This Forgotten Town Is All That’s Left of Michigan’s Oil Boom
Oil City cropped up when a huge oil field was discovered near Mt. Pleasant
The name Oil City makes it sound larger than it actually is. In reality, Oil City feels more like a scattered roadside settlement near the Midland and Gladwin county line built around fuel, maintenance, and survival.
The roads carry most of the activity. Trucks move through constantly. Gas stations feel more important than storefronts.
The Marathon station seemed to function as the town’s central gathering point. People filtered in and out while vehicles cycled through the pumps. Beyond that were a few scattered service businesses, a Dollar General, equipment lots, rust-proofing shops, and small homes tucked against the woods and wetlands.
Oil City felt rough around the edges. Many of the houses looked weathered and improvised, with additions, sheds, trailers, and scrap materials spread across swampy lots carved into the tree line. Nothing looked planned but adapted over decades as people made use of whatever they had available.
Swamp water sits directly behind some homes. Pines bend over gravel drives. Equipment yards back into wetlands. The entire town feels suspended between industry and wilderness.
Then there was the strange multicolored building near the middle of town.
Every inch of it was painted in mismatched blocks of color, almost like a giant roadside quilt assembled from leftover decades. Beside it sat a tiny red trailer labeled “Oil City Taco Express,” which made the scene even better.
When I asked the clerk at Marathon about the building, she shrugged and said it has been “many different things over the years.”
That felt like the best description of Oil City.
In the early 20th century, central Michigan became one of the state’s major petroleum regions. Oil fields spread across Midland, Gladwin, Mt. Pleasant, and surrounding counties as drilling operations expanded.
Michigan’s largest oil boom arrived in the late 1920s after the discovery of the Mt. Pleasant Oil Field, which quickly became one of the most lucrative oil fields on earth at the time.
Small communities across central Michigan grew around extraction sites, maintenance yards, worker housing, pipelines, and service businesses supporting the industry.
Even today, Michigan still produces oil and natural gas, though at a much smaller scale than its peak years. Driving through Oil City, you can still feel traces of that industrial geography lingering everywhere.
But Oil City is not a boomtown anymore. It feels like a place left behind by several different eras at once, worn down and continuously repurposed by whoever remains there.
Buildings become different businesses. Trailers become restaurants. Old infrastructure gets reused instead of being replaced.
And despite all of that, the place never felt depressing. There was something strangely compelling about it: The huge skies. The wetlands behind the houses. The improvised buildings.
The feeling that every structure in town had lived multiple lives already. Oil City is less of a tourist destination and more like a surviving fragment of Michigan’s industrial past continuing into the present.
