Berkley took its name from a one-room school and a farmer's road

The town’s name started as a road name. A farmer named Elmer Cromie called the dirt track running through his land “Berkley,” and when a new schoolhouse went up nearby it borrowed the same word. So when settlers needed something to call the growing crossroads, Berkley was already sitting right there on a sign and a school door, and they took it.

This was open country first — thick woods and pockets of swamp northwest of Detroit, along the line we now call the Woodward corridor. In 1918 the area traded its one-room school for a graded district. Kids packed into a temporary building on the corner of Berkley and Catalpa while the real school went up. Angell Elementary opened in 1921 and has run ever since, the oldest elementary school still open in Oakland County. A high school wing followed in 1926.

The part that’s easy to forget is how people got around. In the 1920s, two sets of tracks ran down the middle of what is now Woodward Avenue. One was for a steam train. The other was for an interurban — the electric streetcars that stitched the Detroit suburbs together before cars swallowed them whole. You could catch a ride into the city right from the edge of the farms. Berkley became a village in 1923 and a city in 1932, just as the automobile was making those rails useless.

Now Woodward is eight lanes of traffic and the streetcars are a footnote. But the name on the welcome sign still belongs to a long-gone schoolhouse and a farmer’s lane — a quieter origin than most towns get.