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Articles by Mark Putnam
Akron: Beach's Corners
The 1834 survey of North Akron Township—T15NR8E. To understand the Village of Akron, start with the soil and the ancient tongues that tried to describe it. Place names are rarely accidental; they mirror the landscape. The German surname Ackerman means "farmer," and the Greek word agrochtema, meaning farmland, is a seed of the word "agriculture." It is fitting that this quiet corner of Michigan's Thumb carries a name that seems tied to the earth. The 1834 survey of South Akron Township—T14NR8E.
The Railroads of Tuscola County
Union Station in Reese, Michigan, captured in the Golden Age of Railroads, when steam locomotives like this one rolled in regularly and passengers gathered on the platform to greet them. The history of railroads in Tuscola County is a classic American story: steel rails turning an isolated timber wilderness into a thriving agricultural empire. Tucked into Michigan's "Thumb" region, the county once depended on the Cass River, oxcarts, and stagecoach roads to move people and goods.
The Iconic Pumpkin
Every October, Caro, Michigan, glows orange. It began in 1981 and has grown into a tradition this community holds close to its heart: the Tuscola County Pumpkin Festival. It is a celebration of the land, the harvest, and the people who have worked both for generations. In 1981, this flag rose over Caro to announce the very first Pumpkin Festival, and a tradition was born. Gary Fulgham, festival chairperson, proudly holds it high.
The Beet That Saved the Thumb and Tuscola County
This reworked, early postcard captures the Peninsular Sugar Refining Company's Caro plant not long after it opened its doors — its arched brick windows, twin smokestacks, and iron entrance gate standing as a proud new landmark on the Tuscola County skyline. In 1906, this factory and five other Michigan beet-sugar companies merged to form the Michigan Sugar Company. George Trestain, a local Caro druggist, sold the card.
The Motto of Michigan Has Roots in the Thumb of Michigan
There, near the heart of this fragment from the 1660 Creuxius map, the word Ekandechiondius names the Thumb of Michigan — flat farmland, beautiful in shape, reaching out like a peninsula into the water. When we speak of the Thumb of Michigan, we picture farm fields combed into furrows, small towns holding fast to their courthouse squares, and the familiar shape of our peninsula reaching into Lake Huron. We think of home.
Column: The Old Putman Building
A Corner Worth Remembering On the northeast corner of State and Burnside in Caro, 319 N. State Street, where SRS Pharmacy Systems now hums, with servers and code, there once stood only bare ground. Lot 7, Block 18, was sold in 1866 by Caro's founder Peter Bush — who had himself bought it from the Shermans, just as Centreville, now Caro, was being plat — for little more than pocket change.
Column: The Sound of the Morning Bell: A History of Schools in Tuscola County
The Sound of the Morning Bell Each weekday morning, a fleet of yellow buses rumbles down M-24, to the Tuscola Technology Center, carrying young people of the Thumb to classrooms warmed by furnaces and lit by fluorescent hum. Rewind the clock, some hundred and seventy years, and that same errand was made not by wheel but by foot: pioneer children picking their way down muddy footpaths, satchels of slate and speller in hand, toward a schoolhouse hewn from the forest that hemmed them in.
The Caro Art Fair: A Young Tradition Rooted in Community
Cultivate Creativity of Caro's brushwork turns a plain park wall into a storybook scene of pandas, bunnies, and butterflies — a fitting welcome to the grounds where the Caro Art Fair will soon take place, just beyond it and behind the pavilion. Some traditions take a century to establish themselves. Others announce themselves as tradition almost from the very first year, because the community they serve was simply waiting for the right idea to come along.
The Kelly Legacy: A Celebration of Family and Tuscola County
Some families leave behind photographs. Others leave behind stories. The Kelly family left something even more enduring: buildings, businesses, and relationships that helped shape Tuscola County for more than a century. Their story begins not in Michigan, but in the narrow streets of medieval Scotland. It travels across the Atlantic through New Jersey and Ontario before arriving in the Thumb, where generations of Kellys became carpenters, contractors, merchants, and community builders.
