The first settlers in this area lived in a primitive manner. Any tools they used were brought with them. When axes became dull, plows would break or a horse had thrown a shoe, the need for a blacksmith was acutely obvious.
The 1880 census is the first that records the John Duckering family in Livingston County. By then they are well settled into their home on Pleasant Valley Rd., south of Hyne Road. The household includes John (38), his wife Emily (or Erma, 33) and four children, two boys and two girls ages 2-10. (Two more […]
Truman B. Worden is recorded as a First Land Owner in Genoa Township, Section 25, in the spring of 1835. The Genoa Township parcel included most of the lake, which now bears his name. He also purchased property in Brighton Township, Section 31. (However, he didnt live on that property; he apparently lived in a […]
The settlers who came to Michigan Territory in the early 1830s must all be considered entrepreneurs. They came with the intention of staying (in the wilderness), developing a livelihood and assuming all the risks, management, capital and labor. Many came because there was no future for them in the east. The most for which they […]
1787 saw the enactment of legislation by the new U. S. government, which formed the Northwest Territory. (States of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.) By 1805 the Territory of Michigan was separated from the Northwest Territory as Ohio, Indiana and Illinois had been at earlier dates. When General Lewis Cass became governor of the Michigan […]
Archibald Hollister, born in Connecticut, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. A son, Algernon Sydney (A.S. as he was popularly referred to), was born January 28, 1796, in Vermont. Anna Teall, born in Vermont in 1800, married A.S., an Episcopal minister.
By the mid 1850s many of the settlers coming to the area had immigrated from Germany. Among these were carpenter/farmer Henry Becker, born 1831 and his wife Margaret and John, a farmer, born 1834. It will be assumed they are brothers since they have the same town of origin, Willofs and came to the United […]
It was 1841 when George E. Pless grandfather, Henry Andrew (Frederich Heinrich Andreas) Pless purchased 240 semi improved (somewhat cleared) acres on the Grand River Indian Trail, west of Brighton in Genoa Township. (Section 11, SW NW ¼, north of Hughes Rd.; sec. 12, E ½ SW ¼, Euler Rd.; Sect. 13, W ½ NW […]
John Sutherlands grandparents, Col. Castle and Nancy Ann, were both born in New York in the last decade of the 18th Century. His father, Solomon, was the youngest of 11 children. By 1828 Castle and Nancy Ann were in Washtenaw County in Ann Arbor and Scio, where Solomon was born, 1833. By 1834 Castle owned […]
A Brighton native and resident for seventy-eight years, Persis Cook died Tuesday, October 4, 1983, in Clearwater, Florida, where she had been living since retiring from her second teaching career in 1968. She was 93 years old.
