B "Frederick Bushnel came across the falls on the Grand River in North Lansing and visualized supplying waterpower to a community; after buying a plot of land, he died a year later in Louisiana. A surveyor, J. T. Durand, reached the area stretching south of the Big Bend to what is now Mt. Hope Avenue. He mapped out lots for a development called Biddle City for Jackson, Michigan brothers William and Jerry Ford who sold plots to speculators. Hurt by the (economic) panic of 1837, the project collapsed before nary a settler set foot on the land.

However, the chopping of axes and the pounding of hammers echoed in the thick forest just two miles west of the ill-fated Biddle City. Jacob Frederick Cooley, who earlier moved back to New York after settling in Leslie, became Lansing Township's first permanent resident in 1837. Despite an unhappy experience in Leslie, the tailor from New York State first inspected Biddle City with one of the Ford brothers. Instead he entered a deed for land between Jolly Road and the Grand River along Waverly Road near the present Waverly Road Bridge, outside the Big Bend area.

So Lansing got its genesis from unsuccessful land developers and a previous unsuccessful settler who was a tailor, not a farmer or woodsman." (pg. 5)