Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of conversation about daylight savings time and why we have it in Michigan. Every fall we jump back an hour, and every spring we move forward an hour, but many people feel like this is a giant waste of time, literally. There has been a lot of talk recently that Michigan should get rid of daylight savings time completely and just stay on one standard time throughout the year.

The truth is Michigan has gone through many changes when it comes to daylight savings time, and even what time zone they are even in. In fact, in the early 1900s, Michigan was entirely in the central time zone as Wikipedia indicates:

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Before time zones were introduced, every place used local observation of the sun to set their clocks, which means they used local mean time, every city was different based on its longitude. Detroit used 05:32:11 west of Greenwich and Menominee 05:50:27 west of Greenwich. Time zones were introduced in the United States in 1883. They were introduced in different years based on local decisions. Michigan adopted Central Standard Time throughout the state effective September 18, 1885. In 1915, Detroit changed to Eastern time, followed by most of the rest of the state in 1931.

Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons
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The Upper Peninsula originally didn't recognize daylight savings time and was entirely on Central Time when the Uniform Time Act took hold in 1967, but in 1973 all but 4 counties ( Dickinson, Gogebic, Iron, and Menominee) switched over to EST.

Do you think we should go back to being a part of the Central Time Zone? Do you think Michigan is central enough to be considered for it?

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