Cambridge Junction: Where Two Roads Crossed

Cambridge Junction was one of the most important crossroads in territorial Michigan. Here the Chicago Road, later US Twelve, intersected the La Plaisance Bay Pike running up from Lake Erie, making it a natural stop on two busy travel corridors. Calvin Snell ran the first tavern here by eighteen thirty-six, feeding passengers making the five-day stagecoach run between Chicago and Detroit.

Sylvester and Lucy Walker took over around eighteen thirty-eight, and in eighteen fifty-three built a second, grander brick hotel with a ballroom on the third floor. The frame Walker Tavern and the brick Walker's Hotel both survive today as part of Cambridge Junction Historic State Park. The Dewey family took over the property after Sylvester's death in eighteen sixty-five.

One of them had been a stagecoach driver himself. They held it until the property became a tourist attraction in the nineteen twenties and eventually passed to the State of Michigan in nineteen sixty-five.