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    Livonia
    Livonia
    Livonia
    Ebook194 pages45 minutes

    Livonia

    By David MacGregor

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    About this ebook

    At the turn of the 20th century, the township of Livonia was largely a rural community populated with farms, dirt roads, and several cheese factories.


    A few decades later, as the auto industry boomed in Detroit, white-collar workers sought places to raise their families outside the city, and Livonia changed seemingly overnight. What was once considered a backwater berg was suddenly seen with different eyes through the lens of the quintessential American suburban city, one in which urban and rural lifestyles converged and formed a new kind of community. This book celebrates Livonia's development from the 19th to 21st century, as it evolved from wilderness into a city that is routinely rated as one of the best places to raise a family in the United States.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateJun 8, 2005
    ISBN9781439615423
    Livonia

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      Book preview

      Livonia - David MacGregor

      book.

      INTRODUCTION

      The history of Livonia is really a tale of two cities. On the one hand, Livonia is the quintessential bedroom community, notable for its neighborhoods, parks, and the quality of its public schools. But beneath this placid exterior lies a quite different city—one notable for its role in the Underground Railroad, as well as being used as a playground by Prohibition-era gangsters, not to mention being a hotbed for grave-robbing in the 19th century. And was Livonia really bombed by the Japanese during World War II, as reported by the Detroit Free Press? Suffice to say, there is more to Livonia than meets the eye.

      Prior to the arrival of white settlers, the Livonia area was inhabited and fought over by a number of Indian tribes—the Wyandottes, Sauk, Miami, and Potawatomi in particular. Subsequently, the French and Indian War saw the French and the British fighting for control of the region, and when the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution in 1783, this area became known as the Northwest Territory of the United States of America. With the signing of the Treaty of Detroit in 1807, the Native Americans effectively sold their rights to most of the land in what was to become Livonia; this cleared the way for settlers to start moving in, although there were still a number of Native Americans in the area.

      The first recorded purchase of land in what would become Nankin Township was by Dennison Palmer on November 7, 1818, although there is no evidence that he ever settled here. In early 1819, William Woodbridge (who later became governor of Michigan) purchased some property as well. That same year, Chief Tonquish, leader of the Potawatomi tribe, was killed by a settler in a dispute over bread and the Potawatomis subsequently abandoned this region altogether. With land priced at only $1.25 per acre, more and more pioneers made the trip up the Rouge River from Detroit, stopping and claiming land where they saw a good place to farm and establish a homestead. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, Easterners were now more easily able to heed the cry of Go West, young man, and a number of ambitious and daring families packed up their belongings and headed for Michigan.

      In 1827, the area now comprising Livonia, Redford, Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Inkster, Garden City, Westland, and Wayne was simply known as Bucklin Township (named after William Bucklin, who was a justice of the peace). In 1829, Bucklin was divided into two sections: Nankin to the west and Pekin to the east. Both were named for the Chinese cities where a good deal of well-advertised missionary work was in progress. Six years later, on March 17, 1835, the Township of Livonia split off from Nankin and took its current 36-square-mile form. This was two years before Michigan became a state in its own right. The name Livonia was chosen because a number of the earliest settlers had come from western New York, where there was also a town named Livonia.

      The original Livonia was once an Eastern European nation unto itself, although its territory was usually under some kind of dispute. In fact, Livonians in Europe found themselves being ruled by Poland, Sweden, and Russia at various points in history. In 1243, a host of Livonian knights was defeated in the Battle on Lake Peipus by an army from Novgorod commanded by Alexander Nevsky, an episode immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky. With Riga as its largest city and capital, Livonia contained over 1,000 lakes and it was long known as one of the three Baltic provinces of Russia. Today, the original land of Livonia is split between Latvia and Estonia and the last remnants of the Livonian language are on the verge of dying out.

      Meanwhile, here in Michigan, growth in this latest namesake of Livonia was sporadic. In 1840, the township had 1,169 people listed in the United States Census and by 1880 this had increased to 1,638 people. However, in the 1920 census, the population of Livonia had actually declined to 1,608. All of this was about to change, in large part due to improvements in transportation and roads. White-collar workers from Detroit’s auto industries increasingly looked to the suburbs as places they wanted to raise their families. In 1915, the Horton subdivision was established at Newburg, and in 1925, building began in two of Livonia’s bestknown subdivisions, Coventry Gardens and Rosedale Gardens.

      However, it wasn’t the neighborhoods that prompted the Township of Livonia to become a city. That came about largely due to the arrival of the General Motors Hydra-Matic plant in 1948 and the Detroit Race Course in 1949. Both represented significant tax windfalls if the township became a city, and on May 23, 1950, Livonia did precisely that. It was a momentous decision, because in 1950, the population of Livonia stood at 17,534. But with the relatively low property taxes offered to both businesses and residents, the population rose to 66,702 by 1960 and surpassed 100,000 by 1970—a population size that has remained reasonably stable ever since.

      Today,

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