Delta Mills
Near Lansing, Michigan
When settlers came to the Grand River in eighteen thirty-six, a water-powered sawmill went up on this spot, said to have been built by Erastus Ingersoll, harnessing the current that would define Delta Township for the next half century. A gristmill followed, and by the early eighteen forties people were traveling from afar to have their grain ground here. What made the community unusual was its ambition beyond commerce.
Local tradition holds that settlers planned a school modeled on Oberlin College, which had opened in Ohio just a few years earlier as one of the first colleges in the country to admit both Black and white students and both men and women. That Oberlin model meant Delta Mills was founded with a progressive educational vision rare for frontier Michigan. The mills are long gone, but the community they anchored still carries the name.
