Northville: the 'north village' that finally broke away from Plymouth

The name is about as literal as a town name gets. When settlers spread out across Plymouth Township in the 1820s and started building up two separate clusters of homes and mills, the bunch up at the north end simply became “the north village” — Northville. It sat on high ground; one early settler’s 1825 land claim was said to be on the highest point around. The Erie Canal had just opened, so a lot of these pioneers came west out of New York, names like Yerkes and Aldrich filing their patents and damming the little river branches to turn grist mills.

For decades Northville and Plymouth shared one township government, and that’s where the friction built up. Northville folks were tired of the long haul down to the Plymouth township offices for every bit of business, and they grumbled that the township spent more keeping up Plymouth’s bridges than their own. In March 1898, about a hundred residents gathered to settle it with a vote. The tally came back 40 to 30 in favor of going it alone, and Northville Township was born — lopping the old township down to a fraction of its former size.

The Village of Northville had actually incorporated back in 1867, the same year Plymouth did, so the two towns grew up as siblings before the formal divorce. To this day the city straddles the county line, with its north half in Oakland and its south half in Wayne.

Walk the brick downtown now, all tidy Victorian storefronts climbing that original hill, and the old logic still holds. Plymouth is right there to the south. Northville is, as ever, the village to the north.