Portal:Michigan highways/Selected article/October 2018
US 27 previously entered the state south of Kinderhook and ended south of Grayling. Its route consisted of a freeway concurrency with I-69 from the state line north to the Lansing area before it followed its own freeway facility northward toward Grayling; the section between St. Johns and Ithaca was an expressway. Created with the rest of the US Highway System on November 11, 1926, US 27 replaced a pair of state highways between the state line and the Cheboygan area. For a time, US 27 even extended from Cheboygan to St. Ignace over the Mackinac Bridge. The highway was converted into a series of freeways starting in the late 1950s. The northernmost section between Grayling and Mackinaw City, bypassing Cheboygan, became part of I-75, and US 27 was truncated to Grayling. Starting in the 1960s, the southern sections were included in I-69. In the 1990s, a bypass of St. Johns was built, the last freeway segment of US 27 to open under that designation. On April 16, 1999, the AASHTO approved the removal of the US 27 designation from the state of Michigan; this change was put into place when the highway number was removed from signage in 2002. (more...)