Where to Stay in Canton, Michigan

What is Canton known for?

Canton keeps a run of them on the register, the Ephraim and Emma Woodworth Truesdell House and the John and Eliza Barr Patterson House and the David and Elizabeth Bell Boldman House among them, survivors of the farming township that came before the suburb. Cherry Hill is the other name. That settlement gives Canton a historic corner distinct from the subdivisions filling the rest of the township, and the Lilley Road-Lower Rouge River Bridge carries the same nineteenth-century thread over the water.

What are the main landmarks in Canton?

Six farmhouses and a bridge make up most of the list. The Phillip and Maria Hasselbach Dingledey House and the Thomas and Maria Blackman Bartlett House are typical of them, named for the families who built them and preserved as the last physical record of the farming township. Cherry Hill stands apart.

So does the Lilley Road-Lower Rouge River Bridge, a crossing left from the era when the road network here served fields rather than subdivisions.

What is the history of Canton?

Canton Township was organised in 1825. For most of the time since, it was farmland worked by the families whose names still attach to the houses on the register, and that is the era Cherry Hill preserves. Then came the suburbs.

Detroit, 23 miles east, grew until its western fringe reached this far out, and a farming district of Wayne County turned into one of the larger communities in Michigan without ever acquiring a downtown of its own. The old buildings survived by luck and by policy. Six of them stand where fields used to run, the Ephraim and Emma Woodworth Truesdell House and the George and Mary Pine Smith House among them, listed and kept while the ground around was built over.

The Lilley Road-Lower Rouge River Bridge did the same. It belongs to the road network of the farming years and still crosses the water on the line it always did. Ann Arbor pulled from the other side.

With that town 15 miles west and Detroit 23 miles east, Canton ended up as the ground between them, which is the shortest account of why it grew the way it did.

Where is Canton?

Canton lies west of Detroit and east of Ann Arbor. Roughly 23 miles separate the township from downtown Detroit and 15 from Ann Arbor, which puts it in the corridor between the two rather than in the orbit of either one alone. Water is scarce but present.

The Lower Rouge River crosses the township, carried at one point by the Lilley Road-Lower Rouge River Bridge, and the rest of the ground is old Wayne County farmland built over with housing.

What is the climate of Canton?

Canton takes the weather of the Detroit corridor. Nothing between the township and either city breaks it up, so one run of seasons reaches Cherry Hill, the register houses and the crossing at the Lilley Road-Lower Rouge River Bridge alike. Summer is the walking season.

The Lower Rouge River and the older lanes around Cherry Hill are best seen then, while the colder months turn Canton back into what it mostly is, ground people drive across between Detroit and Ann Arbor.

How do you get to Canton?

Getting to Canton means a drive. Canton sits 23 miles west of downtown Detroit and 15 miles east of Ann Arbor, so arrivals come along the corridor between them, and the township is entered by car from whichever end the trip began. Lilley Road is one of the older ways in.

It crosses the Lower Rouge River on the Lilley Road-Lower Rouge River Bridge, a reminder that the grid of Wayne County roads here predates the suburb it now serves.