In the 1830s a pair of German travelers visiting the United States alighted one morning from a stagecoach at a tiny community in Michigan and blinked in the hot sun, and one remarked to the other, “So schon hell” (So already bright). Locals with a sense of humor who overheard the comment immediately decided to call their then unnamed town Hell.
That’s one theory about the origin of the designation of the miniscule hamlet (population about 270) that has created a cottage industry living up, or perhaps down, to its moniker. Others include the “hell-like” conditions (near-impregnable forests, boggy wetlands, and swarming mosquitoes) that early explorers encountered and comments by housewife settlers that when their husbands imbibed home-distilled whiskey they had “gone to hell again.”
