Chesaning Township, on the Shiawassee

Chesaning Township sits in the south west of Saginaw County, about 18 miles from the middle of the City of Saginaw in a straight line, measured between the 2025 Census Gazetteer centre points. The Gazetteer gives it 34.3 square miles of land. The Shiawassee River runs north through it on its way to the flats below Saginaw, and the Village of Chesaning sits on the river near the middle. Census counts for the township include the village: 4,749 people in the April 2020 base and 4,654 estimated for July 2025, a slow decline of about 2 percent. The village alone was 2,461 in the 2020 base and 2,399 by July 2025, so roughly half the township lives in town and half on the farms and roads around it.

Search summaries of the county history say the first settler, Thomas W. Wright, arrived in 1839, that sawmills lined the river in the lumber years, and that the name comes from a Chippewa phrase for a large glacial boulder. The town is best known for the Showboat, a river festival that summaries say began on 15 July 1937 and was cancelled in 2013. A dam on the river in the village was removed in 2009, according to an engineering firm's project summary, partly to let fish pass.

The oldest basements in the south of the county

The 2020 to 2024 Census survey counts 2,108 homes in the township, with a median build year of 1964. The 1950s were the busiest decade at 423 homes, but the biggest single group is older still: 480 homes, 22.8 percent, went up in 1939 or earlier. In all 1,665 homes, 79.0 percent, were standing before 1980, and 270 date from 2000 or later. Inside the village the stock is older again. Of its 1,101 homes, 328 predate 1940 and 250 are from the 1950s, and the median build year is 1957. Owners live in 1,593 of the township's 1,985 occupied homes, 80.3 percent, and the median owner occupied value is 152,100 dollars, or 136,700 in the village.

Basements of that age are usually block, clay tile or, in the oldest houses near the river, fieldstone, often with no working footing drain. Water tends to show at the cove joint where the wall meets the floor, or through mortar joints low on the wall. In a house that has already had one round of patching, it is worth finding out where the old drain tile goes before adding anything new. Where the problem is spring groundwater under the slab, an interior drain to a sump is the usual answer; where it is a single crack, a smaller repair may do.

Permits at the township office

Chesaning Township issues its own building, electrical, mechanical and plumbing permits. The township's 2026 brochure, read through a search summary, says building permits are obtained at the township office, and its 2026 plumbing and mechanical permit forms carry the address 1025 Brady Street and the number 989-845-2341. The Village of Chesaning is a separate government with its own offices on Broad Street, so if your house is inside the village, ask the township office first which body handles a basement permit at your address. Wells and septic systems are a county matter: the Saginaw County Health Department issues those permits, which matters if a new sump discharge would run anywhere near a drain field.

Nearby

Saginaw Township and the City of Saginaw lie downstream to the north east, and Birch Run Township is the other end of the south of the county, about 20 miles east.