We may post a lazy update or two from the beach. We may send a postcard from some old cemetery in Philadelphia.

We may not.

We’ll miss you!

[He] was an eccentric individual, tall and thin, and an old-timer, inasmuch as he clung to knee breeches, ample coat skirts and waistcoat. He wore his hair long, brushed straight back from his head and tied in a queue.

Isaac Day held a number of jobs in early Detroit, including Master of the House of Corrections (strikes me as a pretty fancy name for an old stone blockhouse in a frontier town. Oh, and it doubled as the public weigh house, with Isaac Day its weighmaster), chimney sweep and auctioneer. But his final job was as the Crier for the Wayne County Court. He carried a big silver-headed cane and his primary job seems to have been yelling at people to be quiet. Contemporary accounts allude to his love of whiskey.

He died in 1835, which saddened the court so much that several members of the bar wrote pun-bedecked elegies to his memory. This one is my favorite, by Judge Charles Cleland:

Step light! The light of Day’s expired.
Silent is he who silence oft required.
That stentor’s voice and that majestic staff
That raised the bearer and suppressed the laugh
Are heard by Day no more — nor yet by night;
Yet when the evening came, Day still was bright.
But Day today no more shall utter speech,
Since Day’s in darkness far beyond our reach.
Alas! Our Day has gone! No ray of light
Bespeak the Day — no morning radiance bright
Shall ever restore to this dark court, its Day.
Darkly they are left to feel this crooked way
Since, as we are told, in Day’s report,
Day hath no more Day in court.
None cry for Day, who oft have cried
To please the court, when men were tried.
Yet now that Day’s eclipsed, we say,
Peace to his names! Poor Isaac Day.

The other poems are heavier on the he-was-such-a-drunk jokes, which just seem mean-spirited.

On July 23, 1701 — 48 days after leaving Montreal and nearly five months after Louis XIV granted Cadillac the power to establish a fort and a town at Detroit (depicted here, 1902 painting by Fernand LeQuesne) — Antoine De La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac came ashore, with 50 French soldiers and 50 French-Canadian voyageurs. The next day, he declared the settlement founded for the advancement of the glory of France.

Soon the great canoes were unloaded. Camp was struck in the woods on the bluff. The axes of 50 woodsmen rang through the forest stillness and the crash of falling trees scattered the wild animals.

So Detroit, City of Destiny, was born.

George Washington Stark

It was, wrote Clarence Burton, “a houseless city of a hundred souls.”

I know I said I was planning something really fun for today, and I’ll admit sheepishly, I had some big, fanciful plans crammed in between my big, stressful deadlines this week — plans that OF COURSE I couldn’t turn around, since they involved a flash mob at the Cadillac statue in Hart Plaza, some kind of parade, French-Canadian voyageur songs, my accordion, baguettes, culottes, rough-looking men in fur trader costumes, a ceremonial cannon shot across the straits, vintage Cadillac cars, and of course a grand entrance by wooden canoes. Followed by drinks. Anywhere.

This didn’t work out. For obvious reasons.  I was going to settle for a meet-up at the statue, a dramatic reading of Cadillac’s letter to France and maybe a processional to the bar, to the tune of some old coureurs de bois tunes. That didn’t work out either. Because I didn’t plan it. DAMMIT.

Anyway, a year from now, Detroit turns 310, and I hope that some of you will help me plan something grand to celebrate. If you are a rough-looking man, we’ll start looking for a fur trader costume for you. If you own a canoe, I will put you on the canoe-bringing list. If you know any coureurs de bois songs, we should hold a workshop.

And for God’s sake, if the French government can make William Cotter Maybury a chevalier, they can make anyone a chevalier. Here’s hoping that Detroit gets a new ceremonial chevalier every July 24 from now on.

***

This amazed me when I read it yesterday in The Historical Geography of Detroit, by Almon Ernest Parkins (1918). It’s something I sort of understood, but never as well as I do now:

Detroit was 53 years old when the British began their fort at Pittsburg … It was 95 years old when Moses Cleveland laid out the city that bears his name on Lake Erie. Detroit celebrated its centenary in the year that the Holland Land Company plotted the city of Buffalo at the mouth of Buffalo Creek. The first log cabin in Indianapolis was not erected until 118 years after the French began the city on the Straits. And Detroit had been making history 129 years when the Illinois Board of Land Commissioners surveyed the site of Chicago, the great metropolis of the interior.

