In 1905 William Durant of the Buick Motor Company asked wheel and axle manufacturer Charles Stewart Mott to build axles in Flint, and the Mott family and business moved there from Utica, New York, by 1907. In 1913 Mott's company joined General Motors, where he served as vice president from 1917 to 1937 and on the Board of Directors from 1913 to 1973, while also serving three terms as mayor of Flint in 1912, 1913, and 1918. He bought sixty-four acres of farmland here in 1915 and had his brother-in-law Herbert Davis design Applewood, a residence built in 1916-17 at a cost of more than $70,000 and named for the farm's apple grove. The 15,444-square-foot house was designed in a modified Jacobean style, and Mott's wife, Ethel Harding Mott, helped furnish the thirty-five-room home, which included a bowling alley. Mott maintained Applewood as a working farm until 1949, with grounds designed by William Pitkin, Jr. that included an apple grove, vegetable gardens, livestock areas, and recreation areas, and he added twenty-five apple varieties to the orchard. Ethel died in 1924, Mott established the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in 1926 with goals that included education advancement and community development, and he married Ruth Rawlings in 1934. In 1952 he donated thirty-eight acres of the estate to Flint for the future site of Mott Community College, he died in 1973, Applewood was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and in 1989 Ruth established the Ruth Mott Foundation, which took ownership of the estate after her death in 1999.