The story
Welcome to Burr Oak
Burr Oak was laid out in 1851 as the Michigan Southern Railroad was being finished across the southern part of the county, and it grew into a busy little shipping and manufacturing village. For a few years it carried the name of the man who gave land for its depot, until its people voted their old name back.
The township had been settled since 1831, and its post office was at Thompson’s Corners, but there was no village until the railroad came. In 1851 a village was laid out on land owned by William Lock, on the southeast quarter of section 23, and the next year Henry Weaver platted an addition on the northeast quarter. Williams Betts built the first frame house in 1850, before the survey, and John Talbot kept the first store in 1851. In 1852 the post office moved from Thompson’s Corners to the new village.
Cutler calls Burr Oak a railroad town, platted while the Michigan Southern was being completed through the county. According to Romig’s Michigan Place Names, as summarized on Wikipedia, Lock gave land for the station in 1852 on condition that the town be called Lock’s Station, and in 1857 popular demand restored the name Burr Oak. The name itself came from the township, which the 1877 history says was named for the burr oak timber that once covered it.
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The Baptists built the first church in the village in 1858. Burr Oak was incorporated on October 11, 1859, and held its first village election on the first Monday of March 1860. Some twenty years later, Cutler says, the village had five dry goods stores, two drug stores, a jeweler, two hardware stores, groceries, shoe shops, an implement depot, three hotels, a sawmill and a gristmill.
In 1911 Burr Oak had about eight hundred people, an opera house, a union school, a telephone exchange, a public library, an electric light and power plant, and a weekly paper, the Burr Oak Acorn. Its leading industry was the Sheffield Manufacturing Company, founded in 1891 by George S. Sheffield after he left the car works at Three Rivers that bear his name, and garment factories and a lumber company also worked there. Burr Oak remains a small village on the old Michigan Southern line in the southeastern corner of the county. The 2020 census counted 753 people in the village.