24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Turner, MI

Turner is a village within Turner Township in Arenac County, Michigan, and with 121 residents at the 2020 census it ranks as the second least-populated incorporated municipality in the state, after Forestville.

Turner was originally called Turnerville and was named after Joe Turner, one of the first non-native settlers to arrive in the 1870s; the land had previously been home to the Ojibwa.

Joe Turner built a successful lumber company, and the booming settlement grew to include a blacksmith, church, depot, general store, hotel, mill, post office, restaurant, roundhouse, saloon, schoolhouse, shoe store, and train repair facilities.

The Detroit & Mackinac Railway laid tracks through Turner in the 1880s, linking it to National City, Twining, Omer, and Standish; those tracks are still operational today under the Lake State Railway.

Turner was incorporated as a village in 1915, near the end of its lumber era.

Turner's population peaked at 236 in the 1920 census, fell to 114 by 2010, then ticked back up 6.1% to 121 in 2020.

At the 2010 census Turner had 43 households and 55 housing units, and its median age was 42 years.

As the region's forests were cleared, Turner shifted from logging to farming, and most of the land around the village is still farmed by local families today.

Turner Bean and Grain is the village's last operating business; its original schoolhouse and church still stand but have been converted into private homes.

Turner covers 1.02 square miles, all of it land, under ZIP code 48765, and its flat, cleared terrain has attracted interest from solar energy developers, notably DTE Energy.