The capital they built in the woods: Ingham's great gamble

Michigan’s capital is in Ingham County because of one of the strangest votes in state history. In 1847, the legislature had to move the capital out of Detroit — too close to the British, too far from the growing interior — and after every established town lobbied itself hoarse, the lawmakers chose, almost as a dare, an unsettled patch of forest in Lansing Township. Newspapers hooted; one called it a “howling wilderness.” The state built a plank road, then a capitol, and the wilderness answered by becoming Lansing — and, in time, the seat of everything: state government, a great university next door, and the auto empire Ransom E. Olds started there.

That gamble still shapes the county. The 1879 Capitol — restored to its Victorian glory, a National Historic Landmark — anchors a government-and-university economy that gives Ingham County steady work in any economy, and the county fans out from urban Lansing through college-town East Lansing to the small towns and horse farms of Mason, Williamston, and Stockbridge. Not bad for a howling wilderness.