“I am a warrior, not a writer,” Cadillac apparently said once. But he wrote anyway, and unless his translators have embellished his language over the past three centuries (entirely possible), he wrote well. I’ve shared this before, but it seems the proper occasion to share this, almost ritually, once more:

Its borders are so many vast prairies, and the freshness of the beautiful waters keeps the banks always green. The prairies are bordered by long and broad rows of fruit trees which have never felt the careful hand of the vigilant gardner. Here, also, orchards, young and old, soften and bend their branches, under the weight and quantity of their fruit, towards the mother earth, which has produced them. It is in this land, so fertile, that the ambitious vine, which has never wept under the knife of the vine-dresser, builds a thick roof with its large leaves and heavy clusters, weighing down the top of the tree which receives it, and often stifling it with its embrace.

Under these broad walks one sees assembled by hundreds the timid deer and faun, also the squirrel bounding in his eagerness to collect the apples and plums with which the earth is covered. Here the cautious turkey calls her numerous brood to gather the grapes, and here also their mates come to fill their large and gluttonous crops. Golden pheasants, the quail, the partridge, woodcock and numerous doves swarm in the woods and cover the country, which is dotted and broken with thickets and high forests of full-grown trees, forming a charming perspective, which sweetens the sad lonesomeness of the solitude. The hand of the pitiless reaper has never mown the luxurious grass upon which fatten woolly buffaloes, of magnificent size and proportion.

… If the situation is agreeable, it is none the less important because it opens and closes the door of passage to the most distant nations which are situated upon the borders of the vast seas of sweet water. None but the enemies of truth could be enemies to this establishment so necessary to increase the glory of the king.

I thought about Cadillac today when I was driving home through Southfield.  Baby, look at you now.

Vive le Chevalier. Bon anniversare, le Detroit. I wish I could speak French to tell you how much I love you.

I am crushed under a couple of major deadlines this week! But here’s this.

[from Virtual Motor City]

You’re welcome.

Your friend,

The Night Train

P.S. We’ll be back with something fun on Friday. Really fun. Maybe not as fun as an elephant at the beach though.

If you’re headed to Eastern Market this Saturday, here’s some trivia for you to consider while you’re shopping for delicious local produce: the Market, one of the oldest in the country, was formerly the site the Russell Street Cemetery, one of two city-owned cemeteries of the mid-19th century.

Situated on land that the city bought from some farmers, Russell Street Cemetery welcomed its first permanent tenant in 1834. The city was growing — and cholera was killing people in droves — and a smaller municipal cemetery, Clinton Park at Gratiot and Clinton Street, was getting cramped.

Within 30 years, though, Russell Street had become a little too cozy as well, and it was falling into disrepair.

Wrote General Henry Morrow to the City Council in 1861 (from Burton):

It is little short of disgraceful to Detroit that its cemetery should have been allowed to fall into the ruinous and dilapidated state in which we find it at present. It was once the place of interment for the whole city and in it are deposited the remains of many worthy and respectable people. When the city sold lots in the cemetery, it was with the implied pledge that the grounds should be and remain sacred for cemetery purposes. This pledge has been entirely overlooked or disregarded. Not only has the ground been neglected and the fences allowed to go to ruin, but a portion of the land has been appropriated for other purposes. The city has the power, without doubt, to prohibit further interments in the city cemetery, and it would be its duty to do this if the public health or convenience required such a step. But it is still used for the almost sacred purposes of burial, and yet all care of it is neglected.

The City Sexton, Peter Cleisen, appealed to the Common Council in 1857:

Gentlemen,

I respectfully represent to your honorable body, that certain persons are in habit of coming to the city cemetery and digging up bodies for the purpose of removal. Whether they have proper authority so to do I do not know.

The cemetery is under my charge and it seems to me proper that bodies should not be dug up except under my direction.

In 1869, burials stopped at Russell Street. Things were really a mess, and what’s more, the land was starting to look too good to waste on the dead. People were already selling hay and wood at market nearby, and Gratiot Avenue was the perfect conduit between the city and the country.

In 1879, a Circuit Court ordered the cemetery vacated.  From 1880 to 1882, more than 4500 remains were disinterred and relocated to Elmwood, Woodmere and a cemetery in Grosse Pointe.

And guess who stopped by during the excavation?

General Friend Palmer.

