By GREG MONAHAN
Capital News Service
Over the past 70 years, Saline has grown from a small farming town south of Ann Arbor to a constantly growing midsized community with a healthy city center and a number of new schools.
Saline, 1940: In the lower left of this aerial photo from 1940, you’ll see Mill Pond. The main road on the south end of the pond is Michigan Avenue, which intersects with Ann Arbor-Saline road just to the east to form the city’s center.
Since the mid 1990s, Saline has built four new schools to meet its growing population.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the city’s population has increased about 33 percent over the past two decades.
These images from Michigan State University’s aerial imagery archive trace Saline’s growth from a ruralvillage in 1940 to a bustling community 70 years later.
Saline, 1978: In this zoomed out photo, construction has finished on both schools on the north end of the town. Saline Middle School is to the west and the high school is to the east. The shopping center on Saline’s east end has grown significantly, but it is still surrounded largely by farmland.
Saline, 1997: Two new schools have popped up on Woodland drive’s south end. Heritage and Woodland Meadows were two elementary schools built in the mid-1990s for a growing population. Just across the street, you’ll see the road construction that is about to develop into a major neighborhood.
Saline, 2010: Saline has grown significantly in just 13 years. The neighborhood that was in the very early stages of construction in 1997 has now taken over the north end of Woodland Drive. Eastward down Michigan Avenue, there is now a completely new high school. While it may not look much larger than Saline’s former high school, this new building had three stories; and, when it opened in 2005, it was the largest high school by square footage in the state of Michigan.