Cherry Hill Village

The hamlet that came first

The settlement was established in 1825 as an early crossroads hamlet, and its first name was Ridge — taken from its position atop the ridge shore of an ancient lake, which is also why the ground here sits a little higher than the flat township around it. The Cherry Hill United Methodist Church went up in 1834 as the first church in the area, and the Canton Fractional School District No. 1 schoolhouse followed in 1876.

The name arrived with an innkeeper. Around 1865 Abner Hitchcock built an inn he called the Cherry Hill House, after the wild cherry trees growing nearby, and it became the social center of the community for generations — general store and dance hall as much as inn. The hamlet took the building's name for its own.

Those buildings are still there. The Cherry Hill Historic District takes in the Italianate Cherry Hill House, the Gothic Revival church and its cemetery, the schoolhouse, the Thomas and Maria Blackman Bartlett House, and the Thomas and Isabella Moore Clyde House. It is worth understanding that the historic district and the modern residential development are administratively separate things that happen to occupy the same ground — the new neighborhood was built around the old hamlet rather than over it, and the two are governed differently.

Henry Ford's last factory

There is a chapter here most residents of Canton do not know. Beginning in 1918, Henry Ford started buying rural land for what he called his Village Industries — small decentralized plants meant to give farming communities factory work in the winter months while leaving them free for the fields in summer. The first opened in Northville in 1920. The last one he built was at Cherry Hill.

The Cherry Hill plant, on a fourteen-acre complex, began operations in July 1944, taking over ignition, door lock, and key production moved from Willow Run, and making door hinges as well. It was staffed in significant part by disabled veterans returning from the Second World War, and it functioned as a training and rehabilitation site as much as a factory. The workers' dormitory had a history of its own: it was the Wilson Dairy creamery from the village, which Ford bought in 1943 and had physically moved to a spot just south of the plant to serve as a residence hall.

Operations wound down in 1945, and in 1946 the site served as a planning location for consolidating the Village Industries program. It was sold in 1950 and passed through several industrial owners after that. The site is now bound up with Canton's arts and community campus: the township has been renovating the former factory building for community programming, alongside the Arts Warehouse at Cherry Hill. Check the township's current project page for where that stands and when things open. The complex is not part of the residential neighborhood, but it is part of why this particular crossroads has more history attached to it than anywhere else in the township.

The plan

Canton Township's master planning for the area began in 1998, and construction started in 2000. The approved plan called for roughly 931 single-family lots alongside about 360 townhouses and condominiums across the 460 acres, built out in phases over the years that followed, with a small downtown at Ridge Road and Cherry Hill Road.

The design principles are the point of the place and are visible everywhere in it. Streets were deliberately narrowed. Garages were removed as the focal element of the front of the house — nearly everything here has rear-lane or side-entry access instead — which frees the street-facing elevation for a porch, and porches are the neighborhood's signature. Public space was built in rather than left over: neighborhood parks and squares, Preservation Park, and miles of sidewalks and pathways connecting the whole community. The architecture was deliberately varied rather than uniform, drawing on Tudor, Greek Revival, English Colonial, Victorian, Italianate, and American Farmhouse forms so that no two adjacent houses repeat.

The homes

The single-family housing is organized into three lot categories, and knowing which one a house sits on tells you most of what you need to know about it. Estate Homes occupy lots roughly 75 to 80 feet wide and 120 feet or more deep. Village Homes sit on lots about 55 to 65 feet wide and 120 feet deep. Cottage Homes are the smallest, roughly 40 to 45 feet wide and 100 to 120 feet deep, with garage access from a rear lane.

One unusual allowance is worth flagging: the Estate and Village categories permit ancillary units of up to 1,000 square feet — a carriage house or above-garage apartment. That is rare in a Michigan subdivision and it materially changes what some of these properties can do, whether for extended family, a home office, or a separate unit. Not every lot has one and not every lot can accommodate one, but it is a question worth asking about any house here.

The attached housing runs to townhouses and condominiums, generally first- or second-level units with exterior maintenance included. Because the neighborhood was built in phases across two decades, construction dates vary considerably from one street to the next, and a house from the first phase and one from a later phase can differ in finish and systems even where the styling is consistent.

The Village Theater at Cherry Hill

Construction on the Village Theater began in spring 2003, the building was finished in summer 2004, and it held its grand opening on September 11, 2004. It seats 400, and it operates as a performing and visual arts and education center rather than a rental hall — programming runs from the Canton Community Band and the Michigan Shakespeare Company to local school productions, with the Village Theater Gallery rotating exhibitions by local and regional artists monthly.

It matters to the neighborhood beyond the programming. A subdivision with a working 400-seat theater at its center has a public place to be that most subdivisions simply do not, and it is the clearest expression of what the traditional-neighborhood plan was trying to achieve: somewhere to walk to that is not a parking lot.

Schools

Cherry Hill Village is served by Plymouth-Canton Community Schools. School district assignment varies by address across Canton Township — some parts of the township fall into neighboring districts entirely.

Buying or selling in Cherry Hill Village

The first thing to understand is that this neighborhood is regulated more closely than its neighbors. Cherry Hill Village sits within its own overlay district with design guidelines adopted by the township, on top of homeowners association governance. That combination is what keeps the porches, the rear lanes, and the architectural variety intact, and it is also what a buyer is agreeing to. Anyone planning exterior changes, an addition, or an ancillary unit should read both the township overlay guidelines and the association documents before writing an offer, not after.

On value, the lot categories are the key to reading comparable sales. A Cottage Home on a 40-foot lot with rear-lane access and an Estate Home on an 80-foot lot are different properties in the same neighborhood, and a sale in one category is a weak comparable for the other. The same goes for the attached housing — the condominiums and townhouses trade on their own terms, and the separate Cherry Hill Village Condominiums and Rivers Edge sections are distinct enough to be read separately again. Add the phased construction dates on top of that, and pricing here genuinely requires knowing the village street by street rather than pulling a township-wide average.

For sellers, the story is the asset and most listings undersell it. What a buyer is choosing when they choose Cherry Hill Village over another Canton subdivision is the plan itself: the porch instead of the garage door, the square instead of the cul-de-sac, the theater and the 1876 schoolhouse instead of an entrance sign. Buyers who want that want it specifically, and they are usually cross-shopping against places like downtown Plymouth or Northville rather than against the subdivision next door. A listing that names the design principles, the historic hamlet, and the theater reaches that buyer; one that lists bedrooms and square footage competes on the wrong terms entirely.