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Fire and brimstone and Communism at Farmington’s Worker’s Camp

February 2, 2010 in Farmington Hills, History | No comments

A reader wrote to me a few days ago (a decision I highly encourage!) and asked if I’d ever seen the historical marker at 12 Mile and Halsted.  I had to admit that although I knew where it was, I’d never stopped to read it, nor did I have any idea what it was all about, despite having driven by it approximately 100,000 times in my life.

worker's camp fw

The marker is on the south side of 12 Mile, about a half-mile east of Halsted, right before a drive into one of Farmington’s ubiquitous corporate parks (the drive is sunnily named “Investment,”  and it cleaves a near-mile of vacant wooded lots right in half).

It marks the spot where, in the 1930s, a camp for laborers and their families used to be. But the sign doesn’t really tell you the whole ridiculous story. Let’s face it: do you really care that there used to be a summer camp where there are now offices for Alcoa and Daimler Financial? Maybe you do. I don’t know. Better story? It was a Communist summer camp. Allegedly. And their neighbors — and some creepy, violent, be-robed extremists — wanted them out.

You can read the whole weirdo tale in a great (and short!) historical monograph by James Dermody,  “‘Communism’ Comes to Farmington: The Worker’s Camp,” published by the Farmington Historical Commission in 1994.  The marker leaves off in 1930 with the purchase of the camp by the Workers Educational Association and some subsequent ownership changes. But six months after the WEA bought the camp, things started to heat up.

In August 1930, the Oakland County Sherriff raided the camp, seized some “Communist literature” and arrested some of the campers on charges of “criminal syndicalism” that were later dropped. Two years later, the camp was raided again.

It’s bad enough when the Sherriff suspects you’re up to no good. But a month later, a suspicious grass fire started on the camp grounds that would likely have consumed the entire wooded property if  it hadn’t been discovered, by chance, and extinguished. The day before the fire, the camp had received notice that their insurance would be cancelled, indicating that the insurance company had been warned this might happen.

In 1933, arson struck the Worker’s Camp again. This time, two buildings burned to the ground, and the dining hall sustained serious damage. Not to be deterred, the workers built a brand new dining hall. In 1935, that new dining hall was completely destroyed. By a fire. Two months after that, someone tried to explode — with dynamite — the concrete dam the workers had built to make a swimming pool.

How Wile E. Coyote is that? Also why, of all things, would you try to explode … a swimming pool?

Anyway. Early on, the worker’s camp asked the Oakland County Prosecutor to investigate, as recalled by camp member Isaac Smullins:

“I called the Oakland COunty Prosecutor’s office, asking him for an investigation … they informed me that they would let me know. We sent a delegation to Lansing … we were supposed to see the Attorney-General, but we spoke only to his son.
I requested an investigation and protection of the property, and the Assistant Attorney General told us point blank that he had no means to compel the County authorities to act. We asked for the right to arm ourselves to protect the premises, and he informed us that he would refer this matter to the Oakland County authorities. Since then, the camp kept good watch dogs on the premises to prevent further raids.
Shortly after, the dining room was set on fire and was totally destroyed.”
A few months before that fire took place, “The Farmington local paper carried a story about the danger to the community which was kept on the camp and told a story about a horse which was bitten to pieces by our dogs.”

I called the Oakland County Prosecutor’s office, asking him for an investigation … they informed me that they would let me know. We sent a delegation to Lansing … we were supposed to see the Attorney-General, but we spoke only to his son.

I requested an investigation and protection of the property, and the Assistant Attorney General told us point blank that he had no means to compel the County authorities to act. We asked for the right to arm ourselves to protect the premises, and he informed us that he would refer this matter to the Oakland County authorities. Since then, the camp kept good watch dogs on the premises to prevent further raids.

Shortly after, the dining room was set on fire and was totally destroyed.

So the county’s clocked out, someone keeps trying to turn your whole property to tinder, and to top it all off, your neighbors think you’re creeps. A few months before that fire took place, a local paper “carried a story about the danger to the community which was kept on the camp, and told a story about a horse which was bitten to pieces by our dogs.”

