Issac Wilson, a native of New York, and his wife Sarah Florence Miller Wilson, a native of Providence Rhode Island, were the first white settlers in the Alcona County area.

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Isaac Wilson

On the first day of August, 1845, Isaac Wilson, a native of the State of New York and his wife, who was a native of the State of Rhode Island, with their little son, Charles Henry, then seventeen months old, accompanied by Mr. Wilson's sister, were landed by the good schooner "Baltic" at Devil river. Mr. Wilson had come to this wilderness home, on the west shore of Lake Huron, to run the recently abandoned sawmill built by Birch & Eldridge. This isolated family lived there six weeks before seeing the face of a white person, and claim to have been the first actual settlers between Lower Saginaw, now Bay City, and Thunder Bay island, which was at this time occupied by a few temporary fishermen from the latter place and Detroit, who usually left for their homes in the fall. During this time the mill as Ossineke was the solitary monument of permanent industry in all this wilderness.

(Source: "A History of Northern Michigan and Its People, Volume I", Perry Francis Powers, Harry Gardner Cutler, Page 201, The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, 1912)

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Book excerpt:

Isaac Wilson was the son of Peter Wilson and Phoebe Dibble, his widow, who died June 1, 1886, at Plainfield, Kent Co. at the advanced age of 107 years. Her father, Peter Dibble, died at Colchester, Delaware Co., N Y., at the age of 108 years. Mr. Wilson is 78 years old and one of the last of Alcona County's pioneers, and is still hale and hearty.

(Source: "History of Michigan Horticulture - Being a Part of the Seventeenth Annual Report of the Secretary of the State Horticultural Society of Michigan", Alcona County General History, page 370, Theodatus Timothy Lyon, 1887)