The Villages of Lachine & Posen and the Abandoned Farmhouse

First of all, let’s briefly touch on the town of Lachine, in Alpena County’s Long Rapids Township.

Lachine is another of Michigan’s many unincorporated communities, born in 1909 as a railroad station of the D & M Railway and was named by a train conductor who hailed from Lachine, Quebec, Canada. A post office came along in 1910 with a lady named Jennie Moore who became the first postmaster.

During the 1800s, Lachine’s main income was through lumber and farming. There was a huge number of lumber camps, and when enough timber was removed from certain areas, the land was cleared and turned into farms.

Aside from lumber and farm crops, good money was made from making and selling butter and maple syrup. Lachine also had the Hotel Lachine, the Stoddard Hotel, the Lachine Elevator, the Lachine Bank and Lachine Mercantile. The mercantile shop burned down in 1917, rebuilt and bought under the name Nugent’s, then Gleason’s, then Sheldon’s, then Lachine Grocery.

A good number of old buildings still stand in Lachine.

NOW FOR THE TOWN OF POSEN:
Posen’s history records have almost no references to Native Americans, even though we’re sure they were there. In fact, the town records only show one instance - in 1880, when the township board ruled that no beer or alcohol should be sold to Indians.

Some of Posen’s first settlers arrived in 1870, when hundreds of Polish immigrants were sent to the area by lumber companies to become laborers. Once the timber was depleted, many of the immigrants stayed put and settled their own farms and homesteads.

So where did the name ‘Posen’ come from? It came from the Province of Poznan in Poland, where a good number of the immigrants came from.

Interesting historical Posen fact: the man who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901 was from Posen. Leon Frank Czolgosz was born in Alpena in 1873, the family moved to Detroit in 1878, and in 1873 when Leon was ten years old, the family moved to Posen.

Somewhere between Lachine and Posen lies the abandoned farmhouse you are about to see. It’s nothing spectacular, but just one of many such deserted houses and structures that are scattered throughout northern Michigan.

The gallery below shows some old photos of Lachine and Posen, and some inside/outside images of the old farmhouse.