A  neighbor eventually confessed to the dam explosion. His motive? He was “annoyed by the noise emanating from the camp at night. He also blamed the loss of fruit, vegetables and chickens from his farm … upon persons in the camp.”

Another neighbor, Floyd Cairns, remembered “placing roofing nails on the roadway to puncture car tires and once throwing a live skunk through one of the building windows.”

Ugh. So, nasty neighbors. Bad cops. And you know who turned out to be setting those fires?

In the fall of 1936, a grand jury decided that the Black Legion — a KKK affiliate — was responsible for all of the Worker’s Camp fires. Is it a stretch to think that if an investigation had been conducted earlier, the murder that ended up busting the whole Legion in May 1936 — and all of the murders, beatings, arsons, bombings and plots in between — might never have happened? (For further reference, Hour Detroit ran an informative piece by Richard Bak last year about the rise and fall of the Black Legion in Michigan.)

worker's camp field view fw

I love how much scary, almost cinematic intrigue, crime and drama is tied up in this unassuming plot of land. It’s mixed-use now — part fallow, part corporate park, bisected by 696 and hedged by the strange family homes, foreclosed mansions, empty lots and abandoned barns along unpaved Howard Road.

blighted barn

The monograph and my inquiring reader alike tell me that the swimming pool that disgruntled neighbor tried to blow up still exists, but on my drive today I found three different candidate ponds, all frozen over and dusted with snow.

So which one is it? And am I crazy enough to nose around in someone else’s backyard for signs of a long-gone not-really-Communist worker’s camp? Whose barn is this? Why is it caving in on itself? Should I go inside of it? Why am I so scared of trespassing tickets?

Tune in next time.

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And after several hours in the archives: To all a good night

December 22, 2009 in Farmington Hills, History | No comments

enterprise_xmas_122415

(Enterprise, 12/24/1915)

THE NIGHT TRAIN is taking a brief sabbatical from blogging for the holiday. As a send-off and a season’s greetings to you, lovely readers, I’ve spent some time today flipping through the virtual pages of the Farmington Community Library’s Enterprise/Observer-Eccentric/Observer newspaper archives for some cheery vintage Christmas banners, typesets, cartoons, illustrations and details.

We’ll be back next week. Enjoy your holiday!

enterprise_radio_1925

Enterprise, 12/21/1925

enterprise_centralpharm_1925

Enterprise, 12/21/25, from a Central Pharmacy ad

enterprise_warnerdairy_1929

Enterprise, 12/19/29, from a Warner Dairy (remember them?) full-page ad

enterprise_candle

Detail from the 1929 full-page Warner Dairy ad

enterprise_lumber_1929

Enterprise, 12/19/29

enterprise_deloshamlin_1933

Best groceries … EVER! Enterprise, 12/21/1933, from a Delos Hamlin groceries ad

enterprise_whatstoppedher_1929

Enterprise, 12/19/29

“I thought you were going to ask your friends not to give you any Christmas presents this year.”

“Well, I thought some of them might really do it.”

enterprise_schemer_29

Enterprise, 12/19/29

“Yes, y’see it’s like this – I bring this big empty box in and pretend to hide it under the bed. The wife is curious, of course, but won’t let on. Then I asks to go to the club, an’ it’s a cinch, see?”

These aren’t Christmas-related, but I enjoyed them thoroughly anyway:

enterprise_seawolf_122415:

Enterprise, 12/24/15

And that dreadful day on December 22, 1911, when …

zookeeper gored

Enterprise, 12/22/11

A zoo keeper was gored by an enraged buffalo. Don’t worry though; he survived.

And on that note … good tidings.

