Walnut Creek

A name with water in it

Subdivision names referencing creeks, ponds and lakes fall into three categories, and they are worth telling apart because only one of them affects a purchase.

The first is purely decorative — a name chosen by a developer with no watercourse anywhere near it. The second is a genuine natural feature: a creek or drain running through or alongside the plat. The third is engineered water, which in a residential development almost always means stormwater detention doing a second job as an amenity.

Where a real watercourse is present, three things follow for a specific lot. Floodplain status is parcel-specific and determines whether a lender requires flood insurance. Drainage on a lot near a watercourse behaves differently in a wet spring than a dry inspection suggests, and is better observed in season. And maintenance responsibility for a drain or creek corridor may sit with the county drain commissioner, the township, the association or the individual owners depending on how it was established — which is a documented answer rather than a matter of custom.

None of that is a reason to avoid a lot near water. It is a reason to establish which of the three categories applies here and, if a real watercourse is present, to answer those three questions for the specific parcel.

Three forms, three sub-markets

Colonial, ranch and Cape Cod in one subdivision is three products rather than a range of one, and treating them as one market produces three wrong numbers.

The ranch is the scarcest of the three and the one whose scarcity is structural rather than cyclical: single-level living is wanted by a defined and durable group of buyers, and relatively few subdivisions offer much of it. Ranches in a predominantly two-story neighborhood therefore tend to draw interest from buyers who have been waiting rather than browsing.

The Cape Cod is a story and a half, with bedrooms under a sloped roof and usually less usable upstairs area than the square footage implies. Two type-specific checks apply: insulation and ventilation in that sloped space, which is where ice damming and unusable summer heat originate, and whether any dormer addition was permitted, since dormers are structural work.

The colonial competes against the widest set of alternatives across the township, which generally makes it the easiest of the three to price and the hardest to differentiate.

So the discipline is to match on form first, then on size, then on condition — and for a seller, to name the form plainly rather than let a listing blur it, because the right buyer for a ranch is not browsing colonials.

City or township

Plymouth is two municipalities sharing one name. The City of Plymouth is roughly two square miles containing the downtown; Plymouth Charter Township wraps around it and is considerably larger. They are separate governments with separate taxes, separate services and separate elected officials.

A Plymouth address does not distinguish between them, and the difference is real: a different millage, township rather than city services, and the downtown as a drive rather than a walk. Neither is better — they are different products at different prices, and comparable sales drawn across the line without adjusting will produce a wrong number.

The town itself was settled in 1825, when Keziah and William Starkweather, farmers from Preston, Connecticut, bought 240 acres from the federal government on March 11 at a dollar and a quarter an acre. It was incorporated as a village in 1867 and became a city in 1932, which is why the two governments exist today rather than one.

Three high schools on one campus

Plymouth-Canton Community Schools runs an arrangement with no real parallel nearby. The Plymouth-Canton Educational Park puts three separate high schools on a single campus of about 305 acres: Salem, which opened in 1970, Canton, which opened in 1972, and Plymouth, which opened in 2002.

Each has its own building, name, colors and mascot — Salem's Rocks, Canton's Cobras and Plymouth's Wildcats — and each serves grades nine through twelve. But students can take classes across all three academic buildings, and facilities are shared rather than triplicated: one auto shop, one culinary facility, one robotics shop and one varsity football field, alongside three swimming pools and three soccer fields.

It is a structural fact about the district rather than a matter of opinion, and it regularly surprises people arriving from somewhere with a conventional single high school. Elementary and middle school assignment follows the home address, but the high school does not: students are assigned randomly among Canton, Plymouth and Salem. The district also reaches into Canton Township, Salem, Superior and Northville Township.

The park is named for the man who invented the center line

Hines Park runs through Plymouth as part of a seventeen-mile chain of Wayne County parkland following the Middle Rouge from Dearborn out to Northville — one of the more substantial pieces of continuous public riverside anywhere in suburban Michigan.

Edward N. Hines sat on the Wayne County Road Commission from 1906 until his death in 1938, having come to it from a Detroit printing business. In 1909 he was responsible for the first full mile of concrete road pavement in the world, on Woodward Avenue between Six Mile and Seven Mile. Two years later he had the idea of painting a line down the middle of a road to separate opposing traffic — the account has him watching a horse-drawn milk wagon leak a line down the street — and the first painted center line was laid in 1911 on River Road in Trenton, in this same county.

Around 1925 he set about building a parkway along the Middle Rouge. Acquiring the land and the money took years. In 1937, the year before he died, the Middle Rouge Parkway was renamed in his honor. Hilltop Golf Course is nearby too — eighteen public holes built in 1927, redesigned by Jerry Matthews in 1982, and run by Plymouth Township's parks department.

Windmills, then BB guns

Plymouth's industrial identity came from an unlikely pivot. The Plymouth Iron Windmill Company was formed in 1882 to make windmills, a business that did not prosper. What did prosper was a premium the company gave away with them, and in 1895 the firm renamed itself for it: the Daisy Manufacturing Company.

Daisy made millions of air rifles at its factory on Union Street, southeast of Main, and it was not alone — the Markham Air Rifle Company had been established in Plymouth in July 1886, and the Markham Chicago is generally credited as the first commercially successful BB gun. The Red Ryder, introduced in 1940 and familiar to a great many people from A Christmas Story, was originally made here.

Daisy left for Rogers, Arkansas in 1958. The Union Street factory was used as office space afterward and was occupied until it was demolished in 2005. The Plymouth Historical Museum holds the company's archives.

None of it is visible from a subdivision street today. It is worth knowing because it explains why a farming township on the Middle Rouge grew into a town with a downtown of its own rather than a crossroads, and why the street names and the museum are what they are.

Outdoor recreation around Powell Road

The western township's public recreation includes Hilltop Golf Course at 47000 Powell Road and Plymouth Township Park on Ann Arbor Trail. Golf, walking paths, a fishing pond and play areas offer different ways to spend time outdoors. Farther afield, Maybury State Park in the Northville area provides a larger trail destination. Trips toward downtown Plymouth lead to the shops and dining around Kellogg Park, including Compari's on South Main and the Penn Theatre on Penniman.

Buying or selling here

Three forms and a possible watercourse mean the two questions that decide most of the price here are answerable before an offer and rarely asked.

For a seller, name the form, and where the lot has any relationship to water — frontage, proximity, or a drain easement crossing it — state it plainly with the document rather than leaving a buyer to discover it. Buyers discount uncertainty more heavily than they discount known facts.