Crossing Cloud — Sing It Out Loud: The Ancestral Line of Ishdonquet, Indian Dave Stocker
A Tribute to the Beloved First Nation Elder Known as Indian Dave There are names that history writes boldly in ink, and there are names that history merely whispers, waiting three hundred years for someone willing to listen closely enough to hear them plainly. Ishdonquet — Crossing Cloud — is such a name, and it is time, at long last, to sing it out loud.
Four More Days: The Tuscola County Fair Continues
Three days in, and already the Tuscola County Fairgrounds in Caro have proven themselves once more the beating heart of our entire county.
Our Love Affair with the Tuscola County Fair
There is a plot of ground in Caro where the past does not merely rest — it rises up to meet you. Walk the fairgrounds on a summer evening during the fair, and you can feel the Colosseum's roar rolling across the midway, the scent of great food drifting through the air once more, just as it has for generation after generation. Tuscola County Fair Organized — 1881 March 11, 1882, is a day worth remembering.
Column: The Tuscola Colosseum—the Greatest Arena in Michigan's Thumb
I called it right. I called it the Tuscola Colosseum — the Greatest Arena in Michigan's Thumb — and the whole thing had just been fixed. More on that in a moment. First, let me explain why a man of my considerable track record has no business betting on horses. I rile them. I do not know how or why, but the horses sense me, and something shifts. So, I imposed upon myself a gentle and permanent self-barring from the sport, effected June 30, 2026.
Club Hopping-Summer Solstice-2026
On the longest day of the year, when the sun hangs high and hesitant to set, time bends gracefully backward and forward. June 21, 2026. A milestone marked not by grand gestures, but by the quiet poetry of seventy-four years and exactly one single, golden month in my life. With twenty dollars in my pocket—a modest treasury for a summer solstice safari—the journey began.
(Column) Michigan's Long Road to Freedom
Born Late to the Revolution On July 4, 1776, a new nation declared itself free. Thirteen colonies put their names to a document that would change the world, and the long, painful, glorious work of becoming the United States of America began. Farmers took up muskets. Statesmen debated through the night. A continent held its breath. And Michigan? Michigan was still British.
A Question of Equal Treatment in Caro
The City of Caro has clear standards regarding property maintenance. According to City Ordinance Sec. 14-41, any structure in a deteriorating condition — whether showing loose materials, crumbling surfaces, or general neglect — that negatively affects surrounding properties may be cited for blight. This is a reasonable and necessary tool for keeping our community attractive and safe.
From Cache to Caseville: A Thumb Story
The Little Box of Cash There are gifts we give that the world does not receive — and gifts we receive that the world cannot take back. I was in the tenth grade when my family journeyed to Port Crescent State Park in Huron County, that quiet and beautiful stretch of shore where Saginaw Bay surrenders itself to the open sky. I was young and believed myself to be deeply in love, and I wished to show a girl back home in Caro that even across the summer distance, she occupied my thoughts and my heart.
The Pothole Stops Here
It began with a pothole. Three of them, to be precise. Approximately twelve days ago, while navigating the access drive running between Starbucks and Dairy Queen in Caro, my vehicle struck three significant potholes in quick succession. I will admit my patience took more of a hit than my tires did. I asked myself a simple question: who is responsible for this, and what can a citizen do about it? What followed was an education in property law, municipal authority, and the art of civic engagement.
The Lowlanders and Highlanders: Energy and Technology — The Story at Our Feet
There is a moment — and if you have lived in the Thumb long enough, you know it — when the land speaks to you in a language older than any word pressed into the pages of a textbook. Drive along the border of Tuscola and Huron Counties on a clear morning and the world simply opens.
The Possessive Apostrophe That Changes Everything
White's Creek, flowing into the Cass River through the heart of Tuscola County, bears a family name. Its owner was Johannes Visger — John Fisher, Sr. — a great Dutchman who married into the Saginaw Valley Chippewa and was known in four languages by the same title: Gitche-wabi to the Chippewa, le Grand Blanc to the French, de Groot Blank to the Dutch, and the Great White to the English. His descendants wrote that name into White Creek forever.