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My new, old town: Famous (dead) neighbors

December 14, 2009 in Farmington Hills, History | 2 comments

If you’ve been to a wedding, a prom or a senior picture photo shoot in Farmington, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve been to the Governor Warner Mansion, on Grand River. A grand white Italianate mansion surrounded by a sweeping wraparound porch and fabulous gardens, it’s the go-to picturesque location for every occasion of commemorative photography in the city.

warner mansion prom

I had three years of prom pictures taken there, and played in my high school string quartet at a number of other porch lunches, receptions and events I can’t remember. But I didn’t really know anything about the Governor until, compelled to find out more about the historic house across the street from my apartment, I learned that I probably live on land that used to belong to Governor Warner’s father-in-law. After learning that the house’s greatest claim to fame is not its former owner, farmer Samuel G. Davis, but the man his daughter married, the instinct to learn more about the Governor was natural.

Fred M. Warner was born in England and given up for adoption by his impoverished, dying mother when he was seven years old. He was adopted by merchant, statesman and banker P.D. Warner (whose given name, Pascal De Angelis, was cause for great ridicule when he was a child).

Fred was precocious, curious and interested in everything. At some point in the 1880s, Fred invested in a high-wheel bicycle and began a local bicycle business, which enraged his father but became a lucrative pursuit, earning the young Warner $800 in his first year. Along with an interest in bikes came a penchant for competitive cycling;  not long after he started racing, he was a state champion.

When P.D. turned over management of the general store to his 21-year-old son, Fred broadened its offerings and turned it into one of Michigan’s most profitable mercantile enterprises. At 23, Fred Warner started the first of his 13 cheese factories, which eventually gained him respect and admiration as one of the most accomplished cheese makers in the nation; at its peak, the Fred M. Warner Cheese Company manufactured 2 million pounds of cheese a year.

warner general store

(Source)

Fred Warner served as Michigan’s secretary of state from 1901 to 1904 and held the Governor’s chair for three successive terms, from 1905 to 1911. As Governor, Warner led an era of progressive reform that reflected a wider spirit of change across the nation under the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt; he appointed a State Railroad Commission, regulated the insurance industry, and worked toward women’s suffrage, natural conservation and fair child labor laws. As politician, as he had been as neighbor and community activist, Warner was much loved. I would’ve loved him, too.

fred warner

Across the street from the apartment I live in now is an old Victorian home, painted a goldenrod hue with elaborate woodwork trim. Today it’s an office building, and the lights in the attic window are often on after dark, so the house feels like a beacon to me, a warm, steady place that lets me know I’m home.

samuel davis house

(Source)

The house belonged to Samuel Davis, a farmer from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania whose 300 acres of farm and stock made him a wealthy man and a well-known figure in the Farmington community. Samuel Davis was born in New Orleans in 1831; a few weeks later, his father drowned while he was trying to cross a river. The Davis house was built in 1872; his daughter Martha married Fred Warner in 1888 and the couple was sure to have courted, as local historian Ruth Moehlman points out in her fascinating book Heritage Homes of Farmington, in Samuel Davis’s farmhouse.

From Samuel Davis’s obituary in the Farmington Herald in 1905:

During his long years of residence in this township, his life has been an open book for all to read: honest, of pleasing address, generous, social and warmly devoted to his friends, a general favorite with young and old, such a man was “Sammy” Davis. Not only will he be missed by his immediate family, but “Grandpa” was a favorite among his grand-children; for scarcely was he ever seen on our streets without one of more with him, and he enjoying their childish pranks as much as they. He was indeed a GRAND – father.

I don’t know for sure if my apartment is on land that Samuel Davis once stewarded, but I like to think so. And there’s something really enchanting about Fred Warner’s mansion as not only a center of community, but a center of ritual gravity, where once every spring, hundreds of sprightly young people put on rhinestones and satin and bow-ties and say hello to the Governor before they go out for the night.

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Farmington as natural entity

December 10, 2009 in Farmington Hills, History | 2 comments

goose sphinx

A link to this enchanting blog about wildlife in Detroit came through the wire in an email from Model D. If you have adorable Tourrett’s like I do and can’t help but point and shout at anything animate that crosses your path (for real: I have been caught talking in you-are-cute voice to flies before), this is a fun site with lots of colorful photos and edifying facts and proper names. Never before have I felt so capable of telling a brown-headed cowbird from a hopping dark-eyed junco.

