Brighton: From Ore Creek to Livingston County's Biggest City
Near Ann Arbor, Michigan
Brighton started with a land purchase in August eighteen thirty-two, when Maynard Maltby of New York staked his claim along a stream called Ore Creek in what would become Livingston County. The first settlers were drawn by fertile soil and the flowing Huron River. The community went by Ore Creek for years before adopting the name Brighton, after the famous English seaside resort, sometime around eighteen thirty-eight to eighteen forty-one.
It incorporated as a village in eighteen sixty-seven and became a full city in nineteen twenty-eight. Sitting right along what is now Interstate Ninety-Six, Brighton grew steadily as southeastern Michigan filled in around it. Today it's a city of roughly seventy-five hundred people and serves as one of the main commercial centers of Livingston County.
