Webster's 1871 town hall got moved across the cornfields

Webster Township built itself a town hall in 1871 for $1,758.17 — and that price, written down to the penny, covered the land, the fence, and the hitching posts out front. The little white frame building held its first official meeting that December, and the township just kept meeting in it, decade after decade, long after most places had traded up. By 1976 it was the sixth-oldest township hall still in continuous use anywhere in Michigan.

It was not a fancy operation. The hall ran on kerosene lamps until about 1920 and heated itself with a woodburning stove until 1970. A back room got tacked on in 1948. A Jackson builder named Isaac Terry had designed it, and for a century-plus it sat on Gregory Road doing the unglamorous work of a rural township — collecting taxes, holding elections, settling road business.

Then came the strange part. In May 1997 the whole building was jacked up and physically moved — three-quarters of a mile, straight across the cornfields — from its spot on Gregory Road to Historic Webster Village, where the township could keep it near its other old buildings. Picture a 126-year-old wooden hall creeping over the rows of a Washtenaw County cornfield on a flatbed. The township decided the easiest way to save the building was to pick it up and carry it.

This is farm country between Dexter and Pinckney, where some families have worked the same ground since the 1830s, and the town hall fits right in: a plain, stubborn little structure that a community decided was worth hauling across a field rather than tearing down. It’s still standing in the village, hitching-post budget and all.