I picked up a tri-county map a few years ago, Eaton/Clinton/Ingham, but also had a lot of surrounding villages in Shiawassee and Ionia counties. The map itself was just that, nothing special, but it contained mini bios of virtually every town, township, village and city in the vicinity—including several that no longer exist. It was packed with local lore, much of it very, very amusing. I’ve driven out to see what remains of a few of the towns, some of them are now no more than cornfields and an occasional chimney or foundation. The map got destroyed last year and I really need to replace it. It’s a gem.
Somewhere I’ve got a full-state atlas, county by county, with the vanished townsites marked in a pale red, very handy. I’d driven through some of them without knowing. On the Grand Valley campus there’s one of the green historical markers for Blendon Landing, which was on the river, but slipped into nothingness almost a hundred years ago. A few decades ago Grand Valley did an archaeological dig on the old site. Oddly enough, my grandpa had gone there as a boy (to Blendon Landing, not to Grand Valley ;’) with his father.