Cleary started as a penmanship school in 1883

The little university off Grand River Avenue near Howell got its start teaching people how to write a clean, legible hand. In 1883 an Irish immigrant named Patrick Roger Cleary opened the Cleary School of Penmanship in Ypsilanti. Good handwriting was a job skill then. A clerk who could keep neat ledgers and copy a contract by hand was worth hiring. From that narrow trade the school kept widening.

By 1912 it had become Cleary Business College. It turned out bookkeepers, stenographers, and office workers for a growing industrial Michigan. It claims an early first: the first college in the state to place a graduate as a teacher of commercial subjects in the public schools. For most of a century the campus stayed in Washtenaw County, where it began.

The move into Livingston County came later. Cleary opened a branch outside Howell in 1979. That campus, sitting in Genoa Township just off the highway, eventually became the flagship. In 2002 the school dropped “college” for “university” and added graduate programs. But it never strayed far from where it started. It’s still a small, private place built around business — management, accounting, marketing, the practical degrees that trace a straight line back to a penmanship desk.

It’s an easy campus to drive past without noticing, low brick buildings near the I-96 interchange. But the next time you see one of those flowing nineteenth-century signatures, all loops and flourishes, picture this. A classroom full of students practicing exactly that, paying tuition to learn it, a century and a half ago — and the school that taught them still here, a few exits up the road.