Page 106 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

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and when they arrived found there was no laid out city. Nevertheless, they decided to stay and settle. They named the place in the wilderness “Lansing Township” in honor of their home village in New York.
This settlement had fewer than twenty people. However, in 1847 the state constitution required that the capital be moved from Detroit on the eastern boundary
of the new state to a more central location in the middle
of the state. At this time people were concerned about Detroit’s closeness to British-controlled Canada, which had temporarily captured Detroit in the War of 1812.
Lansing was not an obvious choice, but no one could agree on an alternative established city to Detroit, so, in desperation, they chose tiny Lansing as the future capital, calling it ‘Town of Michigan’.
Of course, the arrival of the state government meant that Lansing started to grow rapidly. They also went back to calling it Lansing. It developed as a string of three villages by the river. Lower Town, (now called Old Town) is where pioneer James Seymour and his family built the first house in 1843. By 1847 there was a covered bridge over the Grand River. Upper Town began where the Red Cedar River flowed into the Grand River. In 1847 Main Street Bridge was built over the Grand River. The main building in this area was a hotel called Benton House. It was the first brick building in Lansing.
Middle Town, which developed into the core of what is modern Lansing, developed when the Michigan Avenue bridge was built across the Grand River. This is where the