From a Sawmill Called Varney to a City Named for a Muse
Theodore P. Dean built the first sawmill on the Clio site in 1837, when the settlement was known as Varney (later Varna) after an early grain buyer. The 1861 completion of the Flint and Pere Marquette Railway drove real growth, and in 1866 the town renamed itself Clio, after the Greek muse of history, before incorporating as a village in 1873. Clio sits entirely within, but is administratively separate from, Vienna Township.
An Older Rail-Line Core on the Same County Clay
Clio's oldest housing grew up along that 1861 rail corridor, on ground that shares the slow-draining clay found across Genesee County generally. On a foundation built anywhere near that original core, decades of seasonal clay expansion and contraction is usually the reason water keeps finding the same low point in a basement or crawl space until the grading, gutters, and wall are treated as one connected system.