Hampton Township, on the bay shore

Hampton Charter Township wraps around the east side of Bay City and Essexville and runs out along the south shore of Saginaw Bay. The township's own description gives it about nine miles of bay shoreline and a mile and a half of frontage on the Saginaw River, and the Census Gazetteer counts almost as much water inside its boundary, 25.1 square miles, as land, 27.5. Its start date depends on who you read: a county genealogy list compiled by Don Dolsen puts Hampton first among Bay County townships in 1843, while other histories tie it to 29 April 1857, when Bay County itself was formed. The April 2020 Census base counts 9,702 people and the July 2025 estimate is 9,581.

A 1970s township

The township says its biggest growth came in the 1970s, and the housing count agrees. The 2020 to 2024 Census survey finds 4,709 homes with a median build year of 1974, and 1,208 of them, about a quarter, went up in that one decade. Another 758 date from the 1960s and 630 from the 1950s; in all 3,108, or 66.0 percent, were built before 1980, and fewer than one in ten came after 2000. The mix is unusual for a township. Single detached houses are only 55.7 percent, 416 are mobile homes, and 771 are flats in buildings of twenty or more, so a lot of residents rent and have a landlord to call first. Owners hold 60.4 percent of occupied homes, and the median owner occupied value is 182,600 dollars.

A house from the 1970s here is most often a poured or block basement with a clay or early plastic footing drain, and on flat ground near the bay the drain may have been doing very little for decades. Where the house sits within a few feet of normal groundwater, the practical question is not how to keep every drop out of the wall but how to collect it and lift it out reliably, which is a sump pump question first.

The lake sets the water table

On shore lots the level of Lake Huron matters as much as rainfall. Bay County Emergency Services, read through a search summary, described the Great Lakes in the 2019 and 2020 seasons at levels not seen in more than thirty years, with storms and waves eroding and flooding the Saginaw Bay, Saginaw River and Kawkawlin River shores. Hampton officials sat in on the Army Corps of Engineers briefings that spring. When the bay is that high, groundwater a few blocks inland rises with it, sump pumps run far more often, and a pump that coped for twenty years can fail in a month.

If your basement took water only in those two years, treat that history honestly when you get quotes. Lake levels fall back, and a system sized for a record bay is a different job from one sized for ordinary spring thaw. A backup pump and a discharge line that cannot freeze are often the sensible middle ground.

Permits in Hampton

The township issues its own building, electrical, mechanical and zoning permits, and its current forms, seen through search summaries, list the office at 801 W. Center Road in Essexville with a main line of (989) 893-7541. A third party guide says applications are taken in person, so ring before you drive over. An Essexville mailing address does not make the City of Essexville your permit office.

Nearby

Essexville, the small city inside Hampton, has some of the oldest houses in the valley, and Bay City across the river publishes its own rule on where groundwater may go.