The Schall School: Caro's Town Crier in Brick & Stone
The Frank E. Schall School, Caro, Michigan, circa 1924–1930. Built in 1924 and named for the superintendent who gave everything to see it rise, the Schall School served first as Caro's high school and later as its middle school — standing for over a century as a monument to high-minded possibility and the boundless promise waiting for every child who passed through its doors. The building reached out to claim its place in history — which, it has done by every measure.
The Vulcan's Garden: Vassar's History & Our Ascendant Path to Tomorrow
The Primordial Wilderness To understand Vassar, you must travel back in time — to an era when Michigan's Thumb lay wrapped in primordial wilderness. In the early 1800s, this land was no mere forest. Towering white pines rose like cathedral pillars, their crowns weaving a canopy so dense that sunlight reached the earth only in fragments, casting the world below into a hushed, almost sacred twilight. Among those giants stood the rare "Cork Pine," prized for its buoyancy and straight grain.
From Foundries to the Future: The Resilient Pulse of Tuscola Manufacturing
WHERE FIELD MEETS FACTORY: Facilities like Michigan Sugar and POET Bioprocessing in Caro represent the heart of Tuscola County’s "value-added" economy. By processing local crops into global commodities, these plants generate a combined regional economic impact exceeding $800 million annually. As we navigate the opening months of 2026, the horizon of Tuscola County remains defined by a familiar and comforting silhouette.
A Cornerstone of Caro: 239 North State
A Gateway to Caro: This 1945 advertisement from the Tuscola County Advertiser marks the arrival of Fred and Marie Jacot at 239 N. State Street. Offering "home cooked food" and "short orders" nearly 22 hours a day, the Coffee Cup Cafe served as a bustling social hub and the primary terminal for Indian Trails bus travelers entering the heart of the village.
The Green Revolution: From Farm to Fairway in West & East Tuscola County
The history of golf in Tuscola County is a map of social evolution. While the sport’s earliest roots in the region were planted near the county seat of Caro, the mid-to-late twentieth century saw a "green revolution" that pushed the boundaries of recreation into the rolling farmland and wooded corridors of the west and east.
Column: Sidewalks on the Edge: Our Community’s Pledge
On Saturday, September 27, 2025, something quietly remarkable unfolded in Caro. It wasn’t a parade or a festival. There were no speeches, no ribbon-cuttings, and no dignitaries in suits. Instead, it was neighbors—armed with shovels, rakes, a broom, and even a gas-powered edger—working side by side on a long-forgotten sidewalk. With simple tools and willing hearts, they bent their backs to the task and, together, chose to make this corner of Caro a little better, a little brighter.
ATL Jewish Film: A bold new act for Atlanta’s cultural stage
For 25 years, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival has been one of the Southeast’s premier cultural events—a world-renowned showcase of global cinema that has welcomed tens of thousands of filmgoers each February. Now, fueled by the $2.5 million Kenny Blank Vision Initiative, that celebrated festival is evolving into something even bigger: ATL Jewish Film, a year-round hub for film, culture, and conversation. This rebrand is more than a name change. It’s a signal of intent.
The Red Thread in Caro: Venazir Martinez’s Gift of Connection
A new mural has appeared on the side of the Thumb Meat Market in Caro, and it’s stirring conversation. I stopped by with my camera and took several pictures. In the end, three seemed to capture the essence of the work. Yet no photo can match the experience of standing before the mural itself, which vibrates with life, color, and meaning. The artist is Venazir Martinez, a Filipino street muralist whose quiet demeanor contrasts with the boldness of her art. She is more than a painter of walls.
The Caro Walmart & M’Art: Global to Local
Three words frame this reflection: the City of Caro, Walmart, and my own small venture, M’Art. At first glance, they could not be more different—one a town on the map, another a global retailer, and the third a local expression of art. Yet they share an unlikely kinship. In their names, in their histories, and in the way they bring people together, they form a web of exchange and identity. If we listen closely, the ties between them are not only playful but surprisingly profound.
