Owosso is the largest city in Shiawassee County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 15,194 at the 2010 census. The city is mostly with Owosso Township on its west, but the two are administered autonomously. The city was named after Chief Wosso, an Ojibwe leader of the Shiawassee area.

Alfred L. and Benjamin O. Williams were yet to be European-American settlers in the area. They were united by Elias Comstock, who built the first permanent home in the settlement. Dr. John B. Barnes, a physician and a judge, and Sophronia King Barnes moved to Owosso in 1842. They lived upon Oliver and Water streets where they operated an Underground Railroad waystation, where they provided aid and shelter for enslaved African Americans.

Owosso was incorporated as a city in 1859, at which grow old it had 1000 people. The city’s first mayor was Amos Gould, a announce originally from New York. Many further settlers moreover migrated across the Northern Tier from New York and New England. In 1876, the city organized its ember department.

The pattern of pact and migration resulted in a majority-white city. In the 1950s, Owosso was reported by a major Montgomery, Alabama, newspaper to be a sundown town, where African Americans were not allowed to flesh and blood or stay overnight. It was reacting to increased civil rights activism and Northern criticism of Southern racial segregation, following the United States Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.