Delta Township

Musgrove Evans platted this area in 1827. The first settlers, Erastus and Sally Ingersoll and their twelve children, did not arrive until 1835. The township was organized in 1842 after an act of legislature on February 16, 1842 formed Windsor and Delta from the east half of Oneida Township (2).

At the first township meeting, citizens chose the name Delta and elected Ingersoll’s to nine of the nineteen township offices. They also appropriated “$100 for bridges and roads” and decreed that bulls and boar hogs must be fenced in. By 1887 the area was mainly supported by farming and grist and sawmills. The clapboard township hall, erected in the mid-1870s, served the township until 1955. A combination fire chief’s residence and township hall was built to replace it on the site of the old Soper one-room schoolhouse, one mile north of the earlier structure.

Between 1940 and 1987 Delta Township’s population zoomed from 2,618 to 28,000, and its state tax evaluation increased from $1.48 million to $475 million. Charter status, attained in 1962, helped fuel the explosion that gave Delta Township the moniker “fastest growing township in Michigan.” Local government service are now directed from this building, which was completed in 1970. As farms became residential subdivisions and apartment complexes, the township created an extensive recreational facility. The Sands Moon house, a log cabin built around 1855, was moved to Woldumar Nature Center in 1980, when a large industrial plant was built on its original site. There it became a walk-in demonstration museum commemorating Delta’s early pioneers.

1. http://www.michmarkers.com/startup.asp?startpage=L1458.htm
2. https://archive.org/details/cu31924028870322