William Austin Burt, born in Massachusetts in 1792, settled in this area in 1824 after spending several years in Erie County, New York, where he had been a justice of the peace, a school inspector, and a postmaster. Near this site he lived and worked as an inventor, legislator, surveyor, and millwright, building over eight mills in Michigan. He served in the Michigan Territorial Legislature in 1826-27, as Mount Vernon’s first postmaster from 1832 to 1856, as a Macomb County Circuit Court judge in 1833, as a deputy U. S. surveyor from 1833 to 1853, and as a state legislator in 1853. Between 1833 and 1857, he and his five sons won acclaim for their accurate public land surveys. In 1829, in a workshop on this site, Burt constructed America’s first patented typewriter. Here he also built the solar compass, patented in 1836, which became an indispensable surveying instrument because it used the sun instead of magnetic north as a fixed reference and was unaffected by the magnetic fields of iron ore deposits. He also received a patent for an Equatorial Sextant. Among his other accomplishments were establishing the northern point of the Michigan principal meridian in 1840, discovering the Marquette iron ore range in 1844, establishing the northern portion of the Michigan Wisconsin boundary in 1847, and assisting in surveying the route for the Soo Canal in 1852. Burt moved to Detroit in 1857 and died there in 1858.