Rambling about the city a few days ago, I found myself in the City cemetery on Russell Street (corner of Gratiot Avenue) and it occurred to me that as the order had gone forth for the removal of the bodies still remaining buried there, I might idle away an hour or so scanning the few remaining tombstones, and that perhaps I might remember something in relation to them that would be of interest to the living.

… Many of our old residents will remember Captain Burtis. His grave is so near Russell Street that the passerby could read his name on the tombstone; doubtless many have done so, when it stood erect, and perhaps have wondered who this person was that once owned the high sounding title of Captain. Quite recently, some miserable vandal broke the stone in twain. The captain had the gift of forcible language to a remarkable degree, and I can imagine him standing beside his own grave, in the flesh, giving vent to his feelings against the perpetrators of the useless act in some of his choicest English. He died in 1836 at the age of 45, so the stone records, and though comparatively young, he had lived long enough to accomplish some few things to help along the growth of this great city and state.

No wonder the General and I get along so well.

Captain John Burtis established the first ferry from Detroit to Windsor (powered by horse) and built Michigan’s first steamboat — the Argo.

James Witherell, Supreme Judge of the Michigan Territory was also buried at Russell Street. Witherell used to own the land that became Palmer Park and Woods; he deeded it to his grandson, Thomas Witherell Palmer, who was General Friend Palmer’s cousin. James Witherell is now rests at Elmwood.

The General’s father, also named Friend Palmer, was buried  at the old Clinton Street Cemetery. I have no idea where he was removed to, but the story of the Clinton Street Cemetery is pretty amazing, too. So you can look forward to more graveyard arcana, if that’s your kind of thing.

But let’s backtrack.

Summer is the season for having friends in town. This weekend we entertained a friend of mine from college and his lovely bride-to-be. Eli’s from Northern Michigan, and he’s seen plenty of Detroit before, including once with me, almost six years ago, when all I knew how to do in Detroit was ride the People Mover, drive past the Station (and back then, Tiger Stadium) and eat at New Hellas in Greektown.

Before I had ever set foot in one of Detroit’s mouldering towers of famous decay, Eli used drive out to abandoned houses in the slum-pastoral outskirts of Beloit, Wisconsin and clamor around. Once I went with him. I fished out a down vest in an early-’80s duck-hunt palette, took it home and washed it a couple of times, and wore it faithfully for the next four years. Here I am sporting it in an abandoned barn Eli took us to near his family’s home in Burdickville:

Pretty sharp, right?

Now we’re all grown up. Eli and I are both getting married soon. (Eli’s getting married on a GOAT FARM. GOAT. FARM. Why didn’t I have that idea?) Eli still rustles around in old empty houses. I mostly sit around at home writing about how I feel kind of funny about old empty old houses (or newspaper offices, or blighted barns).

And the empty old thing that makes me feel funniest of all? It’s definitely Michigan Central.

But after we went to Belle Isle (where we saw, by the way, this incredible Black-Crowned Night Heron, who showed up at the koi pond at feeding time:)

And after we went to Grand Trunk for Michigan craft beers on draft, and Sala Thai in Eastern Market, and after I stepped away to pee, I came back to our table and heard Scott explaining the allure of the Station to our visitors. So off we went to see it.

I think maybe I spent so long obsessing over Detroit as an abstract idea, and so long adoring the Station for, you know, that giant, toothless, Rome-recalling Beaux-Arts metaphor of civilization’s decline that it is, that today I want to forget I was ever that person.

The Train Station was it for me, a suburban teenager in love with the idea of Detroit, a kid who was genuinely curious about the city but never managed to get much deeper or more deviant than taking bad black-and-white photos of the houses around my dad’s factory and sneaking into 5th Avenue at Comerica Park to see some lame blues band when I was underage.

Now that I am all grown up and drink legitimately at decent bars and think I might know a thing or two, the Train Station has become this place for people who don’t get it. It’s a secret place that used to be yours and now everyone goes there. Time started publishing photo essays about it and then people started asking questions like “Why don’t you buy one of those $1 houses I heard about?” or “Hey, wanna hear this great idea that might save Detroit?” and you never wanted to see a photograph of Michigan Central ever again.

This, of course, is nonsense, and unfair. There is nothing and nowhere like the Train Station. I have spent a lot of time this year trying to be less unfair about Detroit. To myself and to others. For God’s sake, it’s just a city people live in.

So this weekend I let myself take some pictures of the Train Station.

At first I was concerned. Earlier in the day, Eli’s fiancee told us that in all fairness, and for all our effort to show how people get Detroit wrong, she genuinely felt like Detroit was really, truly falling apart. We tried to leap to the city’s defense, but unfortunately a bum on the corner started shooting up heroin at that exact moment, and our argument was moot.