The Moore Stream: The Logger’s Dream
Clang That Rang Long ago, when saw blades clanged and axes rang in the Cass River Valley, the land that would become Vassar pulsed with beauty and promise. Towering cork pine trees stood like sentinels along Moore Creek, their broad interlocked branches forming a natural cathedral with a bright blue sky above the ceiling. Beneath their green canopy, a perpetual twilight reigned—cool, damp, and hushed.
Montague Avenue: The Place to Rendezvous
For those who call Caro home, our streets are more than just routes for cars. They are storytellers. Each name, tree, and curve echoes our past and invites us to imagine the future. These roads don’t just guide us—they inspire us. Montague Avenue is quietly becoming Caro’s first intra-city linear parkway. With its mix of open spaces and wooded borders, it is transforming—almost on its own—into a peaceful corridor for walking, biking, and reflection.
The Great Trailways: Exploring Recreation in Tuscola County
Tuscola County, nestled at the northwest edge of Michigan’s Thumb, is a vibrant destination for those who find joy in the journey. Across the region, trails of all kinds—hiking, biking, paddling, snowmobiling, and even historic pathways—invite locals and visitors to explore the outdoors in every season. Whether you're a birdwatcher, hiker, hunter, or part of a family looking to camp and fish, Tuscola is rich with trailways that connect land, water, and community.
The Early Tuscola County Fair-Horse Racing-Exhibits & Entertainment
Caro Driving Club—1870 In the mid-1800s, Michigan’s “driving parks” emerged as popular venues for trotting and harness racing. While the Watrousville Fairgrounds offered general entertainment, nearby Caro cultivated a passion of its own—fast horses and competitive driving. In 1870, the Caro Driving Club established the Caro Driving Park, a dedicated racetrack built to meet the rising enthusiasm for trotting races.
The Quiet Beginning of Healing
Sometimes, the path to better health doesn’t begin with flashing lights or urgent alarms. Sometimes, it begins quietly—with a gentle question from a nurse, a routine check-up, or, in my case, a small device taped to my chest. That patch didn’t beep or blink. It didn’t demand considerable attention. For seven days, it silently recorded every heartbeat and every pause, transmitting the data—via cell towers—to a doctor’s office miles away.
When Rivers Spoke: Sparkle City
In the 1970s—and perhaps even earlier—residents of Caro affectionately referred to their town as “Sparkle City.” To many, it may have started as a cheerful radio slogan, broadcast proudly over WKYO’s airwaves. But like so many things in a small town, it grew into something more—a name filled with hope, pride, and the shimmer of possibility. Caro’s residents didn’t just repeat the name, they embraced it. The phrase seemed to reflect a rising energy, a sense that the town had brightness in its bones.
The Most Revered Work of Art
Amid all the public works of art that grace the landscapes of Tuscola County, none surpasses the solemn grandeur and enduring reverence of the stained-glass window that crowns the second floor of the Tuscola County Courthouse. Towering at an imposing seventeen feet high and nine feet wide, this magnificent window was designed in 1932—some ninety-three years past—by A. Kay Herbert of Detroit, and brought to life by the skillful hands of the Detroit Stained Glass Works.
The Privilege to Write
Writing for The Advertiser is one of my life’s greatest privileges. For years, I viewed The Advertiser’s writers and columnists with admiration—and, I will admit, a touch of envy. To me, they were the most well-rounded people in town. They knew everything: our history, our people, our values. They were doing something I deeply wanted to do—but didn’t believe I could yet. And now, here I am. Writing and I have always had a complicated relationship.
Good Things in Higher Ed Take Time (opinion)
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. PepeLaguarda/E+/Getty Images “I’ve decided we are going to have the ‘Decade of the Arts’ over the next five years.” I heard this statement uttered by a college president in a meeting during the late 1990s. Remarkably, no one in the room laughed out loud, but sideways glances and restrained smiles were evident among the participants. No such initiative ever emerged.
