Why so many roads through here are called 'Territorial'

There is a “Territorial Road” on the map in a dozen Michigan towns, and they all trace back to the same thing: a single pioneer highway laid out when Michigan was not yet a state, just a territory waiting to become one.

The territorial legislature approved the road in 1829. The idea was to cut an east-west route from the Detroit area straight across the second tier of counties toward Lake Michigan — and that line ran right through what is now Paw Paw, today the Van Buren County seat. The surveyors didn’t actually reach this stretch until the mid-1830s, which is its own small comedy: settlers were already creaking westward in their wagons while the official route was still being chained off behind them. The road got drawn partly to catch up with people who’d stopped waiting for it.

A road like that builds towns the way a river builds them. Wagons need to stop; stopped travelers need beds, feed for the horses, a meal and a drink; so taverns went up at the natural day’s-end spots, and villages thickened around the taverns. Paw Paw sits where it sits because of this road. A Michigan historical marker in town keeps the memory, and it preserves one wonderful detail — a local stopping place once so jammed with travelers that men were said to pay money just for the right to lean against a post for the night.

The strange part is the afterlife of the name. The modern grid grew up out of these first rough routes, and “Territorial Road” kept getting stamped on signs — often on stretches of pavement that run nowhere near the original muddy track. The road is two hundred years gone, but its name keeps turning up, a little misplaced, on county signposts all over southern Michigan.