Perry: The Town That Followed the Railroad
Near Lansing, Michigan
Perry, Michigan sits at the junction of Interstate Sixty-Nine and M-Fifty-Two in Shiawassee County, and it owes its name to Oliver Hazard Perry, the naval hero of the Battle of Lake Erie in eighteen thirteen. The settlement took root around eighteen fifty when William Laing opened the first store and became the first postmaster. When the railroad came through in eighteen seventy-seven, it missed the original town center by about three quarters of a mile, so the village simply picked up and moved closer to the tracks.
Perry incorporated as a village in eighteen ninety-three and became a full city in nineteen sixty-four. It is a town that literally relocated itself to stay connected to the wider world.
