Pioneer Farmsteads: John Martin Wilcox Farm

Avon Township pioneer John Martin Wilcox built this handsome farmhouse on East Avon Road as his family home around 1860. Here Wilcox farmed and raised horses on a 170-acre parcel. He and his wife, the former Maria Amelia Bennett of Macomb County, reared a family of thirteen children, two of whom died in infancy.

John M. Wilcox was born in Ontario County, New York in 1819 and came with his parents to Avon Township in 1832, when he was thirteen years old. His father settled on the land in Section 14 where the Wilcox farmhouse still stands, but it was John M. Wilcox who built the house after his marriage to Maria Bennett. It is said that timber on the property was harvested and sent to Pontiac for milling, then returned to Rochester to be used in the construction of the house.

The John M. Wilcox house is one of only a handful of Rochester Hills homes that pre-date the Civil War.