Category: Landmark Structures

This site is the last remnant of a farm known as the Willmarth Property which dates back to its first white settler, Hiram Willmarth (1793–1854), who initially saw the land as a government surveyor, “found it good,” and in 1837 acquired land patents for more than one thousand acres in Meridian Township including a full…

This farmhouse was built in 1849 by Augustus L. Sturges, the first white settler of a ninety-acre farm that extended from this site eastward. The farm adjacent to the south was settled by Horace Bigelow in that same year. The section line trail that became Hagadorn Road was initially “brushed out” north of Grand River Avenue by…

Historic Marker text: “By 1986 this Greek Revival house was the only privately owned pre-Civil War house still used as a residence in East Lansing. Horace Bigelow (c. 1822–1891) built it in 1849. According to the 1874 Atlas of Ingham County, Bigelow was ‘a farmer, stock and wool grower, and breeder of Essex hogs.’ He…

James DeLoss Towar (1863–1947, M.A.C. ’85, M.S. 1902) was born September 26, 1863, on the Towar family farm, a 400-acre spread north of East Lansing which his family settled in 1853. The Towar farmhouse was nestled in a bend of Lake Lansing Road, opposite the present Whitehills Elementary School. “At one time it was the largest…

Charles B. Collingwood (1860–1937, M.A.C. ’85, M.S. ’90) was a one-term state senator, Postmaster of the Agricultural College 1902–1907, and was on the committee to write the city’s charter. He then served for more than twenty-five years as a Circuit Court judge for Ingham County. “When Oakwood was originally designed, Sunset Lane was an alley running along the rear of…

This elaborate Tudor-style house with its thatch-like shingled roof seems quite out of place along busy Grand River Avenue. It was built for T. Ray Johnson, an automotive sales engineer, and his wife Alice. The Johnsons and their six children seem to have lived here for only a short period circa 1930–1931. Following several years…

John H. Cowley was East Lansing’s first Justice of the Peace. The John H. Cowley House is an East Lansing Landmark Structure. A later home of the Cowley family stands nearby to the south.

Although today there are still a handful of houses remaining in Collegeville that pre-date College Delta,† only one received any attention from the East Lansing Historic Commission when it completed its initial survey in the 1980s: the Butterfield–Ayers House, built circa 1890–1895. Aside from its age, its significance is unclear. The Butterfield namesake is unknown, even…

This is reputed to be the oldest existing commercial building in East Lansing. Its background is extremely vague, but there are indications it might have originally been a grocery store that predated the Collegeville development, and it might have originally stood farther south, facing Michigan Avenue. East Lansing Historic Commission documents cite its build date as circa…