Owosso's last brick street has been underfoot since 1906

Drive down Michigan Avenue in Owosso and your tires start talking — a low, even hum you don’t get on asphalt. That’s because you’re rolling over brick that was laid in 1906 and has stayed put for well over a century.

The job cost the city $8,700, and the brick didn’t come from far. It was vitrified paving brick — clay fired so hot it nearly turns to glass, hard and water-tight enough to take iron wagon wheels and weather without crumbling — made by the Detroit Vitrified Brick Company right up the road in Corunna, the county seat. For a stretch around the turn of the century, Shiawassee County clay was being baked into the very streets its towns drove on. The bricks under Michigan Avenue are, in a sense, local all the way down.

Most American downtowns paved over their brick decades ago, chasing the smoother, cheaper ride of asphalt, and Owosso did too — almost everywhere. Michigan Avenue is the holdout, the one brick-paved street the city has left. Each brick is its own small paver, set by hand and locked against its neighbors, which is why a 1906 street can still carry 2026 traffic. When a utility crew has to dig one up, they pull the bricks, do the work, and set them back, because there’s no buying new ones to match.

It’s the kind of thing you’d never notice if nobody pointed it out, and then you can’t stop noticing it. The sound under the tires, the slightly uneven sheen of a hundred-plus winters, the seams you can feel through the steering wheel — all of it the residue of a year when a small Michigan city decided to do something the expensive, permanent way, and got more than its money’s worth.