Since moving here this summer, I have dedicated huge swaths of my free time to staring out the window at a Canadian goose colony that took up residence in the apartment complex not long after I did. I never thought there was anything special about a Canadian goose — just a big, messy bully and a common pest, right? But when you’re at home alone all day trying to make something of yourself, a goose is a sight to behold: a gigantic, girthy bird with a ponderous way of moving around the world and an almost Sphinx-like bearing, a white-blazed face and dark, considering eyes. They peck at the grass and take slow, showy struts through the yard, but mostly they just sit around all day, like they’re on the beach.

In the library I found a pamphlet called Farmington: An Original Entity, Being The Natural History of Farmington, first printed in 1976 and based on a series of sesquicentennial lectures given by the Farmington Naturalists Society. Volume one includes brief geological, botanical and zoological histories of the area, with inventories of local invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. And the Foreword, written by series editor Jean M. Fox, seems to indicate that this publishing enterprise has been undertaken in part to contradict some popularly held opinions of the suburb:

Farmington has a long and cohesive past. It is not a twentieth century suburb plasticized from what was a corn field ten years ago, nor is it a commercial dream of a developer, long since, with bank account flourishing, moved on to greener pastures.

The volume is small and slim but full of fascinating information about the area’s biological past and speculation about its biological future. Did you know, for instance, that:

  • The oldest evidence of mammals in Farmington are some 14,000 -year-old muskrat bones and an elk believed to have lived in the area after the retreat of the last continental glacier?
  • The opposum is the only marsupial in the state, and is “of ancient lineage”?
  • The only lizard in Michigan is the five-lined skink?
  • Passenger pigeons once migrated to the area in large numbers?

Me either! I think what I like most, though, are the moments when the authors slip out of the scholarly mode to comment, for example, on the “rogue-like” manner of the common raccoon, or lament the declined state of Farmington bass and trout fishing after the 1940s.

In the back of the book is a Nature Calendar — brief (and rather beautifully written) summaries of how a naturalist might mark the passing months in the city:

December: Mammal tracks are seen in the snow, best noted on the second day after a snowfall. The woods are quiet and observable wildlife scarce.

Winter constellations are bright in the nighttime sky. The year’s shortest days occur now, and the longest nights, until the Winter solstice begins to reverse the trend. The sun pursues an arc deep in the southern sky.

For the most part, the guide still seems pretty accurate 30+ years on, I suppose since natural history moves slowly, relative to our lives. But if a new edition is ever completed and released (and I would be interested to know the current state of wet and dry transitional meadows, marshes and peat bogs, elm and ash trees and the local climate), this speculation about the fate of whitetail deer is probably subject to re-examination:

A few white-tailed deer are still present in the Farmington area. They are rarely seen, are most active in the early morning or dusk. They are found in forested areas, about forest edges and in orchards. They are herbivorous in food habits, chiefly and grazers and browsers. With increasing development of the Farmington Area, and appropriation of their habitat, they will likely completely disappear in a few years.

buck

(Wikimedia)

Wrong. There are more than ever. In fact, Michigan white-tail herds have survived a few periods of boom and bust since Michigan was widely settled in the early 19th century. Shockingly abundant in the 1830s, deer had been hunted to the brink of extinction by the 1870s. Stricter game hunting regulations, forest fire protection and the escape of a few tame deer reestablished wild herds in the 1920s and 30s.

I love crossing paths with deer in the woods, so I’m glad they’re still around. A comprehensive history of deer hunting in Michigan is available on the website of the Michigan DNR.

