Novi: What's in a Name?
Near Ann Arbor, Michigan
People have been arguing about the name Novi for nearly two centuries. One popular legend says it came from the sixth toll gate on Grand River Road, marked No. Six.
Another says it was the sixth stagecoach stop out of Detroit. Both stories have one problem: the toll road did not come until the eighteen fifties and the railway until the eighteen seventies, decades after the township was established in eighteen thirty-two. The real explanation is far simpler: residents wanted a shorter name than neighboring Farmington, and a Doctor J.
C. Emery proposed Novi at his wife's suggestion. Whatever the origin, the name stuck, and that little township is now a city of more than sixty-six thousand people and one of the fastest-growing communities in Oakland County.
