people say about the name. For each, make your call: true, false, or no record either way. Then see what the paper shows.

A post office first

DocumentedThe earliest record of the name we have found is the post office. Postal listings compiled from the Post Office Department’s records give “Vandalia” from 1850, and Rogers’s county history of 1875 names T. J. Wilcox as its first postmaster.

DocumentedThe village had grown up around a mill. Glover’s history of 1906 describes “a grist mill built on the banks of Christiann creek along the state road,” built in 1849 by two Quakers and pioneers of Penn Township, Stephen Bogue and Charles P. Ball, which “served as the nucleus for the village of Vandalia.”

DocumentedRogers says Bogue and Ball laid out the village on 3 January 1851. Glover says the plat of the village of Vandalia was filed on 21 February 1851, on the east side of the creek. It was incorporated in 1875; the railroad, Glover says, arrived in 1871.

Why Vandalia?

OpenNobody we have found says. Rogers mentions Vandalia eight times and never explains it; Glover, writing at length about the village in 1906, does not either. Walter Romig’s Michigan Place Names, the standard reference, may; we have not yet been able to read it.

ReadingThe guesses are borrowed from elsewhere. Vandalia, Illinois, founded in 1819, was the state capital until 1839 and the western end of the National Road, and its name was well known. The Illinois town’s own history of its name is uncertain: the ancient Vandals, a failed colony of the 1770s called Vandalia, and a surveyor’s coinage have all been proposed. Any of these could lie behind the Michigan name, or none.

ReadingWhat the word means is plain enough: Vandalia is a Latin-style “land of the Vandals,” the name of a Germanic people of the late Roman empire. It has no Native-language origin.

A station on the creek

DocumentedVandalia’s founders were Quakers, and their neighbourhood was one of the best-known stations of the Underground Railroad in Michigan. Stephen Bogue had come to the county in 1830; the Underground Railroad Society of Cass County calls him the county’s most famous stationmaster, and says his house, which still stands on M-60, sheltered many freedom seekers on their way to Canada.

DocumentedIn August 1847, slave catchers from Kentucky raided the Quaker farms of Calvin, Penn and Porter townships and seized freedom seekers living there. A crowd of white and Black neighbours, by some counts some hundreds strong, confronted the raiders at O’Dell’s Mill on Christiana Creek near Vandalia, and the Kentuckians agreed to stand trial at Cassopolis. The court commissioner found their papers wanting and released the captives, and dozens of people went on to Canada. The slaveholders’ lawsuit against the neighbours dragged on in federal court in Detroit for more than two years.

DocumentedThe house of James E. Bonine, Bogue’s son-in-law, stands at Penn Road and M-60. It was begun about 1844 and enlarged and restyled after the Civil War; the society, which bought it in 2010, says there is little evidence that the house itself was a station, but there is evidence that freedom seekers were sheltered in the Gothic Revival carriage house of the early 1850s across the road.

ReadingThe village that grew around Bogue and Ball’s mill was born a few years after the raid, in the middle of this Quaker country. The name they gave it is still unexplained; what they did there is not.

Christiann Creek

DocumentedThe creek the village stands on has a recorded name and a recorded reason. Rogers, 1875: the stream that runs into the St. Joseph “near the present site of Elkhart … is known as the Christiana creek. It was so named by the missionary in honor of his wife, as they crossed it the 18th of December.” The missionary was the Baptist Isaac McCoy, founder of the Carey Mission; in October 1803, Rogers says, he had married Miss Christiana Polk. The 1882 history dates the naming to 1822.

DocumentedThe spelling has drifted ever since. Blois’s Gazetteer of the State of Michigan (1838) has “Christiana river”; Rogers has both “Christiana creek” and “Christianna Creek”; the 1882 history “Christianna Creek”; and Glover in 1906 “Christiann creek,” the form used in Vandalia today. Federal maps still call it Christiana Creek.

DocumentedThe creek turned mills long before the village. Rogers puts Carpenter’s mill of 1828, the county’s first grist mill, on the creek “just below where Vandalia now stands.”

The name on paper

Vandalia has kept one spelling from the start. Its creek has not. Play the creek’s names in order.

• 1822 Christiana (Isaac McCoy names it for his wife)
• 16 years later
• 1838 Christiana river (Blois’s gazetteer)
• 37 years later
• 1875 Christiana creek (Rogers)
• 1882 Christianna Creek (the county history)
• 24 years later
• 1906 Christiann creek (Glover, and the creek today)

To cite this page: Michael Urbanski, “How Vandalia got its name,” Project Scroll, projectscroll.com/news/how-vandalia-got-its-name/, first published 22 October 2026. Corrections are welcome, and any we make are noted on this page.