A western suburb of Detroit, Belleville is located roughly 29 miles (46.7 km) southwest of downtown Detroit, and 18 miles (29.0 km) southeast of Ann Arbor, and is completely surrounded by Van Buren Township.

The community was named in honor of landowner James Bell by adroitly choosing the French word for "beautiful town".

About 1881, the Belleville depot on the Detroit line of the Wabash Railroad began serving travelers from across the region and the country.

Belleville was established as a village in 1905,[1] when its governance separated from Van Buren Township by an act of the State Legislature.

The large expanses of woodlands were removed to make way for farmland, industry and increasing population.

To generate more electrical power in the region, in early 1926 the Detroit Edison Company built the French Landing Dam on the river east of Belleville, thereby creating Belleville Lake.

People from all over Wayne County come to celebrate Belleville's economic supporter, the strawberry.

[10] In the 1930s, Belleville had a reputation as a resort community where the wealthy of Detroit maintained getaway estates.

Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh once owned summer cottages on Belleville Lake, in the neighborhood of Harmony Lane.

[citation needed] Techno music produced in the mid-to-late 1980s by Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson (collectively known as The Belleville Three), along with Eddie Fowlkes, Blake Baxter, James Pennington and others is viewed as the first wave of techno from Detroit.