But the Train Station gave us its best. A gang of kids on bicycles rode up and asked us what the building was and if it was haunted.  Someone on the roof waved down at them and they shouted, “WHO WOULD GO IN THERE? ISN’T IT HAUNTED? IT LOOKS SCARY!” They eventually concluded that the people inside the buildings were probably ghost hunters. With cameras.

We said, “Yes, we’re sure they have cameras.”

And in some ways, they were probably ghost hunters, too.

Just then, we heard a float of brass. A man showed up from inside the Station and played a little trumpet serenade at the central door. (For some reason he was also holding aloft a big sweep broom.)

So this picture doesn’t feel weird to me, although at first glance it still gives me a twinge. (“Oh, hello! We just drove in from out of town to see some devastation! Here, take our picture!”)

It felt like the way photos began. Here. Here we were. We saw this guy playing a trumpet and kids on bikes.

And the next time I see it, it will remind me of Michigan Central as a sunset playground, full of music and ghost hunters, object of awe for careening kids on bicycles, not decrepit symbol of bygone, forgotten city.

I have some good stuff in the works for you this week, but since I’m not ready for any of that yet, I’ll share this:

The incredibly beautiful mausoleum door of automotive industry big-shot Frederick J. Fisher, of the Fisher brothers, Fisher Body Works, the Fisher Building. Etcetera.

I adore it.

It’s at Holy Sepulchre in, of all places, Southfield, not far from the border of Farmington Hills, where I grew up. As you know. I also saw some deer that day. Any day that includes deer and a cemetery is a good day in my book.

Woodmere is part of Detroit’s clutch of historic rural cemeteries. (See also Woodlawn and Elmwood.) It’s on Fort Street in Del Ray. The cemetery was founded in 1867 by a cabal of influential businessmen who wanted to plan a big (bigger than Elmwood), beautiful rural cemetery, far (farther than Elmwood) from the bustle of the city.

They did a pretty swell job, overall. And Woodmere is still in pretty good shape, even though some plots are crowded, with disorienting headstones facing every which way.  It’s hilly and rambling and there’s a lake in the middle ringed by leaning willows.

Woodmere also has a dedicated historian and champion, Gail Hershenzon, who literally wrote the book on Woodmere. She also runs a website with a digital records search (AMAZING!). And gives tours. I wish every historic cemetery had someone so loyal posted at this task. Anyway, we’ll leave the dirty work to her and just show you some of the many, many pictures we took.

Some folks you know might know who stay at Woodmere:

David Buick: founder of the Buick Car Company and (fun fact) inventor of bathtub enamel.

Dungaree hero Hamilton Carhartt.

Lumber baron David Whitney, whose former home is now The Whitney. See also: the Whitney Building.

Some things we noticed: A whole lot of Masons.

I love the Square and Compasses paned into the stained glass.

There are a number of fraternities, lodges and orders with monuments at Woodmere — some even have their own plots.

The Elk’s Rest.

A commemorative plaque in memory of Benjamin Geiger, erected by the Detroit Lodge No. 6 of the Ancient Order of United Workmen.

Woodmen of the World.

Woodmere also has a U.S. Army section, where a number of Civil War soldiers are at rest. Many were originally buried at Fort Wayne.

We met a lonely, pretty cemetery dog. I didn’t get too close and neither did he, but we regarded each other like this for a long time.

I like this unusual in-ground mausoleum. Hershenzon says the whole monument used to be sparkly white.

One imagines that it’s the obelisk that’s been growing, and not the tree:

There’s not as much Egyptophilia at Woodmere as there is at Woodlawn, but the Van Baalen crypt is a gem:

Check out the Pharaoh faces in the doors:

Plenty of headstones and gravemarkers in German.

A lovely barefoot angel watching over the Widman plot.

We took way too many photos. See more on our Facebook page.

The then city marshal Adna Merritt [was] a nervous, excitable little body who used to get himself all tangled up trying to stop these two from starting and throwing fire balls, balls of cotton wicking soaked in turpentine and re-enforced with twine. It was quite common then on Fourth of July nights and on other nights as well, during the summer season, for the boys to ignite and throw these balls up and down Jefferson Avenue. Merritt tried to put a stop to it but Owen and Captain Edwards were dead against his doing so and supplied all the fire balls necessary from Dr. Chapin’s store. Did you ever see fire balls thrown or did you ever throw them yourself? ‘Tis great fun, and attended with some danger to the hands, and some to property, although I never knew of any harm to come from them. After a short season both Owen and Edwards joined the Methodist church, having gotten religion. No more fire balls from that quarter after that.

