UPDATE: Silas Farmer’s death certificate is in the Michigan state archives. He died suddenly on December 28, 1902, apparently of a heart attack. He was living in present-day midtown, at 52 Selden, and is buried in Elmwood Cemetery. Next stop, as my mom sassily pointed out to me on Twitter (MOMS ON TWITTER!!), is...
Read more →Shorpy — the online archive of vintage photos from the 1850s to the 1950s — ran this photo yesterday of downtown Detroit looking north/west on Woodward across Campus Martius. Take a look at this photo full-size: I love the streetcars and early Model Ts, the incredible clothes, the electric signs and billboards. (Also, apropos...
Read more →Construction continues on the new site, which should be up and running by the end of the week, although your friends aboard the Night Train aren’t making any promises. One of the luxuries of writing about history, though, is that isn’t subject to the hyper-fast timeline that directs our daily lives. Taking a few...
Read more →I love when people say Detroit is “a shadow of its former self,” or one of America’s “fallen cities.” The benchmark, of course, is Detroit at the height of its industrial success and the peak of its population in the 1950s. But I’ve been reading accounts of the city in the very earliest days...
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