✨ Holistic Healing in Northville Township, MI

Northville Township covers 16.57 square miles of far northwestern Wayne County, about 27 miles from downtown Detroit and 20 miles from Ann Arbor, and its defining landmark is 414 acres of ground the residents paid to keep empty. That land held the Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital from 1952 to 2003, and after an $800 million private development plan stalled, voters bought the site themselves in 2009 and turned it into Legacy Park. The rest of the township pairs the 944 acres of Maybury State Park, once a tuberculosis sanatorium, with the North American headquarters of Tenneco and ZF and a school district whose South Asian population jumped 260 percent in a single decade.

Local residents split from Plymouth Township in 1898 to form Northville Township. It became a charter township in 1985. Michigan announced the psychiatric hospital's closure on November 18, 2002, when it had 536 employees and 239 patients, and all patients had been moved out by May 2003. The Michigan Department of Corrections then closed the Western Wayne Correctional Facility in the township on December 20, 2004. Maybury Sanatorium was built here as a tuberculosis hospital, named for Detroit real estate investor William H. Maybury, and grew to more than 40 buildings including infirmaries, residences, children's playgrounds and a school. Medical advances cut tuberculosis cases and the sanatorium closed in 1969.

ZF Group's North American Operations base. Maybury State Park, 944 acres of rolling terrain, meadows and mature forest, Wayne County's first state park (1975), with three surviving stone and brick doctors' residences from the sanatorium era. The site of the 1907 Salem train wreck near Napier Road and Five Mile Road.

The Northville Chamber of Commerce has served the Northville community since 1964 and reports more than 300 members, and runs a Farmers' Market on Thursdays from May through October. Township residents share the calendar of the adjacent City of Northville, which holds the Heritage Festival, formerly the Victorian Festival, every September, plus the Fourth of July Parade, Memorial Day Parade and the Holiday Lighted Parade. Maybury Farm operates as a program of the Northville Community Foundation, a 501(c)(3), and runs without tax dollars, charging $8 general admission. The township lost two state institutional payrolls within 14 months, the psychiatric hospital with 536 employees in 2003 and the Western Wayne Correctional Facility in 2004.