College closures: A look at the recursive history of higher ed failures
During the 1992–93 academic year, I was deep into work on my dissertation, focused on struggling colleges facing the potential of closure or merger and the information trustees used to support decision-making under extreme conditions. After completing an extended onsite interview with the president of an institution struggling for survival, this seasoned college leader turned to me and asked, “Aren’t you afraid you will become known as the college coroner?” It was a chilling question.
Mark L. Putnam
Mark L. Putnam is the president of Central College in Iowa. He is the author of "Leading Across the Arc of Time: Commitment and Change in Higher Education" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025).
Trusteeship: January/February 2023
Table of Contents Features What Boards Need to Know about Online Opportunities By Christopher Connell Faculty recognize post-COVID-19 on interviews with more than 2,000 interviews with students, faculty, some of the advantages and administrators, parents, young alumni, job recruiters, and trustees, their possibilities of teaching online, research examines what higher education is and what it can be. and students don’t want to give up the flexibility of choosing when and where to do coursework.
Managing the Presidency Through the Arc of Time
I am the 21st president of an institution that is nearly 170 years old. And I enjoy an incredibly rich inheritance. My principal task now is to steward that inheritance for future generations. My experience may be a bit unusual as it relates to relationships with past college presidents. In 2010, when I began my appointment as president of Central College in Pella, Iowa, my four immediate predecessors all were available to me. Their service to the college dated back to 1960.
Taking the long view of the presidency (opinion)
I am serving in my 13th year as the president of Central College in Pella, Iowa—my 40th year in higher education. While I certainly have presidential colleagues who have equaled or exceeded my years of leadership service, I have become increasingly concerned by the number of public and private institutions that have appointed as many as four presidents during the dozen years I have been in this role.
How to Clean Up Georgia Power’s Dirty Energy Plan Original
by Mark Putnam, Georgia Recorder July 19, 2022 On July 21st, the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) will vote on a new energy plan, outlining how Georgia Power will generate our electricity over the next 20 years. The plan will have huge implications on some of our most pressing issues relating to public health, the economy, and the environment. Unfortunately, the current proposal from Georgia Power falls far short in addressing the social and environmental damages of fossil fuels.
In this case study, the authors explain how companies can use the Long-term Visioning Scorecard for longer-term R&D.
The 2021 Holland Award article, “Long-Term R&D Strategy and Planning,” showed that companies struggle to determine where to invest their R&D efforts in longer-term technology platforms and projects. The work resulted in the development of a Long-term Visioning Scorecard with key elements that support confidence and R&D investments in opportunities. This case study illustrates the application of the scorecard and best practices for long-term R&D strategy.
Are recently passed Georgia voting laws oppressive or justifiable?
Mark Putnam Conservatives enjoy multiple systemic advantages that bias election results in their favor. It’s difficult to take them seriously when they claim voter fraud rigged the 2020 election against them, while there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud or indication that it would have significantly benefited either party. This has not stopped Republicans. In the last few months, Republicans nationwide have proposed an unprecedented 250+ state bills to tackle voter fraud.
What does the rapidly changing workplace mean for college students?
Mark Putnam, Iowa View contributor Published 11:00 a.m. ET Jan. 11, 2019 Apparently, employers are hiring people with wonderful soft skills.
What does the rapidly changing workplace mean for college students?
Mark Putnam, Iowa View contributor Published 3:45 p.m. ET Jan. 10, 2019 Apparently, employers are hiring people with wonderful soft skills.
What does the rapidly changing workplace mean for college students?
Mark Putnam, Iowa View contributor Published 3:19 p.m. CT Jan. 9, 2019 Apparently, employers are hiring people with wonderful soft skills.
Will Wes Hurley's Local Film Little Potato Win the Oscar for Best Short Documentary in 2018? - Slog - The Stranger
Will Wes Hurley's Local Film Little Potato Win the Oscar for Best Short Documentary in 2018? The Little Potato with his mother... Little Potato, a short film by Wes Hurley and Nate Miller that premiered at this year's SXSW Film Festival —and won the prize for best Short Documentary—claimed that prize again this weekend at the Sarasota Film Festival .
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