Preserve on Fellows Creek

The creek, and what was done to it

Fellows Creek once ran through a wide floodplain on a meandering bed, with banks of forested wetland and open prairie. That is not how it runs now.

Farming changed it. Drainage works straightened the channel to make the surrounding land workable, and the consequences traveled downstream: reduced plant and animal diversity along the creek itself, and degraded water quality in the lower Rouge and ultimately the Detroit River. It is the same watershed, and the same story, as the channelized stretches of the Rouge over in Dearborn — where the river caught fire in 1969 and has been a Great Lakes Area of Concern since 1987.

Canton has been undoing some of it. The Fellows Creek Wetland project works to re-create a more natural stream system — managing stormwater, stabilizing the banks against erosion, holding back pollutants before they reach the Rouge, and restoring fish and wildlife habitat. The Fellows Creek Wetland Nature Trail runs through it and connects into the township's wider trail network.

Restored wetland is infrastructure, not just scenery

This is the part worth understanding as a buyer rather than admiring from a window. A restored wetland alongside a residential community is functioning stormwater management: it slows water, holds sediment and takes load off the storm system downstream.

That has two practical consequences. The first is durability — land in that role is very unlikely to be built on, which makes the open ground beside this community a good deal more permanent than an ordinary undeveloped parcel. The second is that wetland is regulated. Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy oversees inland wetlands, and a regulated wetland constrains filling, grading, drainage changes and in some cases structures and tree removal near it. On a specific lot, where that boundary falls determines what an owner may actually do at the back of the property.

The everyday realities belong in the same paragraph: standing water and mosquitoes are part of living beside wetland, and how a particular lot drains in a wet spring is better observed in the season than read about.

Living beside water in a township association

Where a community holds any part of the creek corridor, a pond or a detention basin as common element, that is an obligation as well as an amenity. Sediment accumulates and eventually has to be removed, outlet structures need maintenance, banks erode, and vegetation is managed on a schedule.

Dredging a detention basin is a capital expense of a size that associations frequently have not reserved for, so the reserve study is the document that answers whether it has been planned for. Ask for it alongside the budget and the recorded restrictions, and look at what the assessment has done over the last five years rather than only what it is today.

Where the corridor is instead in township or public ownership, the maintenance obligation sits elsewhere — which is a materially better position for an owner and worth establishing rather than assuming either way.

The golf course on the same creek

Canton bought Fellows Creek Golf Club in 1978. The course was not new even then — it opened in 1961 to a design by Bruce Matthews and Jerry Matthews, of the family behind a great many of Michigan's public courses. What the township acquired was eighteen holes, a house serving as the clubhouse and a small maintenance building.

The decades since have been a continuous rebuild: greens and tees improved, cart paths added, a new clubhouse and maintenance building, expanded parking, and nine more holes. In spring 2005 two new holes replaced two poorly designed ones, built by Robertson Brothers Builders as part of their condominium project on the course. It plays today as twenty-seven holes at 2936 South Lotz Road, each nine over 3,200 yards from the back tees, with a bar and grill and a year-round banquet facility.

It is owned by Canton Township and operated under a private contract — which means the ownership is durable while the operator can change, and those are two separate questions.

The five hamlets, and the one that survived

Before the subdivisions, Canton was a scattering of crossroads settlements — five hamlets, of which Cherry Hill is the last to retain substantial historic significance. Sheldon Corners was established in 1825 beside the Sauk Trail, now Michigan Avenue, and grew into a small village with a post office, general store, blacksmith, church and school.

Cherry Hill was settled the same year and was originally called Ridge, for the ridge shore of an ancient lake it sat on. It took its present name around 1865, after Abner Hitchcock built an inn he called the Cherry Hill House for the wild cherry trees growing there; that inn later served as a general store and a dance hall and was the social center of the community for generations. The first area church, Cherry Hill United Methodist, went up in 1834.

Dairying followed. The Ypsi Creamery and the Detroit Creamery, later Wilson Dairy, operated until 1940, when Henry Ford bought the dairy and folded it into his village industry program — which here provided work for veterans of the Second World War disabled by their service. The Cherry Hill Historic District was added to the National Register in 2003. Eleven Canton houses built between 1825 and 1904 are listed under the Canton Township Multiple Property Submission, most of them added in 2000 and the rest in 2003. One of the eleven, the Sheldon Inn of 1825 on Michigan Avenue, was demolished in 2021.

How Canton got this big

Canton became a Michigan township on March 7, 1834 and was named, like the neighboring Nankin and Peking townships, after a city in China — Canton is the only one of the three still carrying the name. New England settlers arrived after the Erie Canal opened in 1825 and farmed the flat ground for well over a century; from 1925 to 1970 the township was known as the Sweet Corn Capital of Michigan, and its creameries supplied the region.

The township counted about 5,300 residents in 1961. What changed it was I-275, completed in 1977: once the freeway was in, a township of farms sat within an hour of anywhere in metropolitan Detroit. The population approached 50,000 by the 1980 census and reached 98,659 by 2020, making Canton the second most-populated township in Michigan. At the peak, construction here sometimes exceeded two thousand homes a year.

Canton has put an unusual amount of land into public recreation since. It owns two golf courses — Fellows Creek, bought in 1978, and Pheasant Run, opened in 1995 with 27 holes by Arthur Hills on more than three hundred acres. Heritage Park runs to 105 acres on Canton Center Road, the Summit on the Park beside it is a 95,000-square-foot recreation and cultural center opened in January 1996, and the Lower Rouge River Recreation Trail, begun in 2007, runs out to the I-275 Metro Trail.

Three school districts, not one

Canton Township is served by three separate school districts: Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, which covers the substantial majority of the township, along with Van Buren Public Schools and Wayne-Westland Community Schools.

Match comparable sales on district as well as on subdivision and size.

Buying or selling here

The creek and the restored wetland are the reason for the address, and they are checkable facts rather than adjectives — which makes them stronger selling points than most listings manage.

For a seller, that means stating what the adjoining land actually is, who owns and maintains it, and what protects it. Where the association holds part of it, a reserve study that accounts for the water is a genuine advantage worth putting in front of a buyer.

For a buyer, the order is what the adjoining ground is and who maintains it, the wetland boundary and what it permits on the specific lot, the association's reserve position, and then the house — with a visit in a wet spring somewhere in there.