Michigan lawmakers picked Lansing as capital out of sheer frustration
In 1847 Michigan had to move its capital away from Detroit, uncomfortably close to British Canada. Ann Arbor, Marshall and Jackson all lobbied hard. Deadlocked, the state House privately chose a township of fewer than 20 settlers, and when the choice was announced many in the room openly laughed. That township became Lansing.
The worry was not abstract. British forces had captured Detroit during the War of 1812, and although the United States retook it in 1813, the state constitution required the seat of government to move somewhere more central and secure. Two months after the House vote, Governor William Greenly signed the act naming Lansing Township the capital. Within months three villages sprang up at bridge crossings along the Grand River, and the settlement was incorporated as a city in 1859 with close to 3,000 people.
A popular tale says Lansing began as a land swindle: two brothers supposedly sold plots in a flooded, imaginary Biddle City to gullible New Yorkers. Historians call it a myth that spread from a 1904 newspaper story. The brothers, William and Jerry Ford, were respected Jackson businessmen who sold 21 parcels, mostly to fellow Michiganders who knew the town did not yet exist, and the Panic of 1837 sank the plan. Biddle City also lay outside Lansing's original limits. The name actually came from Lansing, New York, hometown of the settler who proposed it for the township in 1842.
Industry transformed the city after Ransom E. Olds founded his motor vehicle company in August 1897. In 1905 he started the REO Motor Car Company, which lasted another 70 years in Lansing, and the city grew into a major centre for cars and parts. Earlier, in the late 1840s and early 1850s, residents united against slavery and the city served as a secondary stop on the Underground Railroad.
Today about 112,644 people live there, and the economy leans on government, health care, insurance and education, with Michigan State University next door in East Lansing. One oddity: among the 48 state capitals located in counties, Lansing is the only one that is not also a county seat.
Source: Lansing, Michigan