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My new, old town: #4 – Sleepy Hollow

December 1, 2009 in Farmington Hills, History | 3 comments

Something funny happens on Drake road between 11 and 12 mile; the stiff, airy grid streets of Farmington Hills collapse into a dark, knotty road, a valley road flanked by bluffs of boulders and trees. Driving due north from 11 mile, the road dips past a pair of old wooden houses and a stone wall over the river; across the street, a bench in a tiny, deserted park. As the road winds, you pass two palatial mansions on the east side of the street, not the kind you find in especially big, brand-new subdivisions, but the kind you dream about when you are a child — and as children, they were objects of our fantasies, full of servant girls in ruffle-hemmed gowns, noble vassals, horse stables, maybe a sinister count or a dowager duke. You can’t see them unless you squint past the gates and hedgerows, and even though the speed limit is low, the road is narrow and there is nowhere to pull over and gawk. But catching a glimpse of a sprawling country estate through the willows is so much more tantalizing.

North of the fantastical mansions is a subdivision full of later, fast food-era mansions, the Oxford Estates, and in December our aunt would drive my sister and me through the neighborhood to see Christmas lights. To the west of Oxford Estates is a hilly gated community behind towering trees that make Drake Road look like an almost rural pass.

The whole stretch is a huge part of the poetic imagination I developed as a child, a memory without reference that, when I lived in Wisconsin, floated up without warning, then passed, in about the amount of time it takes to drive the quiet, shady mile.

Now that I live here again, I drive Drake Road frequently between Farmington and my parents’ house in Novi, sometimes turning on secluded, still-gravel Howard Road and taking the long way to 12 Mile, snaking past overgrown lawns and a mish-mash of houses, some historic, some lavishly new, some seemingly empty, sometimes a curious deer ambling along the shoulder.

howard road

The elbow of Drake and Howard Roads, and the two old houses that mark the transformation of square suburbia into a temporary but glorious otherworld, are remnants of a historic settlement called Sleepy Hollow. Founded by New York emigres Howland Mason and brothers Edward and Harmon Steele, who built a gristmill in 1827, the neighborhood soon attracted other industrious residents, who founded a saw mill, a shoemaker’s shop, a tannery and a soap factory. The old houses — and when you know what they are, it is remarkable to realize that they’re still here — are the stooped white Miller’s Cottage and, just south of it, a cooper’s late-1830s house, set on hand-hewn wooden beams.

In 1894, Edward Steele’s grandson Frank Steele gave a speech about the history of Sleepy Hollow and his childhood memories of the Old Mill, which the Farmington Historical Commission published as a series of monographs in 1993:

Here in the early days was the social and financial life of the neighborhood. Here the stalwart young men bathed in the waters of the pond, caught fish from its sparkling waters, and skated upon its smooth surface.

On moonlight nights the hills which sloped downward to the mill were ever echoing and re-echoing to the laughter and joyous exclamataions of the boys and girls as they “coasted down hill.”

The Old Mill was always the real center of the outdoor activities. It was there they went to get warm, to sharpen their skates, mend the sled and talk over the events of the neighborhood as they listened to the splash of water over the water-wheel, and the busy whir of the machinery.

Here is where the flour covered miller with his white cap greeted his customers, asked them the news, and in exchange passed on to them the gossip told by the previous customers of the day.

The Old Mill is gone and the cottages were moved slightly to accommodate for the paving of Drake Road in the 1990s, but on the site of the pond is a small billboard of historical information, including the blade of an ice skate that was excavated during construction:

ice skate blade

Tremendous. It’s incredible to me that I grew up less than a mile away from these people, space-wise, but 100 years away from them, time-wise, and how 100 years changed childhood — and life, really — so completely.

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Eli Blanchard, Musician: The 24th Michigan of the Iron Brigade

November 17, 2009 in Farmington Hills, History | 1 comment

EDIT: I spent a lot of time yesterday worrying about Eli Blanchard and his regiment, mostly concerned that I’d been a little lazy with my research, so I went back today to comb through the Orson Blair Curtis book one more time. I still wish I knew what instrument he played in the 24th Michigan band, when he got sick and with what, and when he left on furlough, but this is future grist for the blog mill.

