A whole pioneer village sits in the shadow of the Meridian Mall

Behind the Meridian Mall in Okemos, past the parking lot and the chain stores, there’s a small cluster of 1800s buildings that look like they wandered in from another century. This is Meridian Historical Village, a pocket of pioneer Michigan tucked into Central Park on Marsh Road, and it’s stranger and better than the mall it hides behind.

The village is made of seven old buildings, each rescued from somewhere in the township and moved here to be restored: a one-room schoolhouse, a farmhouse and barn, a general store, an inn, a 19th-century chapel, a log cabin, and a tollgate house from the plank-road days. That last one is the unusual piece. In the mid-1800s, some Michigan roads were paved with wood planks and run as toll roads, with little houses where a keeper collected the fee. The tollhouse here is a rare survivor of that era, the kind of thing almost everywhere else tore down and forgot.

The whole place is the work of the Friends of Historic Meridian, a nonprofit started in 1974 to keep local history alive. They gathered the buildings, fixed them up to their 1800s look, and run the village as a window into how the people who first settled the township actually lived — before there was a mall, before there was a Marsh Road, when this was farm country east of a young Lansing.

Step into the schoolhouse and the bell still tolls. Walk through the furnished farmhouse and the tollhouse and the rest, and the modern sprawl just outside the trees starts to feel like the odd part. It’s an easy thing to drive past a thousand times without noticing — a settler village, sitting quietly in the shadow of the place everyone actually came to shop.