The Downs

A note on the name, first

There are two places called The Downs in this area and they have nothing to do with each other. The other one is in Northville: a redevelopment of the former Northville Downs harness racing track, which ran from 1944 until its last race in February 2024, now carrying 443 homes and a ten-acre river park about thirty miles east of here.

This is a fourteen-house enclave in Washtenaw County with no racetrack in its history. The names collide by coincidence, and automated valuation tools and listing aggregators do occasionally conflate similarly named communities across counties.

It is worth using the full location — The Downs, Dexter — in searches, in comparable-sales work and in any written offer. A comparable pulled from the wrong Downs will be wrong by a very wide margin.

Fourteen houses is not a market

A community of fourteen custom residences does not have a market rate, and both sides of a transaction need to accept that at the outset. In a normal year this address may produce no sales at all, and when one occurs it is a single data point about a single house rather than evidence about the others.

Custom construction compounds it. When houses are individually designed, square footage becomes a weak predictor of value: two houses of 6,000 square feet here can differ substantially in materials, specification and finish, and none of that shows in the headline numbers. A price per square foot across the community is close to meaningless.

So the price has to be built from the property — the specification, the lot, the condition — with adjusted comparables drawn from a much wider area than the subdivision. An automated estimate on a house like this should be treated as noise rather than as a starting point, in either direction.

Named builders are a researchable advantage

Where a house was built by an identifiable local firm rather than a production company, the claim in a listing becomes checkable rather than decorative. Christian Tennant Custom Homes still operates out of Ann Arbor, working across Ann Arbor, Barton Hills and Dexter. The Landau Building Company and Lincoln Poley are similarly local names.

That is genuinely useful. Original plans and specifications may be traceable, questions about how a particular house was built can sometimes be answered by the people who built it, and a seller with the original documentation has something concrete to put in front of a buyer.

It also sets the right questions for houses now fifteen to twenty-five years old: what was specified originally for the roof, the windows and the mechanicals, and what has been replaced since. On houses of this size, the answer matters more than it would on a smaller one — there is simply more of everything to maintain, often multiple heating and cooling zones, and finishes that cost more to match than to replace outright.

Where it sits

East Delhi Road between Huron River Drive and Miller Road puts this community inside the Huron corridor between Ann Arbor and Dexter, on ground with real history immediately around it.

Delhi Mills stood just downstream. Jacob Dorms founded it in 1831 with a sawmill at the rapids, platted a town in 1836 that he called Michigan Village, and by the 1860s and 1870s it held two grist mills, a woolen mill, a sawmill and a plaster mill, its own post office and a railroad station with four scheduled stops a day. The mill foundations are still visible in the river.

The Delhi Bridge carries East Delhi Road over the Huron: a one-lane wrought iron Pratt through truss completed on October 12, 1883 by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton, Ohio, listed on the National Register on September 4, 2008. A tornado on June 6, 1917 lifted it off its abutments into the river; it was rebuilt the following year using many original trusses, closed in 2005 when an inspection found deterioration almost to the point of failure, and reopened in August 2009 after a $1.2 million rehabilitation. One lane still means one car at a time.

The river corridor

The Huron between Ann Arbor and Dexter is one of the better-protected river corridors in southeast Michigan. Three metroparks sit along it — Delhi on the rapids about five miles west of Ann Arbor, Dexter-Huron upstream of it, and 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 through riverfront, woodland and prairie, and the Huron River Water Trail follows the same stretch for paddlers. The run from Hudson Mills down to Dexter-Huron is a standard trip.

That is publicly funded and permanent open space rather than association amenity. It requires no assessment, it is maintained without a special levy, and it is not going to be sold — which is a different proposition from open ground that simply has not been built on yet.

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 was established as a village in 1830 and remained one until November 20, 2014, when — after a process spanning eight years — the Village of Dexter became the City of Dexter, its voter-approved charter filed with the state.

That change matters more than it sounds. Those inside the new city stopped being residents or taxpayers of the townships the village had straddled, so a property in the city and one a mile outside now answer to different taxing authorities, and comparable sales from before 2014 predate the split.

A Dexter mailing address, meanwhile, reaches across Scio, Webster, Dexter and Lima townships, and Dexter Community Schools crosses all of them while matching none exactly. Two listings both saying Dexter can therefore differ in municipality, in tax rate and in school assignment.

The founder left a house behind. Samuel Dexter was born in Boston in 1792, the son of a politician who served as Secretary of War and of the Treasury under John Adams; he came to Michigan in 1824, became a land developer and civic leader, founded several towns, and named this village after his father when he established it in 1830. Gordon Hall, the Greek Revival house he built on a hilltop above the town between 1841 and 1843, was designed by Calvin T. Fillmore — brother of the president — with Sylvester Newkirk overseeing construction, and took two years largely because lumber was hard to get from Flint and Detroit. It carries a hexastyle Doric portico, runs about 2,500 square feet on each of its two main floors with unfinished attic and basement space above and below, and originally held 22 rooms, nine fireplaces and 55 windows. It became a Michigan State Historic Site in 1958, was listed on the National Register on November 9, 1972, and was bought by the Dexter Area Historical Society in 2006.

March 15, 2012

On the afternoon of March 15, 2012 an EF3 tornado cut a path of nearly eight miles through this part of Washtenaw County, with peak winds of 135 to 140 miles an hour. It damaged more than two hundred homes and businesses by the county's final assessment, brought down hundreds of trees, and left about twenty houses needing demolition. Total damage came to just under $10 million.

Nobody was injured, which given the strength of the storm and the hour of the day was remarkable. Most of what was damaged or destroyed has since been rebuilt, though some work continued for years afterward.

For a buyer this is a live diligence item rather than a historical note, and it is the Dexter equivalent of the flood question in Dearborn. A house in or near the path may have been repaired or substantially rebuilt in 2012 and 2013 — which is worth knowing, because it means newer roofing, siding, windows or framing than the build year suggests, and because the quality and permitting of that work varied.

Ask directly whether the specific property was affected and what was done. Where it was, the permits and the contractor records are the documentation that matters, and a seller who has them is in a materially stronger position than one who does not.

Schools

The Downs is served by Dexter Community Schools. The district crosses several townships and does not follow municipal boundaries, and assignment is set by address.

Buying or selling here

At this size and this level of individuality, the transaction is closer to a private treaty than a market sale, and it should be approached that way. Fourteen houses means the buyer pool is specific and the seller's job is to reach it rather than to advertise broadly.

For a seller, the evidence is the specification and the provenance — what was built, by whom, to what standard, and what has been done since. Where the original builder is still in business, that documentation is more obtainable than sellers usually assume.

For a buyer, the work is the same in reverse, plus a clear-eyed view of operating costs on a house of this scale. The location is genuinely uncommon: ten minutes from two downtowns, inside a protected river corridor, on a road that still crosses the Huron one car at a time.