To avoid too much ado, here’s my question: who is this guy? And how did he, a musician, end up dead at 21 during service in the Civil War?

eli blanchard

And here’s the back story: about a month ago, when I was first getting worked up about the diary of Farmington founding father Nathan Power, I paid a visit to the Quaker Cemetery, Farmington’s oldest, to visit with the Powers and their friends.

quaker cemetery

I paid my respects to Uncle Nathan, Farmington’s first teacher and conductor of the township’s stop on the Underground Railroad, and his first wife Selinda and their daughter Phebe Minerva, who died on the same day of cholera, and Patience Comstock Power, his second wife, whose headstone is considerably better kept than Selinda and the girl’s.

nathan power headstone

phebe minerva

A young teenage couple was nuzzling in front of the grave of an Oliver Hazard, d. 1923 (whether he bears any relation to the decorated Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry of “Don’t give up the ship” fame is an item for future exploration). I found it unlikely that they’d be mourning an 86-years-ago-and-counting death of a loved one, and indeed I saw them later that afternoon, nuzzling and making the same god-our-sadness-is-earth-shaking faces at each other in someone’s driveway, under a basketball hoop. Teenagers. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, though, and tried to be surreptitious about my picture-taking.

And this was when I was struck by the headstone of musician Eli Blanchard.

If you are at all sharp with your in Civil War history, you probably already know that the 24th Michigan Infantry, Eli Blanchard’s regiment, was part of the legendary Iron Brigade, which incurred a higher percentage of casualties of any Civil War brigade (while the 24th Michigan suffered more casualties during the Battle of Gettysburg than any other regiment).

iron brigade fw

But Eli Blanchard didn’t die at Gettysburg. He lived for two more years.

When President Lincoln was shot and killed in April 1865, the 24th Michigan escorted the President’s funeral cortege to Oak Ridge cemetery in Springfield. From History of the Twenty-Fourth Michigan of the Iron Brigade, by Orson Blair Curtis, 1891:

The assassination of Lincoln had its effect upon the men — that of profound sorrow. Many of the soldiers wept as at the loss of a father. On the occasion of the President’s funeral, the appearance of the Twenty-fourth Michigan which formed the principal escort added to the pageant and elicited much commendation from military men and citizens. The regiment was drilled with especial care for the honorable duty by Major Hutchinson and the company officers, and its appearance was at its best, being thoroughly furnished with new Iron Brigade black hats, feathers, brasses, and white gloves. They were soon recognized by Major General Joseph Hooker, who was in attendance, and who seemed pleased again to meet the Regiment whose acquaintance he had made in the early stages of the war. Lieutenant Colonel Edwards commanded the Regiment on the occasion.

Eli Blanchard may have marched in this procession, but it’s unclear when he fell ill and took sick furlough to return to Detroit. In any case, he either barely missed or just made his regiment’s homecoming to Fort Wayne on June 20, 1865. Eli Blanchard died the next day. By June 30, the Iron Brigade had officially disbanded.

It’s so tragic, although maybe not quite as bitter as the death a member of the 24th Company H, Michael Cunningham, who survived wounds sustained at Gettysburg only to die on leave in Canada when he was caught under a falling tree.

Naturally, the 24th Michigan has its own Michigan-based reenactment group.

Any other need-to-know on the 24th Michigan? Send it along.

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Deer friend

October 25, 2009 in Farmington Hills | No comments

There is nothing unusual about a deer, I know. They are so populous we need to issue licenses to kill them every year — for their own good. The drive from the southeast corner of Michigan to the western coast of the lake in Wisconsin is measured in deer corpses on the highway shoulder. Most people I know have shot a deer, hit a deer with their car or know someone who has, can dress a deer, eats deer, or once stumbled over a garbage can stuffed with a deer’s carcass whilst playing football in the street.

deer in the woods

I know that seeing a deer in the woods is tantamount to seeing a squirrel or fellow hiker in the woods. Still, every time I see a deer in the woods, I am startled, and awed a little by the sight of something so big — bigger than me — something so lithe and graceful loose in the wild.

