✨ Holistic Healing in Forest Hills, MI

That arrangement gives the area an unusual shape, a named community of nearly twenty-nine thousand people that exists mainly as a boundary on a census map and a school district crest. The Grand and the Thornapple rivers meet here, and that junction is the reason anyone settled. Rix Robinson, generally counted the first permanent colonial settler in Kent County, bought a former French-Canadian trading post at the confluence in 1821 from Madeline La Framboise, who was acting for John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company. He married Sebequay, whose name means River Woman. The post office arrived in 1837, and both the township and settlement took the name of Ada Smith, daughter of the first postmaster. The Ada Covered Bridge still stands over the Thornapple, 125 feet of Brown truss built by William Holmes in 1867. It went onto the Michigan State Register on May 9, 1969, the National Register of Historic Places on February 16, 1970, and received Michigan Historical Marker L0075 on August 28, 1974. It carries pedestrians only now, maintained by the Kent County Park system, and it is one of only four publicly owned covered bridges left standing in the state. Amway has run its world headquarters from Ada Township since 1959. Gerald R. Ford International Airport takes up 4.89 square miles of Cascade Township. And Goodwillie Environmental School, which opened in fall 2001, was the first LEED-certified school anywhere in the world; its fifth and sixth grade seats are filled by application and lottery. The Amy Van Andel Library and Ada Community Center opened at 7215 Headley St. SE on May 13, 2021, a 25,786-square-foot building with a courtyard and a sculpture called The Reader. Down the street at 7144 Headley, the Averill Historical Museum of Ada holds the community's collections in an historic barn and gardens.