Wixom: From Sibley's Corners to Suburb

In May of eighteen thirty-one, a twenty-year-old named Alonzo Sibley arrived in what was still Michigan Territory and became the first permanent white settler in the area that would become Wixom. The community was known for decades as Sibley's Corners, then Shelby Corners, quietly farming through the mid-eighteen hundreds. The name Wixom emerged around eighteen seventy-one, though the origin of the word itself is not firmly established.

The community remained small for more than a century, then the postwar suburban wave hit Oakland County. Wixom became a village in nineteen fifty-seven and a city the very next year, a jump that tells the story of how fast metro Detroit's western fringe was growing. Today it's a city of about seventeen thousand people sitting at the junction of Interstate Ninety-Six and Michigan Nine Sixty, part of the sprawling Oakland County suburbs.