My parents found no joy in the outdoors; to them, “roughing it” meant finding a restaurant in a foreign city with a legible menu. Growing up, my biggest zoological excitements (outside the zoo) were garter snakes, exceptionally large spiders and the rare mole sighting — maybe skunks on dark summer nights, but mostly only their awful smell, and as I got older that only meant I’d have to scour the dogs. I guess a creature as large and majestic as a deer holds, to this day, a glimmer of city-kid mystery. It is rare that I don’t see a deer or four in Heritage Park — the bucks with a flash of white tail darting out of sight, the does with their long, still gaze under those big, ridiculous, vulnerable ears — but I can’t help but stand frozen and watch them for a while, until I start to think about those antlers, and what they could do to me, and scamper off.

My old, new town: #3 – “Uncle” Nathan Power

October 21, 2009 in Farmington Hills, History | 1 comment

Books lead you to strange places. After learning about the cauldron that boiled Mad Anthony Wayne’s exhumed bones a few weeks ago, I was drawn to learn more about the young Revolutionary War general and his role in the settling of the city of Detroit.

After searching for out-of-print paperbacks on Amazon for a while, I remembered that I live next door to an especially good public library, and I put on a sweater and marched myself over there. When I arrived, though, I learned that all of the library’s books on Mad Anthony are part of the library’s non-circulating Heritage Collection.

So I slipped into the Heritage Room, where I failed to find the biography I was looking for but managed to become distracted in no time by the modest but well-curated selection of books on the Detroit area, the state of Michigan and the Great Lakes region at large.

michillaneous

A corner of the shelves in The Heritage Room is given over to the big binders that organize the city’s archive of newspapers and vital records, where my first instinct was to search for family names – specifically, an entry for my aunt and uncle, who were married in Farmington in the early ’60s.  Not that I need to – we have their wedding album – but it’s an affirmative comfort to see things on the public register. My aunt and uncle are dead now, and they didn’t just belong to me and my family; they were part of the world.

After fruitless leafing through the marriage books, my eyes were drawn to a fat blue binder, with collected news items about Farmington indicated on the spines: People; Land; Churches; Underground Railroad.

According to the Farmington Library’s online history index, an underground railroad station in Farmington is “part reality, part speculation,” but Mrs. Lillian Drake Avery, writing for the Michigan Historical Society in 1915, writes vividly (if anecdotally) about the business of freeing Southern slaves at a time when many people who lived through it were still alive.

first baptist church

Mrs. Avery writes that Farmington was “the principal station in Oakland County … and the conductor was Nathan Power, or ‘Uncle Nathan,’ as he was universally called.” She continues:

I have met only one man, now living, who personally harbored the runaways, Mr. Palmer Sherman … went out to his barn one morning in June and was considerably astonished to find thirteen negroes camping on his freshly gathered hay … It seemed that Uncle Nathan had more people than he could take care of and had directed this party to Mr. Sherman’s barn.

Read the rest of this entry »

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My new, old town: #2 – The woods

October 13, 2009 in Farmington Hills, metro Detroit | 1 comment

In the six weeks or so that I’ve been back in metro Detroit, I’ve been spending at least an hour a day in the woods, walking and thinking (or trying not to think too much).

From my apartment, it’s a five minute walk to a steel-caged footbridge that carries me over I-696 to Woodland Hills, a rough, root-knotted walking trail looped around a brambly 74-acre nature park. At the back of the park, just past a trail heavy with goldenrod and dogwood, there’s a marshy pond, goose families, and a few no swimming signs.

bridge

shaded path

bench by the pond

Suburbs have long seemed like no-places to me — invented miles of strip malls, office parks, curlicue’d subdivisions with no sidewalks, their continuity interrupted by perpetually widening expressway corridors. The suburbs, especially when I lived in the suburbs, were inconvenient, alienating and colorless at their best — at their worst, resource-sucking, psyche-ravaging holes in space.

