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The City of Beaverton, Michigan straddles Beaverton and Tobacco townships in southwest Gladwin County, about thirty miles northwest of Midland..

The city is situated at the confluence of the Cedar and Tobacco rivers. At the mouth of the South Branch of the Tobacco River is Ross Lake and, while most of the city is south of the lake, its boundaries extend to the north banks, which is where the Beaverton Post Office is located.

The chief route through the city is M-18, which is also known as Ross Street within the city limits. Lesser routes include Blades Road, Burgess Road, Glidden Road, Lang Road, Porter Road, Roehrs Road (Brown Street), and West Knox Road. The city of Gladwin is 8.3 miles north, and Coleman is 17.1 miles southwest of Beaverton.

European-Americans, mostly lumbermen, began coming to the area in the early 1860s, as it was heavily wooded and had the added attraction of the rivers, the combination of which made it a prime location for the lumber industry.

The Ross family came to the area in the late 1880s, setting up a large timber operation, calling the place Cedarville. Under contract with the Ross Brothers, the Flint & Pere Marquette Railroad constructed a line from Coleman to the Ross mill as Cedarville. However, the railroad refused to name their station Cedarville because they had other stations by that name. Instead, station manager assigned the name Grand Forks to the station in September of 1890, the same year that the town was officially founded by Donald Gunn Ross. That name didn't last long, though.

When a post office was established there on February 27, 1891, the postal service in Michigan determined that there were too many places in the state using Grand in the title, so it was renamed Beaverton, for the hometown of Donald Gunn Ross in Ontario, Canada. Ross served as the first postmaster.

The Ross family established a number of businesses in Beaverton and the surrounding region, including a shingle mill, several lumber camps, and a sawmill.

Beaverton was incorporated as a village in 1901, and as a city on March 13, 1903, with William Ross as mayor.

In 1912, several stone buildings were constructed, many of which are still standing on West Brown Street today. That same year, the Pierce Hotel was opened, later renamed the Muscle Shoals Hotel. Five years later, the People's Bank building was constructed where the city hall now stands.

Like many of Michigan's cities and villages, the city suffered some serious fires in its history. On September 23, 1909, much of Beaverton's commercial district caught fire, many of the buildings destroyed by a fire and explosion. The following day, the Passenger Depot and Ross Mercantile buildings were burned, and the Commercial House Hotel burned to the ground three weeks later. In 1939, the Opera House and the salesroom for the W.H. Hall & Son Lumber Company were burned. The city's three-story school building burned to the ground early one morning in 1945, and the Muscle Shoals Hotel and Beaverton Library, in the same building, were destroyed in a 1975 fire.

Aided by the city's proximity to Dow Chemical Company in nearby Midland, a plastics industry developed in Beaverton in the 1950s. In 1952, Gaylord Brown founded the Brown Machine Company when he changed the business model of his father's oil-drilling repair company to manufacture rotary and continuous thermoforming machines. It remains in operation as the Brown Machine Group, still headquartered in Beaverton.

Manufacturing is still a significant facet of the city's economy, with nearly a third of its residents employed in various manufacturing industries, the most common being metal and plastic work.

The focus of this category is on Beaverton, Michigan. Topics relating to the city or its history are appropriate for this category, as are the websites of businesses, industries, schools, places of worship, organizations, attractions, and events.

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