For nearly twenty years William H. Powell was the foremost man of Oxford township. As supervisor, justice of the peace, and township clerk, he performed the official duties falling to his share, a liberal one, of the public burdens, not for honor or pecuniary profit, but for the public good. Coming to the township in 1836, when there were scarcely a handful of the settlers of the county within the limits of Oxford, he lived to see it rise rapidly to a populous community, and the heavy forests give way to smiling fields, and the log house of the pioneer vanish, and the comfortable and elegant farm house of the descendants of the pioneer rise in its place. He built the first frame house in the village of Oxford, in the summer of 1837, and opened it as a hotel, and as such kept it until his death in 1854. The old location, the farm, is yet owned and occupied by a member of his family, Thomas W. Powell. Mr. Powell was born in Westchester county, New York, February 11, 1795, and was married to Hetty Vought in 1819, and with her and his four boys removed to Michigan in 1835, stopping in Detroit a year and a half, and removing thence, in the latter part of the year 1836, to Oxford. The summer of 1837 the family lived in the barn he erected previous to building the hotel, and in the fall occupied the latter, but one room being finished. The guests found their way into the house by an inclined plank, across which slats were nailed to afford a secure foothold. The house is now known as the Staunton House. Mr. Powell was a stanch Whig, active and zealous as a partisan ; and when the glorious old party finished its mission and gave way for its successor, the Republican party, he transferred his allegiance to that, but died before he could cast a vote for its national candidates. Himself and wife were earnest and devoted members of the Methodist Episcopal church, Mr. Powell being a trustee of the Oxford society from its organization to his death. Mrs. Powell makes her residence in Detroit, but passes her time between that and the old homestead. One son resides in Chicago, and is the general ticket agent of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad, and the oldest Judge Powell resides in Pontiac. The latter was the judge of probate of Oakland County from 1872 to 1877, four years, and though the county gives generally some four hundred Democratic majority, and he is an ardent Republican, yet he was elected by a handsome majority in 1872, and lost the election in 1876 but by eight votes only.