The Saginaw Trail: Michigan's First Highway
Near Detroit, Michigan
The road beneath you traces one of the oldest travel corridors in the Great Lakes region. The Saginaw Trail began as a Native footpath connecting the Detroit River to the Saginaw Valley, used for trade and seasonal migration long before European contact. Work on a formal road along the trail began in eighteen seventeen, and the territorial government approved the route to Pontiac in eighteen nineteen, the first such route approved in what became the state.
Travelers and settlers followed it north through Pontiac and Flint as Michigan's interior opened to settlement in the eighteen twenties and thirties. The trail became Woodward Avenue in the Detroit area, today one of the most storied urban boulevards in the United States. That straight shot north you see on the map is not a surveyor's accident.
It is a path worn into the land by generations of human feet.
