Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Custer Custer, MI

Custer is a small village in Mason County, sitting inside Custer Township on U.S. Route 10 about 11 miles east of Ludington, the county seat.

Custer was platted in 1878 and incorporated as a village in 1895, and it was named for General George Armstrong Custer.

The 2020 census counted just 272 people in Custer, and the village's population has stayed in the few hundreds for over a century — it was 269 in 1900 and peaked at 365 in 1960.

The 2010 census counted 110 households in the village, so Custer remains a tiny, close-knit rural community.

Just south of the village on the Pere Marquette River is the Notipekagon site, where the Odawa defeated the Mascouten in a famous battle — the river's original name, Notipekagon, meant "heads on sticks."

The United States created an Indian reservation on the land where Custer now stands in 1855, two decades before the village was platted.

Lithuanian immigrants began settling in Custer around 1912, and their St. Mary's Catholic Church — established in 1933 — got a new building in 1966 designed by Lithuanian-American architect Jonas Mulokas.

Sanders Meats was founded in Custer in 1925 by Joseph T. Sanders, who delivered meat to customers in a Ford Model T, and the business stayed in the Sanders family for four generations.