Marshall Michigan Historic District
Clickable Google Map of the Marshall Michigan’s National Historic District. The map has the museums marked for an interactive walking tour. The district roughly bounded by Plum St., East Dr., Forest St. & Hanover St. There are almost 800 resources located within this area.
We are posting Marshall’s historic markers onto an interactive map on Google and will link to more information about each marker. Here is information about the district:
The Marshall Historic District encompasses 844 residential, religious, civic and commercial properties in the historic core of the city of Marshall. There are 787 contributing buildings, three contributing sites, four contributing objects and 69 noncontributing buildings.
Located in the rural agrarian township of Marshall near the geographic center of Calhoun County in south-central Michigan, the city once served as the bustling center of commercial, political, social, religious and industrial activity for the surrounding region, particularly between ca. 1840 and ca. 1870.
Today, although serving partly as a bedroom community for the major cereal industries in nearby Battle Creek, Marshall is still the county seat and remains an essentially self-contained community with a broad range of commercial, light industrial and professional services. Original street plans, density of development and patterns of land use survive virtually intact in the historic core of the city.
Typical of most nineteenth-century settlements in the Midwest in general and southern Michigan in particular, Marshall is laid out in a rough grid; variety and liveliness in the overall plan is provided by the different lengths and widths of the various streets, occasional diagonals and several public green spaces. In general, Marshall’s pre-World War II building stock consists of a wide variety of standard architectural types and styles popular in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marshall features a broad range of houses, stores, churches, schools, libraries and government buildings, from vernacular utilitarian to sophisticated high style buildings, in the Federal,Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Italian Villa, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Bungalow, Foursquare, Neoclassical, Beaux-Arts and Art Deco styles, as well as transitional and eclectic adaptations of the major styles.
Commercial, religious and civic buildings are generally constructed in stone and/or brick and are often executed on a monumental scale. Most date from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Most houses date from the 1840s to the mid 1870s, although there are several earlier as well as many later dwellings erected between the 1830s and the 1930s. Most houses are generally built of wood, although the more fashionable middle and upper-class dwellings are executed in brick or stone, especially Marshall Sandstone, a yellowish-brown stone quarried locally and recognized as a distinct geological form.
Secondary support structures and outbuildings found in the district include many nineteenth century carriage houses/bar and early twentieth century garages, along with occasional castiron fences, carriage steps, hitching posts and ornamental urns.
Below is an interactive Google Map of Marshall’s National Historic District. If you do not see the map embedded below, you may not be fully logged in or out of Google. You can click here to get directly to the map on Google where you can see the map larger also.
Within the map can also be found links to Marshall’s eight historical museums. Learn more about the eight museums by clicking here.