Howell is the largest city and county seat of Livingston County, Michigan.[4] As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 10,068. The city is mostly surrounded by Howell Township, but the two are administered autonomously. Howell is part of the South Lyon–Howell–Brighton urban area, which is an extension of the larger Detroit–Warren–Dearborn (Metro Detroit) metropolitan statistical area. As of 2022, the largest industries were manufacturing, health care & social assistance, and accommodation & food services.
History
January 1836 saw the establishment of the first post office. Flavius J. B. Crane was postmaster and the post office was in the Eagle Tavern.[5] In March of this same year, there was a mail route started from the village of Kensington which went through with a stop located in Howell until ending west in the town of Grand Rapids.
The pioneer manufacturing enterprise of Howell was a saw mill built in 1836, soon followed by a blacksmith shop.[6]
The City of Howell is the county seat of Livingston County. On 24 March 1836, the legislature passed an act organizing Livingston County and Howell was slated to become the county seat though the newly established Brighton nearby claimed for 12 years, that they should be the town seat instead which then died down once a County Office was built.
The town was originally called Livingston Center and was established as a village by an act of Legislature on 14 March 1863, consisting of sections 35 and 36, and the south half of sections 25 and 26 of Howell Township.[7]
20th century
The Howell Home Rule City Charter was adopted in 1955.[8]
The Ku Klux Klan first took hold in the area in the 1920s, and membership in Livingston County increased during the civil rights era.[9]
Since the 1970s Howell has had a national reputation of being associated with the Ku Klux Klan: White supremacist leader and Michigan Grand Dragon 1971-1979 Robert E. Miles held KKK gatherings on his farm 12 miles north of the city in Cohoctah Township with a Howell mailing address.[10] Miles died in 1992, but the gatherings, including the burning of crosses, continued.[9]
The Livingston Diversity Council, founded in response to a 1988 cross burning on the lawn of a black family,[11] has been promoting diversity and inclusion in the county.[12] While they are numerous in Metro Detroit, as of 2011, Howell was not listed as an active home to any hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.[13]
On October 22, 1994, less than a dozen Ku Klux Klansmen from outside Howell held a rally on the steps of the historic Livingston County Courthouse. According to a reporter for the Livingston Post, the town may have been chosen because of its reputation for intolerance. The Rev. Ben Bohnsack, the pastor of the First United Methodist Church in nearby Brighton, Michigan at the time, described the approaching rally as an "assault on the values" of the community. The day of the rally, the courthouse was put under the protection of 174 police officers from every law enforcement agency in the county. An 8-foot-tall chain-link fence was erected around the courthouse, with two additional sections raised on Grand River Avenue to contain protesters and observers. The fence was dismantled after the rally and on the following day, citizens assembled with brooms, mops and buckets for a symbolic cleansing of the courthouse steps.[14]
21st century
The KKK reputation persisted into the 2000s, with events such as a public auction of KKK items scheduled for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday in January 2005,[15] the 2010 suspension of a teacher who removed students for wearing a Confederate flag and making antigay slurs,[16] students' racist tweets toward a racially mixed team in 2014.[17]
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on his Build Back Better agenda, Tuesday, October 5, 2021, at the Operating Engineers Training Facility in Howell, Michigan.
On July 21, 2024, about a dozen masked white supremacists marched through downtown Howell, chanting "Heil Hitler" and carrying signs with messages such as "White Lives Matter" and "End the War on White Children". This group came from Macomb County just North of Wayne County, where the city of Detroit stands. The full article is on the Livingston Daily. They began their demonstration on the lawn of the Livingston County courthouse where in 1994 members of the community symbolically scrubbed the steps following a KKK rally. Several miles east of Howell at the Latson Road/I-96 overpass in Genoa Township, Michigan pictures posted to a community Facebook group showed demonstrators hanging KKK and Nazi flags over the side of the overpass. One of the photos showed them with a Donald Trump flag, while the Livingston Post uploaded a video made by a passerby in which one of the protestors is heard saying, "We love Hitler. We love Trump."[19] On July 28, 2024, one week after the white supremacist march, at an anti-white supremacist counterprotest in downtown Howell residents cleansed the sidewalk to symbolically wash away the racism.[20] On August 20, 2024, Donald Trump visited Howell for a campaign speech.[21]
Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of 4.95 square miles (12.82 km2), of which 4.75 square miles (12.30 km2) is land and 0.20 square miles (0.52 km2) is water.[22]
The city's median household income was $43,958 and the median family income was $57,149. Males had a median income of $44,980 versus $27,956 for females. The city's per capita income was $22,254. About 4.6% of families and 6.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 7.2% of those under the age of 18 and 7.9% of those 65 and older.
2010 census
As of the census[25] of 2010, the city had 9,489 people, 4,028 households, and 2,237 families. The population density was 1,997.7 inhabitants per square mile (771.3/km2). There were 4,551 housing units at an average density of 958.1 per square mile (369.9/km2). The city's racial makeup was 94.8% White, 0.4% African American, 0.7% Native American, 1.1% Asian, 0.3% Pacific Islander, 1.3% from other races, and 1.3% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino people of any race were 3.5% of the population.
There were 4,028 households, of which 30.4% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 36.8% were married couples living together, 13.6% had a female householder with no husband present, 5.1% had a male householder with no wife present, and 44.5% were non-families. 36.6% of all households were made up of individuals, and 12% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.25 and the average family size was 2.97.
The median age in the city was 35.2 years. 23.2% of the city's population was under age 18; 10.1% was between the age 18 and 24; 29.8% was from age 25 to 44; 23.6% was from age 45 to 64; and 13.5% was age 65 or older. The city's gender makeup was 48.2% male and 51.8% female.[26]
2022
As of 2022, 87 % of Howell s population were white, 1.7% African American, 0.7% Native America, 0.6% Asian, 1.6% from other races, and 2.3% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino people of any race were 3.8% of the population.[27]
Government
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2024)
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2024)
As of 2022, the economy of Howell, MI employed 5410 people. The largest industries were manufacturing (969 people), health care & social assistance (786 people), and accommodation & food services (726 people); the highest paying industries were transportation & warehousing ($240,235), information ($100,398), and transportation & warehousing, & utilities ($79,417).[29]
Education
Carnegie District Library
Elementary schools
Challenger Elementary School (champions)
Hutchings Elementary School (Huskies)
Northwest Elementary School (Eagles)
Southeast Elementary School (Super Stars) (closed 2017)
This climatic region is typified by large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and cold (sometimes severely cold) winters. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Howell has a humid continental climate, abbreviated "Dfb" on climate maps.[31]
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