Romeo's hundred old houses, saved almost by accident

Walk a few blocks off Main Street in Romeo and you pass Greek Revival, Gothic, Italianate, Queen Anne — a parade of nineteenth-century styles standing shoulder to shoulder on quiet streets. The village holds roughly 100 well-preserved historic buildings, and what makes it remarkable isn’t any single mansion. It’s the range. Nearly every major architectural style popular in America from the 1830s up to about 1910 is here, often several good examples of each, packed into a small grid. The whole village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.

That survival was mostly luck. Settlers arrived in 1821, and the place got its name in 1830 when a settler’s wife suggested “Romeo” because it was short, musical, and uncommon. By 1859 it was the second-largest village in the county, behind only Mount Clemens, with a busy cluster of small factories — a broom factory, a chair factory, an iron foundry, a cigar maker, and four separate carriage companies turning out wagons and buggies.

Then the thing that usually erases an old downtown never happened. The railroads and the big highways routed around Romeo, the carriage trade faded, and the village stopped growing fast. No urban renewal bulldozer came through, no freeway split it in two. The houses the carriage builders and merchants put up just stayed standing, generation after generation, until what was once ordinary became rare. The state describes Romeo’s concentration of historic buildings and the diversity of their styles as outstanding in Michigan. Come in fall and the same streets fill up for the Peach Festival, the porches strung with bunting in front of houses older than the state’s car industry.