The story
Welcome to Brighton
Brighton is the village laid out in July 1836 as Lexington, near the spot where the first two families of Greenfield Township put up their cabins in the spring of 1830. Its post office was called Brighton, and in the 1830s and 1840s its school, built largely by a Christian cooperative society, was one of the best in the county.
Settlers from southern Michigan staked claims on Pretty and English prairies in 1829, while the land was not yet for sale. Early in the spring of 1830 William Miller and Benjamin Jones tore the roof off the cabin they had wintered in, loaded it on a wagon with their goods, and moved their families to near the present site of the village, the first families in the township. Late that autumn the squatters fitted up a vacant log cabin southwest of the village and hired Miss Jane M. Clark, later Mrs. Judge Prentiss, to teach a three-months term at $2 a week, boarding around; she remembered about sixty scholars.
When a false alarm of Indian attack spread through the county, the families around Lexington crowded the women and children into George Donaldson’s blacksmith shop while the men felled trees for a fort, afterward called Fort Donaldson; the alarm passed within a day or two, but the logs lay at the spot for many years. In July 1836 the surveyor John Kromer laid out twelve blocks of eight lots and four of six on sections 25 and 30 for Abraham K. Brower and Joseph Skerritt, who named the village Lexington. The same year, at Wall Lake, Elisha U. Shepard and Bazaleel Alvord laid out Vistula, a handsome village on paper that sold corner lots to Eastern buyers; when they came west, the historian wrote, not a house was standing, “nor ever was.”
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Peter Bisel opened a store at Lexington with $2,000 in goods, later $6,000, and Chancey Adams a second; by 1847 there were seven or eight families, a small hotel kept by Ira Crandall, a shoemaker and a blacksmith. H. R. Crandall bought Bisel’s store in 1848 and kept it until his death in 1870, when his widow carried it on, and the Crandalls held the post office, called Brighton, nearly all that time. Dr. Charles Pritchard settled there in 1843, and Dr. Delos W. Rupert, who came in 1849, went to war with the 30th Indiana and died at Nashville on October 2, 1862.
About 1836 or 1837 a large two-room frame schoolhouse was built in the village, mostly at the expense of members of the “Community of Saints,” to be used by all denominations. From 1838 to 1845 it enrolled more than a hundred pupils, was graded, and counted among its teachers Daniel Graham, afterward president of Hillsdale College. The society, a Christian cooperative organized formally on March 5, 1843, met in the schoolhouse under Rev. Samuel Bradford; it ended with his death in 1844. A Presbyterian church built in 1837–38 at Gale’s Corners was moved about 1853 to Lexington for the use of all denominations; the Methodists lost a lawsuit over its control, and the Spiritualists also held meetings there.
The 1920 history called Brighton a small hamlet on sections 25 and 30, reported in 1910 to have a hundred people, with “a country store or two — that’s about all!” Greenfield Township counted 1,323 people in 2020.