Brighton Area Historical Society

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.

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Henry Maltby’s Oakwood stock farm has its origin in the very early days of the settling of Brighton, Genoa and Green Oak Townships.  His father, Almon and Uncle Maynard (both teachers) were among the first to take up land in these townships.  Born in New York, they came to the area in 1832.  Within two […]

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A newspaper clipping (c 1900) contains a list of 41 farms, almost all in Brighton Township.   From that list & research on background of these farms should show what life was like at that  time. The Lamart Hicks Farm on Skeman Road is the subject of this issue.

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Henry’s father, Jacob, came to the U.S. in 1832, with brothers Phillip and Charles and sister, Mary Magdelene as very young children.  Their parents, Charles C. and Maria Catherine Nadig came by sailing vessel, an ordeal of which our imagination is incapable.  In the early 1830s German immigrants constituted a major portion of the stream […]

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Of the early settlers to the Brighton Area, many were of a moral caliber, which assumed a responsibility to the community and the young state.  Among them was John Gilluly, son of Irish-born parents, Thomas and Ann.  John was born in Massachusetts.  Research indicates John taught in the Brighton School District in 1845, ’46,’57, ’59. […]

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When husband William Henry died at 48 in 1835, it may be assumed his mercantile business in Hamburg, Germany, was sold.  Perhaps the proceeds enabled Henrietta to bring her family to America.  She and the children, William H. (21), Emma (15), Edward G. (11) and Charles E. (8) spent 10 weeks crossing the briney deep.

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Eldad Spencer Field, with brother-in-law Norton Wait, came to Michigan within ten years of the completion of the Erie Canal. (The convenient and economical route over the Appalachian Mountains in New York opened the way for settlers to pioneer in Michigan Territory. Early Livingston County census records indicate a family of Fields in each township.)

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As early as 1837, German Lutherans had settled in southeastern Livingston County.  By 1842, they began meeting for public worship services, under the leadership of the pioneer Lutheran missionary in eastern Michigan, the Rev. Frederick Schmidt (born Sept. 6, 1807, in Wuertemberg, Germany; died August 30, 1883 at Ann Arbor). 

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Groups of settlers united as they headed west to Michigan from New York in the 1830s; many of them long time friends.  (Not unlike the wagon trains which ‘went West’ a few years later.) Arriving in Brighton Township they found no living quarters, merely a wilderness.  Some land was level, some wet, much rolling, almost […]

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