North Delhi Hills

Three answers to one question

A mailing address is a postal convenience and nothing more. It determines where letters go and how a listing reads, and it has no bearing on who taxes the property, who plows the road, or which school a child attends. Buyers routinely treat it as though it settles all three.

The municipality is what actually drives taxes and services, and here that is Scio Township rather than the City of Ann Arbor. Township millage, township services, township assessing. That difference between a city and a township rate is one of the larger line items in a monthly payment, and it is a genuine reason people look on this side of the line.

The school district is the third answer and the one that requires an actual check. Dexter Community Schools crosses several townships and does not follow the municipal boundary, so assignment is set by address. All three facts sit on a listing, but people read them as one fact rather than three, and the three do different work.

Water and sewer, and why it is not well and septic

A township address in Washtenaw County usually implies individual wells and drain fields. Here it does not, and that is worth understanding before an offer rather than after.

North Delhi Hills is served by the Loch Alpine Sanitary Authority, a public utility jointly operated by Scio and Webster townships. It also serves Loch Alpine and Glen Devon, and it is governed by a seven-member board — three members appointed by each township board, plus one representing the Loch Alpine Improvement Association. The authority is an entity independent of that homeowners' association.

In practice that means water and sewer here are billed by a public authority rather than handled lot by lot, and that an owner is not carrying the maintenance, pumping and eventual replacement of a private system alone. It is a different cost structure and a different risk profile from the well-and-septic arrangement a buyer might reasonably assume from the address, and it is one of the more attractive things about this pocket of Scio Township.

The village that was here

Delhi Mills was founded in 1831 by Jacob Dorms, who built a sawmill at the rapids on the Huron and threw a primitive dam of timber, stone and earth across the river. In 1836 he platted a town, called it Michigan Village, and began selling lots.

It became a real industrial place. At its height in the 1860s and 1870s Delhi held two grist mills, a woolen mill, a sawmill and a plaster mill, along with its own post office — Delhi Mills — and a railroad station with four scheduled train stops a day. Water was the reason: the rapids here were power, and power was the whole basis of a nineteenth-century village.

Almost none of it survives above ground. The mill foundations are still in the river west of the bridge, visible on both banks, and most people picnicking at the park nearby have no idea the rocks they are stepping across are the footings of five mills.

The Delhi Bridge

The bridge carrying East Delhi Road over the Huron was completed on October 12, 1883, built by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton, Ohio, with steel members supplied by the Trenton Iron Company. It is a one-lane wrought iron Pratt through truss, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 4, 2008.

It has had an eventful century and a half. A tornado on June 6, 1917 lifted the bridge off its abutments and left it collapsed in a twisted heap in the river; it was rebuilt the following year using many of the original trusses. In 2005 an inspection found deterioration almost to the point of failure and the Washtenaw County Road Commission closed it to vehicles. It reopened in August 2009 after a rehabilitation costing $1.2 million, with a dedication ceremony that September.

One lane means one car at a time, and that is a small daily fact of living on this side of the river rather than a historical footnote. It is also the reason the road stays quiet.

The river and the parks

Delhi Metropark sits on the rapids about five miles west of Ann Arbor and is the nearest of three metroparks along this stretch of the Huron; Dexter-Huron and Hudson Mills lie further upstream toward Dexter, with Hudson Mills at 8801 North Territorial Road.

The Border-to-Border Trail runs the corridor, connecting downtown Dexter to the Dexter-Huron and Delhi metroparks along the river through a mix of riverfront, woodland and prairie. For a subdivision sitting inside that corridor, it means the recreational infrastructure is regional and permanent rather than something an association has to fund and maintain.

The houses

The subdivision is a modest one by lot count, on quiet streets set back from the river road. Its appeal has always been positional rather than architectural — this is a place people choose for where it sits relative to two downtowns, a school district and a river corridor.

As with any established subdivision, the systems cycle is where the money is. Roofs, furnaces, air conditioning, water heaters, electrical panels and the service connections all have dates, and the difference between a house that has had that work done and one that has not will outweigh differences in square footage. Because the water and sewer come from a public authority here, the private-system questions that dominate diligence elsewhere in the township do not apply, which simplifies the inspection meaningfully.

Dexter is several different places

Samuel William Dexter arrived in 1824, thirteen years before Michigan became a state, and bought a large parcel. The settlement he founded was established as a village in 1830 and remained one for nearly two centuries: on November 20, 2014, after a process spanning eight years, the Village of Dexter became the City of Dexter when its voter-approved charter was filed with the state.

That change matters more than it sounds. City residents are no longer residents or taxpayers of the townships the village had straddled, so a property inside the city and a property a mile outside it now sit under different taxing authorities. Meanwhile a Dexter mailing address reaches across Scio, Webster, Dexter and Lima townships, and Dexter Community Schools crosses all of them without matching any.

The practical upshot is that two listings both saying Dexter can differ in municipality, in tax rate and in school assignment. North Delhi Hills is in none of the obvious combinations — Ann Arbor mail, Scio Township, Dexter schools — which is exactly why it is worth spelling out.

Scio Township itself carries a name from the same decade and the same enthusiasm that named Ypsilanti: it is called for the Greek island of Chios, rendered in the older Western spelling, out of the American sympathy for the Greek War of Independence that ran from 1821 to 1832. The early township records were reportedly lost to a fire, so precisely who chose it is no longer known.

Buying or selling here

The selling argument here is specific and it is not the house: Dexter schools, Scio Township taxes, an Ann Arbor address, a public water and sewer utility, and a position inside the Huron River park corridor. That combination is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly rather than leaving a buyer to assemble it themselves.

The utility question that consumes so much diligence elsewhere in the township is already answered here, which is a genuine advantage and one that ought to be understood rather than overlooked.