Michigan
Michigan's 70 Churches on the National Register of Historic Places
70 Michigan churches stand on the National Register of Historic Places. The full list, from Detroit's stone naves to Upper Peninsula mission churches, mapped below.
70 Michigan churches in the Churches List directory stand on the National Register of Historic Places, and more than half of them stand in one county: Wayne County, home of Detroit, holds 38 of the 70 listings, the most lopsided county concentration of any state in this series. The state's first listing from this directory came March 11, 1971, for Christ Church Detroit, an 1863 Gothic Revival parish on East Jefferson Avenue.
The Detroit dominance is the history of the city's growth: between 1880 and 1930 Detroit built sanctuaries at industrial scale and in every style its immigrant parishes brought with them, and the preservation surveys of the 1980s documented that stock before further demolition. No other Michigan county holds more than 4 listings.
The complete list of Michigan churches on the National Register
The table lists all 70 Michigan congregations in this directory whose buildings hold National Register of Historic Places listings as of June 11, 2026. Click a column to sort; the county menu filters the list.
When did Michigan churches enter the National Register?
Michigan's listings peaked in the 1980s with 37 entries, the decade of Detroit's comprehensive church surveys. The 1970s contributed 16. After near-silence in the 1990s and 2000s (6 listings combined), the pace recovered with 7 in the 2010s and 4 since 2020, several of them Detroit congregations pursuing register status as a step toward preservation funding.
Which Michigan counties hold the most register-listed churches?
Where the register-listed churches stand: the map
How this list was assembled
The list joins the Churches List directory (11,550 Michigan congregations as of June 11, 2026) against the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places database by building location and name. 70 matches hold as of the snapshot date; the earliest Michigan church listing dates to 1971. A register listing covers the building, not the congregation, and some listed buildings house congregations younger than the walls. Corrections are applied through the corrections page.
Related reading in The Letter: Detroit's 1850-1900 Catholic stone belt profiles six of the parishes behind Wayne County's register dominance, and getting to church without a car in Detroit covers the same city from the practical side. The Michigan state page lists all 11,550 Michigan churches.