Oxford once called itself the Gravel Capital of the World

The wealth under Oxford was left behind by a glacier. As the last ice sheet ground its way across Michigan, it crushed rock and dropped the rubble in deep beds — and one of the richest sat right under this village. For a stretch of the last century, that gravel made Oxford famous enough to put a brag on the water tower: Gravel Capital of the World.

The man who started it was W.O. Smith, who came to town in 1910. In 1912 he bought 80 acres and opened Oxford’s first real gravel pit, the Detroit-Oxford Gravel & Stone Company. The timing was perfect. Detroit was about to explode with factories and the cars they built, and all those new roads and buildings needed crushed stone and sand. Oxford had it by the hill.

By 1924 the boom was in full roar — five gravel plants working the pits, more than 200 people on the payrolls, and roughly 40,000 railroad cars a year leaving town loaded with stone. Companies like American Aggregates and Wolverine Sand & Gravel worked the deposit hard. In a real sense the foundation of modern Detroit, and the roads its cars first drove on, came out of the ground at Oxford.

The pits never refilled with gravel, of course — you only get the glacier’s gift once. But many of them filled with water instead, and today the old diggings sit around the village as lakes, ringed with houses and fishing docks. The trains stopped hauling stone a long time ago. The crater they left behind is now somebody’s backyard swimming hole, which is a fairly graceful second act for a hole in the ground.