WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP -- Suburban growth has been widely criticized on environmental grounds, but other activists are concerned about another dimension of sprawl: It obliterates history.

One such pressure point is the old Clifton grain mill, where preservationists are seeking an historical designation they hope will salvage a place with cultural value.

"It's nice out here because it's still country," said Judy Weymouth, a Romeo native who lives in a 100-year-old house near the Washington Township mill. "I hate to see all this land eaten up by subdivisions. People move out here from the cities and they want (city) water and sewers, lights and paved roads."

When the Clifton grain mill was built in the early 19th century along 31 Mile, it soon became the center of a thriving rural community.

A U.S. Post Office and general store were located in the mill building. Down the road was an inn for travelers.

But that was before the railroad decided to bypass Clifton and lay its tracks through nearby Romeo. Romeo prospered and Clifton died. The mill, rebuilt in 1850 after a fire in 1844, is still there, but Clifton, like hundreds of other ghost towns that once prospered throughout southern Michigan, is long gone.

To Weymouth, whose husband's family has owned the old mill since the 1940s, the time for action is now.

She and other preservationists are seeking the historical designation for the old mill at a time when they also are searching for creative ways to keep sprawl from overrunning preserved portions of the other former communities, too. Such a designation, awarded by the state, would save properties from being developed.

Group raises money

In Clinton Township, Don Green, chairman of the Historical Commission, said his group is raising money for a marker for the old town of Frederick, near what is now Cass and Moravian, just west of Mount Clemens.

"At one time, it was a rival to Mount Clemens," Green said. "It lost out when the (Clinton-Kalamazoo) Canal folded and when the railroad came to Mount Clemens."

The canal was to join the Clinton and Kalamazoo rivers and cut across the southern Lower Peninsula. The never-finished canal project collapsed in the 1830s when it ran out of investors.

Local history buffs looking for ghost towns usually begin their search by reading Deborah J. Remer's book, "If this is Hastings ... then where is Hog's Hollow?"

Hastings was an early name for a community in Troy. Hog's Hollow was an early name for Utica.

Remer is a Walled Lake science teacher who lives on Shelby Township land that was purchased by her great-grandfather in 1894.

Her book was published by the Rochester Hills Museum, which is located on a former farm in another ghost town, Stony Creek, on 25 Mile, west of Dequindre.

Dig sparks interest

Remer said her interest in the ghost towns began when she participated in an archeological dig in Stony Creek. Among the many items unearthed was an 1848 presidential campaign button for Zachary Taylor.

From that experience, Remer decided to catalogue some of the other ghost towns in Metro Detroit.

"We started out by looking at the towns within a five-mile radius of the museum (at Stony Creek)," Remer said. "But our circles kept expanding farther and farther out."

Macomb's ghost towns are still designated on the county's official highway map as unincorporated communities. The ones that are best known to Macomb preservationists are:

* Disco, on Van Dyke at 24 Mile. Settled by farmers from New York in 1840, by 1850 its residents had financed and built one of the first high schools in Macomb County.

* Meade, on North Avenue and 26 Mile, at the Ray and Macomb townships border. Established with a post office in 1848 as Crawford's Settlement, its name was changed after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 to honor the leader of the victorious Army of the Potomac, Gen. George Meade.

* Mount Vernon, at Mount Vernon and 28 Mile in Washington Township. Its most famous resident, from 1824-56, was William Austin Burt. He was an inventor and surveyor who laid out the principal meridian in the Upper Peninsula and surveyed for a canal at Sault Ste. Marie.

Thriving towns vanish

Numerous other ghost towns have disappeared from the map, Remer said. Among those she lists in her book are Prestonville in Shelby Township, Clifton in Washington Township and Belvidere at the mouth of the Clinton River in Harrison Township.

Those former settlements thrived for a simple reason, according to both Remer and Clinton Township's Green: They provided a handy market for farmers who had only horse-drawn wagons for transportation over bad roads.

The coming of the railroads and, later, paved roads for automobiles also doomed those rural communities, they said.

Cars led to paved roads, which led to freeways and suburban shopping malls, Green said. Now most traditional towns are merely quaint, he believes.

Back at the Clifton Mill, Jody Weymouth is glad most of the time that her once-thriving community has slid back into a quiet, pastoral existence.

But she regrets that the water-powered mill has not operated regularly since 1977.

"When the creek was at spring flood and the mill was running, the whole building would shake," Weymouth said. "It used to make the best pancake flour."

You can reach Mike Wowk at (586) 468-0343 or mwowk@detnews.com.