unincorporated community
An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...
Michigan
Michigan ( ) is a peninsular U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, Upper Midwestern United States. It shares water and land boundaries with Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the west, ...
In 1800, the first settler Henry Snow came to this location which was original called Snow's Landing. In 1825, Amariah Rawson and his family arrived at the village.The community plat, as Michigan City by Amariah Rawson and two others, was filed on January 7, 1836. After a group of neighbors petitioned the State Legislature asking that the name be changed to Rawsonville, on March 22, 1839, the act formally changing the name to Rawsonville was passed. On November 14, 1838, The Van Buren post office was moved to Rawsonville and assumed that name.
By the Civil War era, the village was doing well with grist mill, saw mill, a stove factory, and a wagon maker. With the building of the railroad, the community was bypassed hurting the industries there.
On October 25, 1895, the post office was closed. It reopened on November 20, 1895, only to close again on February 28, 1902. By 1900, there were few residents. In 1925, the Detroit Edison company began constructing the French Landing hydroelectric dam on the Huron River and parts of the land around the community became submerged in the new Belleville Lake. There is a historical marker in front of the
McDonald's
McDonald's Corporation, doing business as McDonald's, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational fast food chain store, chain. As of 2024, it is the second largest by number of locations in the world, behind only the Chinese ch ...
on Rawsonville Road and across from Grove Road mentioning this, although erroneously stating "Most of the town" was under the lake. The modern community of Rawsonville still exists on land west of the original settlement, and with a commercial district on most of the original settlement's land, with only small portions of the community now being under Belleville lake.