Before 1900, no one in their right mind would have wanted to live in this God-forsaken lumber town on the border of Clare and Gladwin Counties. Most Michigan ghost towns started with a sawmill, railroad or a mine. Meredith was different- it started with a saloon. Maybe that's why people said it was doomed from the start. Yet as many as 2,000 people lived there briefly because it was where the work was, felling and hauling the timber from the immense forests that spread into parts of three counties. Per capita, it was probably the roughest, toughest town in all of lower Michigan in those days. With scores of barroom fistfights, a daily occurrence, along with numerous gunfights and murders. Meredith had it's lumber boom hayday in the 1880s and early 1890s, then the town up and died. Now it quietly sits along M-18 minding it's own business, a ghost town that has come back a little over the last fifty years.
Among the many uncertainties about Meredith is how it got it's name. Local legend has it that early lumbermen called it that in honor of the area's first saloon which was near Frank Meredith's lumber camp. The saloon was started by one Tom McClennon who followed the railroad in from Harrison and in 1881 also built a hotel called Corrigan House, named after the railroad conductor. Pine timbering in Clare County reached a peak in the late 1870s and 1880s. There were fifty lumber camps in the northern townships and the woods were crawling with lumberjacks. Most of the big operators- Wells, Stone and Company, Hoyt, Murphy Dorr and Roscommon among them- hauled logs south to Meredith and the new PM railroad. Grand Haven Lumber Company brought in it's own logging railroad and used it to get the timber from the woods to the connecting railroads. Some years, more than 3,000 men worked in the cold and clammy camps for weeks on end. Meredith became the commercial center for the main things most men wanted- a hot meal, a warm place to sleep, booze and women. With this main menu, the town had a reputation as Sin City, USA. For those who controlled their liquor and tempers, fistfights and gunfights were free and regular entertainment. There were no lawmen to speak of. It was said this came about as a result of disputes over the location of the county seat and the subsequent refusal of the majority of the voters to pay for most county expenses, including the jail. The sheriff stopped making arrests when the county supervisors wouldn't reimburse him for taking prisoners to jails in adjacent counties. There were no prosecutions for thievery, murder and other crimes. To complicate matters, Meredith was on the border of townships in two counties.
Back in 1881, Meredith grew up fast around the depot and hotel. Within a year, the village had forty businesses including a score of hotels, saloons and boarding houses (many of ill repute). Prostitution, gambling and fighting got so bad that Corrigan and others put out a call for a missionary to come and help clean things up. That lasted a few months until the church was burned down. Other types of commerce prevailed for a while. The village in 1887 had a railroad roundhouse for engine repair, two general stores, two jewelry stores, a meat market, livery stable, sawmill, three restaurants and eventually twelve saloons, a city hall and opera house that seated 700 people. At least 500 people, including many respectable folks who ran legitimate stores, shops and other businesses, lived in town year-round.
McClennon had the monopoly on booze. Not only did he supply the other saloons, but each lot in Meredith had the restriction that nobody except McClennon could sell whiskey or beer in Meredith without paying him a $400 annual fee in addition to the regular $300 license. McClennon was a big man, intimidatingly strong, and only one man ever challenged him on this. Dewey Allen leased a lot, erased the restriction and sub-leased it to a Mount Pleasant saloon keeper by the name of O'Brien, who opened a tavern on it. As soon as he heard, McClennon boarded the next train for Meredith from his Saginaw home and gave O'Brien exactly one hour to get out of town. O'Brien emptied his shelves, packed his goods in a hired livery rig and cleared the city limits with twelve minutes to spare. Nobody argued with Tom McClennon. McClennon never was prosecuted and soon was long gone, taking his bag of badness to Seney an spreading his lawless ideas into the upper peninsula. McClennon was it's founder, but the story of Meredith is basically the story of Jim Carr. Carr was one of Michigan history's worst scoundrels.
