Yerkes and Hortons Addition

The family the plat is named for

Joseph Yerkes, his sons William and John, and members of their family moved from Romulus, New York to Michigan in 1826 and bought land around Novi and Northville. William Yerkes was among the first settlers in the Northville vicinity, and the family name attached itself to enough of the landscape that it now appears on a plat, a street and a separate subdivision a couple of miles off.

Three Yerkes houses earned formal recognition and two of them are still standing; the third, in Novi, burned in 1989. Robert Yerkes, William's son, was born in 1829 and spent most of his life farming; in the late 1860s he moved into the village so his children could attend school there. The house he built at 535 East Base Line Road was begun in 1869 and finished in 1870 by the builder John C. Macomber, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 30, 1973 as the least altered example of the Gothic Revival cottage form that was common around Northville in the last third of the nineteenth century. His descendants held it into at least the 1970s.

Joseph D. Yerkes, William's eldest son, was born in New York in 1819 and bought eighty acres from his father in 1848. The Italianate house he put up on that land was finished between 1870 and 1872 and was listed on the National Register on January 26, 1984. Its address today is 42580 Eight Mile Road and it is in Novi, which is a small illustration of how little the municipal lines here follow the family histories that produced the place names.

A third stands at Mill Race Historical Village, which owns it, moved there from East Cady Street, with nine rooms and its Carpenter Gothic detailing intact. William Purdy Yerkes, of the same family, was the village's first president.

Why the street is called Base Line

Base Line Road is not named for a landmark. It marks the survey line that organizes the entire region. Michigan's principal meridian was laid out in the summer of 1815 by a surveyor named Benjamin Hough, who had been contracted that April to run a true meridian north from Fort Defiance. The east-west base line that crosses it was established eight miles north of downtown Detroit and runs west from there to South Haven on Lake Michigan.

That line is why metro Detroit's roads are numbered the way they are. Eight Mile, Seven Mile, Six Mile and the rest count outward from a survey mark rather than from a city center in any ordinary sense, and Eight Mile is the base line itself. Northville's Base Line Road carries the survey's name directly.

Eight Mile is also the Wayne and Oakland county line, which is why the City of Northville sits in two counties at once. A single survey decision in 1815 set the road grid, the county boundary and the street name at the top of this neighborhood.

A plat with no single house type

Ninety-two houses spanning roughly 1850 to 2006 is not a subdivision in the way the word usually means. There is no builder, no era and no elevation package running through it. Sizes range from a little over 900 square feet to about 3,500, with three to five bedrooms and one to three baths, and exteriors are predominantly wood.

The consequence shows up first in pricing. Comparable sales here have to match on era and construction as well as square footage and bedroom count, because a wood-frame house from the 1870s and an infill colonial from 2001 on the same block are different products with different buyers, different inspection findings and different insurance answers. A price per square foot drawn across the whole plat will mislead in both directions.

It shows up again in what the streets look like. Front porches, mature trees and setbacks that vary house to house read as a place that accumulated rather than one that was delivered, and that is the defining difference between this plat and the township subdivisions south of the city.

What the older houses ask

For the pre-1900 stock the live questions are the ones common to nineteenth-century wood-frame houses in Michigan: foundation type and condition, whether any knob-and-tube wiring remains in service, plaster against later drywall, original window sash and the storm arrangements over them, and whether earlier work was permitted. Federal law requires lead-based paint disclosure on housing built before 1978, which covers most of this plat.

For the mid-century houses the systems cycle is the story. Roofs, furnaces, air conditioning, water heaters, electrical panels and sewer laterals have generally been through one or two rounds, and the dates matter more than the appearance does. For the newest infill, systems are current but lots are usually the smallest, and how the house sits against its older neighbors is worth looking at directly rather than from a photograph.

The Northville Historic District, which carries design review, is downtown, roughly bounded by Cady, Rogers and Randolph Streets. It was designated a Michigan State Historic Site on December 11, 1970 and listed on the National Register on July 31, 1972. This plat sits north of that district. If exterior work is part of the plan for a particular house, the city is the place to establish what applies before the work is designed, because a designation is a property-level fact rather than a neighborhood-level one.

Maplewood Park, downtown and the rest of it

Maplewood Park, roughly four acres with paths through it, adjoins the neighborhood. Rotary Park is about a mile and a quarter east and is the larger facility, with hiking trails, playground equipment and four baseball diamonds.

Downtown Northville is about a mile south: the nineteenth-century brick commercial blocks along Main, Mill Race Historical Village north of Main on Griswold beside Ford Field, and the summer and holiday programming the city runs there. Amerman Elementary and Hillside Middle School are both in the city, and Northville High School is about 2.8 miles south in the township.

Four things called Northville

Northville is four separate entities with the same name, and they do not share boundaries. The City of Northville straddles Eight Mile Road and therefore sits in both Wayne and Oakland counties. Northville Township is entirely in Wayne County and wraps around the city to the south, a separate municipality with its own government, taxes and services. The 48167 and 48168 mailing addresses reach past both. And Northville Public Schools is a fourth boundary matching none of them.

The district is the one that surprises people. Within Oakland County it serves the county's portion of the city along with Novi Township, the southwestern part of the City of Novi and a southeastern part of Lyon Township. In Washtenaw County it serves a small part of Salem Township. Meanwhile parts of Northville Township to the south are served by Plymouth-Canton Community Schools rather than by Northville.

This plat is straightforwardly inside the city and inside the district, so the complication is lighter here than it is in the township. It still matters the moment you compare this neighborhood against something a few miles away that also says Northville on the sign, because the two may share a name, a mailing address and nothing else.

Schools

Yerkes and Horton's Addition is served by Northville Public Schools.

Main Street parks and local culture

Main and Center streets bring shops and restaurants into the same compact downtown setting. Table 5 is on Main Street, and Tipping Point Theatre offers professional performances on East Cady Street. Mill Race Village adds a historic destination near the central parks.

Buying or selling here

Ninety-two houses produce few sales in a given year, and the variety among them means the handful that do trade are often poor comparables for one another. Pricing a house here is closer to appraising an individual property than to reading a subdivision's market, and both sides of a transaction are better served by an analysis that starts with the house rather than with the plat name.

For a seller the argument is specific and it is not the floor plan: a particular house of a particular age, a mile from a downtown, on a street where nothing was built to match. For a buyer the work is establishing exactly what is being bought — era, systems, prior work and what the city will allow to change.