The oldest house in Oakland County still stands in downtown Birmingham

In 1822, while most of his neighbors still lived in log cabins, John W. Hunter hired a passing carpenter and built himself a proper frame house. That one choice is why the house is still standing today — the oldest house in Oakland County, and one of the oldest in the whole Lower Peninsula.

Hunter was one of Birmingham’s three founders. He’d come from New York and settled along the Saginaw Trail, the old Native footpath that became the road north of Detroit. He rented rooms to travelers passing through. His tidy little house sat right where downtown Birmingham’s shops crowd together now, on what became Old Woodward, south of Maple. For most of the next century and a half it was just somebody’s home, handed from owner to owner.

By 1970 the land under it was worth far more than the cottage on top. The house could easily have been knocked flat for a storefront, like so many old buildings before it. Instead the city of Birmingham bought it and moved the whole thing to a park on Maple Road. It now anchors the Birmingham Museum, next to the 1926 Allen House — the grander home of the city’s first mayor. The Hunter House is on the National Register of Historic Places, furnished with the plain, sturdy pieces a frontier family would have owned.

Stand in front of it and the math is dizzying. This small wooden box went up four years before Birmingham even had a name, when Michigan was still a territory and statehood was fifteen years off. It has outlived every building that ever stood beside it.