Born in New York state in 1855, Carr came to Clare County's north woods in 1878. After working three years in a lumber camp he turned up in Harrison seeking easier ways to make money then cutting down trees. In 1881, he formed an unholy alliance with a prostitute named Maggie Duncan which, while they disdained matrimony, nevertheless lasted until they died together a decade later. That same year Carr built a combined saloon, dance hall and brothel- with Maggie as madam- on a hill just outside of Harrison. In two years he made so much money selling whiskey and women, rolling drunks and cashing lumberjacks' time cards at a 25% discount that in 1884 he opened a branch saloon and "stockade" in Meredith, installing one of the Harrison girls as den mother. By this time Carr had acquired a considerable reputation for murder, arson and various other felonies. He was said to have been involved in the murder of at least three men, and that with two accomplices he had burned down a rival "stockade" near Harrison. One of his victims was a man who operated a bordello in Meredith before Carr got there and whom Carr couldn't persuade to leave town. Another was buried on the Meredith "stockade" premises under a dead horse. Investigators later dug up the horse but couldn't find the man. Carr was a mild, soft-spoken, medium-size man, quieter than a rattlesnake but just as deadly. Jim Carr's big troubles began when he caused the death of Frankie Osborne, one of the girls at the Meredith "stockade". In retaliation for a flippant remark, Carr knocked the girl down using brass knuckles, kicked her and then turning to his bouncers said "Finish her off". The bouncer kicked her into insensibility. She later died that night in her bedroom upstairs.
This brutal act was to be Carr's undoing. Up until that time, the law in Clare County had been practically invisible. But in 1884, a reform candidate, W.A. Burritt, was elected prosecuting attorney and he vowed to get on Carr's case and put him behind bars. It took him tow years to do it, hurdling such obstacles as hung juries, stuborn witnesses and venal judges, but on January 21, 1886, Carr was sentenced to fifteen years in Jackson prison for murder. Maggie was also convicted of running a bawdy house and sentenced to a year in the Detroit House of Corrections. Penniless, broke and looking for trouble, they both returned to Meredith in 1887 after Carr's conviction was overturned by the State Supreme court on the grounds that it was based on inconclusive evidence. But Burritt continued to hound Carr with arrests and trails for arson, murder and other crimes. By 1890, Carr was virtually penniless after paying the fees of expensive Flint and Saginaw attorneys. His health was also broken by alcoholism and venereal disease. On March 15, 1892, in a wretched little lumber shanty on an abandoned logging railroad south of Meredith, Jim and Maggie died within hours of each other, under mysterious circumstances. Carr was only thirty-seven.
The bottom fell out of Meredith by 1893 when all the good timber was exhausted and the big cutters and haulers moved their equipment to other towns. The railroad tracks and depot were taken out and most of the businesses, and saloons too closed. The post office closed in 1895. A forest fire swept through the village in 1896, but there was no one left to put it out. Among a few buildings that weren't burned was the opera house which later was moved south to Arthur Township and rebuilt as a church. Meredith became a ghost town before 1900 and remained that way for the next fifty years. After World War II, speculator Herbert McIntish purchased the town for a song and sold long-abandoned properties off to forty poor families who were looking for cheap housing in the area. Weathered street signs put up before 1900 mark the way to rutted muddy roads into the woods. Today, most of the residents are retirees, according to Judith Hopkins, Franklin Township Clerk. Depending on which side of the county border road of M-18 they live on, the children go to either Gladwin or Harrison schools.
More recently, a number of younger families have moved to Meredith, including several local business owners. The Meredith General Store was rebuilt forty years ago over the original town store that was next to the railroad station before 1900. The town also has another, larger store and a restaurant, but still has no church. A church was built nearby in the 1930's, but it was mysteriously burned down around 1970.
Meredith has three cemeteries and some barely visible burial plots in the woods. Jim and Maggie's graves are somewhere out there in a private cemetery once owned by "Good Old Tom Garrity". Garrity obliged as he did for all "no goods" and for $200 provided a private burial plot. As the barroom friends of the dead would escort the bodies in a wagon to the burial site they would sing, "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, If Meredith won't have them, Garrity must" All cemeteries are fenced off with "Keep Out" and "No Trespassing" signs. This seems a bit strange since just about all the descendants who might have wanted to visit have moved away decades ago. Perhaps because many of the interred are there because they didn't mind their business, the signs are a warning to others.