Azalia is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

in Monroe County in the U.S. state of

Michigan Michigan ( ) is a peninsular U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, Upper Midwestern United States. It shares water and land boundaries with Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the west, ...

. The community is located within Milan Township. As an unincorporated community, Azalia has no legally defined boundaries or population statistics of its own but does have its own post office with the 48110 ZIP Code.

History

The community was first known as East Milan, or Reeves Station where a family named Reeves established the Star Bending Company. A post office opened on August 4, 1869 (or in 1866 by some accounts),Milan Township History
in ''History of Monroe County, Michigan'', Wing, Talcott Enoch, ed. New York, Munsell & company, 1890. p. 593 largely through the efforts of Daniel T. Hazen, to avoid having to travel to West Milan (now

Cone In geometry, a cone is a three-dimensional figure that tapers smoothly from a flat base (typically a circle) to a point not contained in the base, called the '' apex'' or '' vertex''. A cone is formed by a set of line segments, half-lines ...

) to pick up mail. Steven Frink was the first postmaster, followed by Hazen in 1867, Joseph Meadows in 1872, John M. Lewis in 1877, and A.C. Reynolds in 1884. On September 1, 1887, the postmaster-general issued orders changing the name of the post office from "East Milan" to "Azalia", which was the name of the railroad station and also named Meadows as postmaster again. The Toledo, Ann Arbor and Grand Trunk Railway (later the Toledo, Ann Arbor and North Michigan Railway and then the Ann Arbor Railroad), opened on June 8, 1878, with a station named "Azalia", named after one of the daughters of the president of the railroad, Azalia Ashley. A

Methodist Episcopal Church The Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) was the oldest and largest Methodist denomination in the United States from its founding in 1784 until 1939. It was also the first religious denomination in the US to organize itself nationally. In 1939, th ...

began holding classes in the early 1850s, building a church in 1870, which continues to the present as the Azalia

United Methodist Church The United Methodist Church (UMC) is a worldwide mainline Protestant Christian denomination, denomination based in the United States, and a major part of Methodism. In the 19th century, its main predecessor, the Methodist Episcopal Church, was ...

Images

File:azalia_dave_and_pam's_corner_store.JPG, File:Azalia, Michigan market.jpg, File:Azalia-United Methodist Church (Michigan).jpg,

References

Unincorporated communities in Monroe County, Michigan Populated places established in 1869 Unincorporated communities in Michigan 1869 establishments in Michigan {{MonroeCountyMI-geo-stub