Oakland Township's Best-Kept Trail Secret Just Ran Out of Time

For most of the last two decades, if you wanted to walk the quiet end of the Paint Creek Trail near the Oakland Township and Orion Township line, you learned to park on Dutton Road. Not in a lot. On the road, where there was room for maybe two cars if everyone was polite about it. The official options weren't much better: a small lot at Silverbell, a gravel patch near the Cider Mill on Gallagher Road. None of it was built for volume, and that was sort of the point. The north end of the trail stayed quiet because getting to it was mildly inconvenient, and inconvenience is one of the few things that still works as a filter in southeast Michigan.

That filter is gone now. This year brought two changes that, taken together, mean the north end of Paint Creek Trail is not going to stay a locals-only stretch much longer. If you live here, this is the fall to use it the way it's always been used, before more people figure out what you already know.

The State Noticed What Locals Already Knew

The Paint Creek Trail was named a Pure Michigan Trail by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources this spring, joining a list of only about ten other trails statewide with that designation. The award was presented to the Paint Creek Trailways Commission at the Pure Michigan Governor's Conference on Tourism in Grand Rapids in April. MDNR State Trails Coordinator Tim Novak, who helps oversee the designation, called it about as quintessential a Michigan trail experience as exists, and said the trail earns the honor through consistent maintenance and easy access for all kinds of users.

That kind of praise is not just a plaque. Pure Michigan Trail status means the trail now gets folded into official Pure Michigan maps and statewide tourism marketing, with new signage carrying that branding installed at trail access points. Trailways Commission Chairwoman Martha Olijnyk framed it as one more reason people across the state might make the trip specifically to walk this stretch of woods and prairie north of Rochester. The trail also has new leadership this year: Tom Correll took over as manager in May, following Melissa Ford, who ran the trail for the previous five years.

None of this changes what the trail is. It's still 8.9 miles of crushed limestone following Paint Creek, one of the state's cold-water trout streams, through fields and wetlands between Rochester and Lake Orion. What changes is who's being told to come find it.

The Parking Problem Finally Got Solved

The state designation would matter less if getting to the trail's north end still meant a lucky spot on Dutton Road. It doesn't anymore. Oakland Township opened a real trailhead earlier this year at Paint Creek Junction Park, on a parcel at 2210 Orion Road that the township's Parks and Recreation Commission actually bought back in 2003 and then sat on, undeveloped, for over twenty years while it waited for the right plan.

A township official explained the gap plainly in a recent interview with C&G Newspapers:

"We have the parking at Gallagher Road, which is basically at the Paint Creek Cider Mill, and we have a tiny parking lot at Silverbell, and we have a pseudo lot on Dutton Road that is only for a couple of cars too, so we've never had, within our township, a really good parking area at the north end."

The new trailhead includes real parking, restrooms, a picnic area, and a water source, connecting the Paint Creek Trail to both Bald Mountain State Recreation Area and Marsh View Park. It's part of a broader set of connections designed by PEA Group, which also built a 1.1-mile pathway along the Gallagher Road corridor and a direct pathway connection to the Cider Mill itself.

Here's the part worth knowing if you follow how these projects get paid for: the whole trailhead project ran around $400,000, and the township only covered somewhere between $75,000 and $100,000 of that. The rest came from a Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund grant, Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Legacy Funds, and the Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan. In other words, the township got a genuine amenity upgrade for a fraction of the sticker price, which is exactly the kind of math that tends to get projects like this greenlit in the first place. It also means the trailhead was never really a township decision alone. Once a Pure Michigan Trail designation and three outside funding sources are involved, the incentive to promote the trail more widely comes from directions the township doesn't fully control.

Two Cider Mills, a Quarter Mile Apart

If you're timing a fall walk on the trail, the mill stretch is still the payoff, and it's a stretch most visitors from outside the township don't realize has two separate destinations. Paint Creek Cider Mill sits at 4480 Orion Road, in the small unincorporated village of Goodison, and Goodison Cider Mill is just a quarter mile away. Both have been pressing cider and serving donuts in this same corridor for decades, under different ownership and different histories, close enough that you can walk from one to the other without leaving the creek.

The Paint Creek Cider Mill building itself has a longer story than most visitors know. The current structure went up starting in 1958, replacing an original 1835 gristmill built by Col. Needham Hemingway, and some of the old mill's hand-hewn timbers were salvaged and worked into the new building's corner supports. Ray Nicholson bought the property in 1996 and donated it to the township in 2005, which is why the upper floor now houses the offices of Oakland Township Parks and Recreation, the Historic District Commission, the Paint Creek Trailways Commission, and Six Rivers Land Conservancy, all stacked above a working café that still serves lunch, dinner, cider, and donuts most of the year. The ground floor also has a retail bay that's currently sitting empty, a small detail, but one more sign that a building this central to the trail still has room to change.

The Calendar Still Belongs to Residents

Two Oakland Township Parks and Recreation events round out the fall texture, and both are still, for now, mostly a resident's calendar rather than a tourist one. Goodison Good Tyme returns every September at Bear Creek Nature Park with live music, games, crafts, and bounce houses, free to attend. And the township's Music in the Meadows concert series runs across the summer in three parts, splitting its evenings between Bear Creek Nature Park and the Cranberry Lake Farm Historic District, a rotating lineup of local acts that changes every year.

Worth remembering: Paint Creek Trail is only one ribbon in a bigger network. The township maintains more than 20 miles of trails across its parks, most of which never show up in any statewide marketing push, Pure Michigan or otherwise.

What This Means for the Next Few Months

None of this is a reason to avoid the trail. It's a reason to use it now, deliberately, while the crowds are still mostly familiar faces. A few ways to think about the next stretch of weekends:

• The mill corridor gets its heaviest weekend traffic in October, so a weekday walk between the two cider mills still gets you closer to what the trail felt like before any of this happened.
• The new Paint Creek Junction Park trailhead solves the parking problem at the north end, but it's also the newest, most visible entry point, meaning it's the one most likely to fill first as word spreads.
• If you want the trail without the mill crowds at all, the stretch south toward Rochester still runs through the quieter marsh and prairie sections that made the Pure Michigan case in the first place.

The trail isn't going anywhere, and neither is the creek, the prairie restoration along its banks, or the nearly two centuries of mill history sitting at its midpoint. What's changing is how many people know to look for it. For anyone who's called Oakland Township home through the quiet years, this fall is worth treating like the last easy season before that changes for good.

If Paint Creek Trail's evolution has you thinking about what's next for your own address in Oakland Township, whether that's more space, a different lot, or simply understanding what your property is worth in a market shaped by exactly this kind of local momentum, Realty Solutions of Michigan is a call away. Get a Free Home Valuation and let's talk about what a changing neighborhood means for your next move.