Eaton County Small Towns

This is Hoytville's store, on Mulliken Road, Eaton County, Michigan. As long as I've been aware of it, this has been former store; when I first moved to Mulliken it was functioning as a combined garage/storage shed/playground. It's about the same today, except the children have grown and moved away.

Another small town in Michigan's Eaton County. I "explained" Hoytville the other day . Thought I'd share a couple pictures which show it better. This one shows the view from Mulliken Road, across a field from south of town. The houses run perhaps a half-mile east from this road on Saginaw Highway; there are also some houses on Mulliken Road. Perhaps a third of the town's structures show in this photo. A couple look like they've been there for a century or more--the settlement dates from before the Civil War--but most are more recent.

Hoytville and Mulliken have common roots, as several buildings were transplanted from Hoytville to Mulliken when the tracks were laid a mile and a half north of the existing town. In 1888. Hoytville never recovered, but neither did it completely fail. Twenty or so families still live there. Taken from my bicycle.

In its prime, Little Venice wasn't much--a motel, a general store, a handful of houses, and a great view of Michigan prairie. Not a canal in sight, though. Venice is now well past its prime. Not a proper ghost town, but a place which hints of failed ambitions.

Chester, Michigan. I seem to be out photographing really small towns, this week.

Little Venice, Michigan; on M-50 not far from Mulliken and Sunfield. (If those are your local "big towns," you're in a really small place; neither has more than 800 inhabitants.) The Siesta had some pretensions to being a resort when I first found the place, though there's really nothing close-by to call a tourist attraction. Now a rural apartment complex.

Northeast on Bridge Street, from the bridge across the Grand River. My favorite of the local small towns. I never lived in Dimondale, but for years I had a Dimondale mailing address. Somehow the village has maintained its small town feel despite its near proximity to Lansing, and its increasingly suburban citizenry.

About a half-mile southeast of Little Venice is an even smaller "named place," called Kelly. Here in 2005 it's pretty difficult to see why any map would show Kelly as a place at all; the settlement consists of a couple homes and a gaggle of barns and other farm outbuildings. I seem to remember a cute one-room schoolhouse--gothic?--standing at this corner until a few years back, but it collapsed. The road, here, is labelled Needmore Highway; at the stop sign it crosses a diagonal Clinton Trail (M-50). Needmore ends two miles past 50, only to resume a couple miles later as Kelly Highway, which would make more sense if the road actually connected to Kelly. A few miles more and it changes to Coats Grove Road, which likely attracts X-Files pilgrims . Shot from my bike, today, on what seems to have become my "normal" ride.

Andrew Nickle, a native of Ireland, made the first government land purchase here in 1837, but while he went to get his family, Orrin Rowland and Henry Clark became the first actual settlers; William Crother lived here with Roxana, believed to be his wife; her son-in-law had Crother sued for bigamy and won; while her lawyer, Edward Bradley, was a state senator, the townspeople had him petition that the town be named Roxana; the enrolling clerk made the final "a" look more like a "d" and the name became Roxand; but its post office, opened on Dec. 31, 1849, with John Ewing as its first postmaster, was spelled Roxana; the office operated until March 31, 1903; the village was also called Needmore and is on some maps as such. That run-on sentence from Michigan Place Names by Walter Romig. Who says history can't be fun? ---------- The photograph shows what used to be Larry's Body Shop at the corner of Wheaton and Needmore, which is to say in Needmore . As the quotation indicates, Needmore's been settled since the 1830s.

Potterville, Michigan.

Dimondale, Michigan. Camera: Minolta SR-T 101

The Lake Shore & Michigan Southern (New York Central) line to Lansing crossed the Grand River at Dimondale. What's left of the railroad bridge shows in this photograph. Shot from the Bridge Street bridge, of course. What this photo doesn't show is a delightful, modern house perched on the bridge footing on the northern (left, in this view) bank of the river. (Don't know if I've a photo from the late 80s which shows that house. Due to relatively recent construction on the south side, I'm unlikely to get one now.) Camera: Minolta SR-T 101.

Dimondale, Michigan.

That's the edge of Hoytville, Michigan, shot from the end of our road in Mulliken.

After they tore half of it out.

Small town charm on a snowy morning.

Down the end of our street, in 1995, from when the town still made some pretense of supporting the neighboring farmers. No longer. Much of this complex has long-since been dismantled; what remains has been repurposed.

Another photo from my 1995 exploration of the local grain elevator.