But Farmington Hills is my hometown and, for now, the no-place I call my own, and although I felt strange and scared to move back here, I am learning to reconsider the suburbs — or rather this suburb — as an honest-to-goodness place. It’s a complicated reckoning, especially in Detroit, where every attempt at so-called normal life seems infinitesimally examined.

berries

There’s a lot that has dazzled me about Farmington Hills and environs, a freshness that comes as a luxury of my many years elsewhere. My small suburban apartment complex is unquestionably the most diverse place I have ever lived, and the sprawling aisles of ethnic food at grocery stores — and the languages I hear there — are dizzying. And I still see good movies and good art shows and hear good music and hang out with smart, creative people — my biggest fear about leaving a “real” city and moving to a satellite suburb in a huge, fragmented metropolis.

But my search for a spiritual core of suburbia has taken me time and time again to several local parks, all of which I call, in casual conversation, “the woods.”

park blight

The woods are part of the natural history of a place and reminder of the human history around it that I often want to deny the suburbs. In Heritage Park – Farmington’s 200-acre jewel — there’s a pet cemetary from the 1930s where the Spicer family dogs are buried, near an English-style countryside manor, built in 1926, where Eleanor Spicer lived until her death in 1982. The land that’s Heritage Park now was her farm — she rode horses, raised sheep and often referred to her land as “the only unspoiled place” in the city.

(Aside: stumbling around the internet for some basic fact-checking has led me to this excellent guide to historic Farmington buildings and sites, organized by architectural style.)

Farmington’s abundance of megaplex movie theaters and big box-anchored shopping centers belies the city’s history. The area was first settled by Quakers; Farmington founded a post office and organized a township in 1827. My parents live a few suburbs over in Novi (apocryphally, the number six — No.VI — train stop); a half-mile from their house, nestled between two industrial parks, is a little farmstead cemetery started in the mid-1840s by the Knapp family. Just past the graveyard you can hook a right into Rotary Park, a 67-acre swath of barely-tended woodland along the Middle Rogue. I walk my mom’s border collies down a trail crashed with deadfall and overgrown with water grasses; the dogs like to race down the trail ahead of me and leap through the brush into the river.

huldah blanchard

dogs in the river sized

Today, Novi is the mall capital of Oakland County, with the Fountain Walk and Twelve Oaks and the Town Center causing immediate aneurysm to anyone who finds herself at the 696 and Novi Road interchange. Then again, my brother lives in Novi on a gravel road and has watched herds of deer (and an occasional coyote) caravan through his backyard.

The woods are also, like the suburbs, a kind of no-place. These parks seem less like parks to me than slices of Farmington unstuck in time, shaken loose from the tended lawns and chain restaurants and allowed to be what they have always been. Just as the strip malls I’ve known in Michigan don’t look too different from the strip malls I’ve known in Iowa, Wisconsin, or Indiana, I call all of the nature trails I love — Woodland Hills, the river bluff trails in Milwaukee, even those modest few acres that buffer my elementary school from the subdivision behind it — the woods. And all of them make me feel basically okay about wherever I am.

marshes

branches on the river sized

wade in the water

What am I going to do during the winter? Maybe I should learn to cross-country ski.

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Miss America 2008: BTYB Farmington Hills

September 22, 2009 in Farmington Hills | No comments

Making a Michigan left on Grand River yesterday, on the southerly side of Farmington Hills, I saw a Welcome to Farmington Hills sign that said: “Welcome to Farmington Hills: Home of Kirsten Haglund, Miss America 2008.”

I had no idea Farmington Hills was home to any Miss Americas.  I do not watch or care about beauty pageants, but as a little girl, I always rooted for Miss Michigan, whomever I thought had the best evening gown, and Miss Hawaii (who was usually exotic).

Haglund is probably now the second most famous resident of Farmington Hills, although her legacy is probably far more fleeting than that of our hometown hero, and one of my favorite TV characters ever …

Jessie Spano.

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