History of Oakland County Michigan a narrative account of its historic progress, its people, its principal interests / compiled from the official records of the county, the newspapers and data of personal interviews, under the editorial supervision of Thaddeus D. Seeley.

488

HISTORY OF OAKLAND COUNTY

sections. Among the first to settle permanently was Johnson Niles,
who came from Otsego county, New York, and purchased one hundred
and sixty acres on the northeast of section 9, in the spring of I821. He
then returned to New York for his wife, two sons and daughter, and,
being a carpenter, found himself fully occupied that same year in the
erection of several buildings for George Postal of Avon. In 1822 he
built a log house on his own land, moved his family thither and in the
fall seeded several acres to wheat, from the crop of which he made the
first flour manufactured of the native-grown grain. Mr. Niles also had
the thrift to supply himself with trinkets, which he bartered with the
Indians for furs and products of the chase; later, he purchased a fair
stock of goods at Detroit and by I830 had quite a complete general store.
He also opened a tavern, and was appointed postmaster in I833, thus
giving the new settlement weekly mails from Detroit. Although Guy
Phelps and others owned portions of the subsequent site, Mr. Niles was
the real early promoter, and in 1838 platted sixteen blocks on the corners of sections 4, 9 and Io, which he called Hastings in honor of E. P.
Hastings, then president of the Michigan Bank. Until well into the
forties, Hastings, or Troy, promised to become a progressive center of
trade. It had several good hotels, and as it was on one of the most important routes of travel from Detroit to the northern part of the territory, or state, the village continued to grow as long as the old-time
thoroughfares and stage routes existed
The Troy Corners of today is little more than a postoffice in the
midst of a good farming country, on the Detroit United Railway. It is
nine miles east of Pontiac and seven miles northeast of Birmingham,
the latter being the nearest banking point.
BIG BEAVER AND CLAWSON
Big Beaver postoffice lies a mile east of the electric line and, like
Troy Corners, is chiefly interesting from a consideration of "what might
have been." The so-called village is at the intersection of the crossroads separating sections 22 and 23 and 26 and 27, and the place derives
its name from a large dam built by a colony of beavers across a little
brook near by; but both beavers and brook have long ago disappeared.
Ira Smith erected the first house at this point on section 27, in 1825,
and three years later opened the first tavern in that building In 1834
Smith discontinued his inn and Benjamin Wooster opened a blacksmith
shop at the Corners; after which there was a "slump"' in building operations and new enterprises for over twenty years. In 1857 Mr. Smith
again appears as proprietor of a fair general store kept in a frame building. Edmund Gillett opened a hotel about the same time, a brick schoolhouse was erected, and "things looked up" awhile; but promises were
faulty and, although twenty years from then Big Beaver was a settlement of about one hundred people, it has not grown since and may have
retrograded. The postoffice still has a good country around it, but has
no transportation facilities to encourage trade to center at that point.
It is six miles north of Royal Oak and about the same distance north