On that note, have a safe and happy holiday.

Yesterday, of course, the world was rocked by the announcement that Boy Governor Stevens T. Mason’s remains, originally presumed to be — well, you know, in his grave — were MIA. The situation grew stranger by the hour as reports surfaced that no one even knew if they were looking for a coffin or an urn or what, despite the fact that Mason was disinterred (to make way for a bus station) and then laid back to rest in 1955. The same funeral home that is exhuming him now did that job and yesterday they were all like, “Oh, yeah, well, we don’t have any of those records. Who knows.”

To the collective relief of a frantic and confused nation, Mason’s crypt and casket were found a couple of hours later, about four feet away from where everyone thought they were. MY GOODNESS. This current disinterment is poor Governor Mason’s third — after his death from pneumonia in 1843, he was buried in New York, then dug up and sent back to Detroit with his 92-year-old (living) sister in 1905. So maybe the poor dude was just trying to make himself scarce.

As an expression of our great joy that this all turned out A-OKAY, your friends aboard the Night Train want to share this lovely work of prose with you about the dapper, darling Stevens T. Mason — Michigan’s first, and America’s youngest, governor — taking one of his first strolls around Detroit, happening ultimately upon what is now Capitol Park — his (sort of) final resting place. It’s probably imaginary, but we’re cool with that:

Arrayed in his skin-tight black broadcloth trousers and flowing cloak, jauntily gesturing with an ebony walking stick, Tom Mason sallied forth to explore the town. From the Mansion House he could see nothing on the downriver side but a spreading log citadel and an open farm. The Mansion House happened to be on the extreme western edge of town, at Jefferson Avenue and Cass Street. Sauntering down Jefferson Avenue and observing with satisfaction how people stared at him, he passed rows of cluttered store windows and presently arrived at Woodward Avenue. Three blocks. He saw a huge street, astonishingly wide, cutting the town in two and running straight back from the river toward the distant forest. To his right, still in the middle of lower Woodward, was the ignoble French Market and its rabble of gesticulating French habitants. He continued onward.

Three more blocks eastward on Jefferson, and he was staring at a tumble-down gate in an old pike-pole wall. This, then, was the eastern edge of town. It was just six blocks wide on the river, a compressed slice of city sandwiched between spreading farms … From the river the town marched solidly, row upon row of one- and two-story white frame stores and homes, as far as Congress — four blocks. There it stopped.

…  In 1828 the Council was seriously crticized for allowing the Territorial capitol building to be built so far out in the commons that it was far remote from the town and required a long, exhausting walk to get there. There was no road to it, nothing but a pathway continuing where Griswold Street gave up its wrestle with the mud at Congress. It was a good half-mile from downtown.

By the way: until reading this, I’d never made the connection that Capitol Park was where the capitol was. Whoa.

Writing about Capitol Park in 1947, the author continues:

… Hardly anyone in modern Detroit ever heard of such a place. It is a triangular little space at the head of Griswold, a block uptown from Michigan, crisscrossed with wide concrete sidewalks and boasting a couple of conspicuous comfort-station signs. Sunshine rarely reaches it; the towering cliffs of tremendous buildings hide it from all but historical researchers and people who are looking for parking places. How it could have been regarded, a century ago, as remote from the city of Detroit is utterly incomprehensible to today’s Detroiters. Those who can find it realize that the point is in the heart of the sprawling metropolis. Tom Mason and his father, John T., frequently waded in mud over their ankles and exhausted themselves trying to walk there from the town.

-Kent Sagendorph, from Stevens T. Mason: Misunderstood Politician, 1947.

He walked the two miles home, flung his homespun jacket across a chair, took a flickering tallow candle and sat down at a table. In the dim yellow light, wavering and dancing before his eyes, he studied. He kept us his classwork as carefully as if he had to recite all those lessons the next day. He wrote comments in the margins of his father’s and grandfather’s works on philosophy. They are preserved to this day, and readable. One says: “This is silly!” The passage, in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, is the famous dictum holding that any nation’s economic resources can be exceeded by the spending of tyrants.

Dear Adam Smith,

Whatever.

Yours,

Stevens T. Mason