Yerkes Estates

A city in two counties, and this is the other half

The City of Northville is bisected by Eight Mile Road, and Eight Mile is the boundary between Wayne and Oakland counties. That means one municipality, two counties, two county governments, two sets of county services and two registers of deeds — an arrangement common enough in Michigan to be unremarkable to a local and thoroughly confusing to everyone else.

Yerkes Estates sits on the Oakland County side. Yerkes and Horton's Addition, which carries the same family name, sits south of Eight Mile on the Wayne County side. Both are inside the same city, both served by the same schools, and they answer to different counties.

For a buyer that mostly shows up in paperwork rather than in daily life, but it shows up. County-level records, county services and anything routed through a county office differ, and comparable sales pulled by county rather than by municipality will miss half the city.

Sixty years of building under one name

A subdivision name covering construction from around 1950 to 2012 is not one product. It is at least three: post-war houses now approaching seventy-five years, later twentieth-century infill, and houses barely a decade old, all sharing a plat name and a listing description.

The pricing consequence is immediate and it is the same one that applies wherever a name outlives a build cycle. Comparable sales have to match on era before anything else, because a 1955 ranch and a 2008 colonial in the same subdivision are different buyers, different inspection findings and different insurance answers. A price per square foot averaged across the whole name will mislead in both directions.

It also changes what an inspection is looking for. On the oldest houses the questions are original electrical service and its capacity, galvanized supply piping, single-glazed windows, cast iron or clay sewer laterals and their condition, and lead-based paint disclosure, which federal law requires on anything built before 1978. On the newest, the systems are current and the questions are workmanship, grading and drainage, and whether any builder warranty survives.

The family the name belongs to

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 was among the first settlers in the Northville vicinity, and the family's name ended up on enough of the local landscape that two subdivisions in this one city still carry it.

Three Yerkes houses carry formal recognition. Robert Yerkes, William's son, born in 1829, farmed most of his life and moved into the village in the late 1860s; the house he built at 535 East Base Line Road was begun in 1869, finished in 1870 by the builder John C. Macomber, and listed on the National Register on November 30, 1973 as the least altered Gothic Revival cottage of its kind in the area. Joseph D. Yerkes, William's eldest son, bought eighty acres from his father in 1848; his Italianate house was finished between 1870 and 1872 and listed on January 26, 1984 — at an address that is now in Novi. And a third stands at Mill Race Historical Village, associated with William Purdy Yerkes, the village's first president.

None of that is why anyone buys a house here. It is worth knowing because it explains why two unconnected subdivisions in two counties carry the same surname, which is otherwise a genuinely confusing thing to encounter in a search.

Four things called Northville

Northville is four separate entities sharing a name, and they do not share boundaries. The City of Northville straddles Eight Mile Road — which is the Wayne and Oakland county line — so the city itself sits in two counties. Northville Township is entirely in Wayne County and wraps the city on 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. In 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 reaches a small part of Salem Township. In the other direction, parts of Northville Township are served by Plymouth-Canton Community Schools instead.

The consequence is that being in the district tells you very little about which municipality you are in, and the municipality is what sets the tax rate. Both facts appear on a listing. They are worth reading as two facts rather than one.

Base Line Road, and why the roads are numbered

Base Line Road, which carries one of the Yerkes houses, is not named for a landmark. It marks the survey line that organizes the whole region.

Michigan's principal meridian was laid out in the summer of 1815 by a surveyor named Benjamin Hough, contracted that April to run a true meridian north from Fort Defiance. The east-west base line crossing it was established eight miles north of downtown Detroit and runs west from there to South Haven on Lake Michigan.

That is why metro Detroit's roads are numbered as they are: Eight Mile, Seven Mile, Six Mile and the rest count outward from a survey mark, and Eight Mile is the base line itself. It is also, at Eight Mile, the county line — so a single decision made by a surveyor in 1815 set the road grid, the county boundary, and the fact that this city sits in two counties.

The track that closed, and what is replacing it

Northville Downs stood at 301 South Center Street from 1944 until February 2024 — Michigan's oldest surviving harness track, the first in the state to offer parimutuel betting, founded by John Carlo and run by the Carlo family for its whole life. Its last live race was run on Saturday, February 3, 2024, after eighty years.

It was also the last horse racing track operating anywhere in Michigan. Its closure ended the sport's continuous presence in the state, and the sequel has not gone smoothly: the ownership bought 128 acres near Five Mile and Ridge roads in Plymouth Township intending to build a replacement, and the plan died there. The township planning commission rescinded its recommendation of the development agreement in January 2024 after conditions attached to it went unmet, the township board ended negotiations, and a judge dismissed the owners' lawsuit against the township in April 2025.

In Northville itself the site is being redeveloped by Hunter Pasteur as a roughly $300 million mixed-use neighborhood called The Downs, with several hundred homes and commercial space. The part worth knowing is the water: roughly 1,100 feet of the Rouge River, buried in a concrete tunnel since 1962, has been brought back to the surface between Beal Street and Seven Mile, with a ten-acre River Park built around it.

For anyone buying near the downtown this is a live change rather than a historical note. Check the current status of the work directly.

Schools

Yerkes Estates is served by Northville Public Schools.

Buying or selling here

Two hundred houses across sixty years of construction produces a lot of sales and very few genuine comparables for any one of them. The discipline that matters is matching on era first and size second, and being explicit about which era a house belongs to rather than letting the subdivision name do the work.

For a seller, the build year is a selling point in either direction and should be stated plainly — a 2008 house in an established subdivision and a well-kept 1958 ranch are both good propositions, and they are good propositions to different people.