cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

Roseville Park, 1937 Because, yes, I am this easily distracted, I wanted to post a few things about the early days of Roseville Park. This was brought to my attention by a comment by Bill Harris, who linked to this article in the News Journal  (link may or may not work for you). The gist of it is here: Planning for the neighborhood of Roseville Park got under way off Kirkwood Highway in 1928, with a few homes done before the Great Depression idled the project and uncounted others nationwide. The post-World War II boom saw many more homes built in the neighborhood – boasting the oldest continuous civic association in the state – and more recent building brought the total of homes to 179. From its start, when Kirkwood Highway was two slim lanes, the quiet, almost-hidden neighborhood near Polly Drummond Hill Road – one of the state’s first subdivisions, if not the first – welcomed residents and guests with a brick wall with end post tops engraved “Roseville” and “Park.” The point of...

When I first heard the name of Joan's baby on Mad Men this past season, I thought, "Kevin sounds sort of modern for the sixties." Then I realized Mad Men was now taking place in the year I was born (1966), and I went to school with a number of Kevins, so it was in fact a very appropriate name. I just don't associate it with the sixties because the people I think of when I think of the sixties were adults then and born decades before. Which made me think about naming characters in historical fiction and how we need to consider the cultural influences not of the time in which are our books are set but of when our characters were born. Characters in their thirties or twenties in the Regency would have been named in the 1780s or 90s. When they were born, their parents might have been reading Henry Fielding, Fanny Burney, or Alexander Pope not Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, or Lord Byron. Those in their twenties and thirties in the early Victorian era on the other han...

Polly Drummond's Tavern today Several times previously here on the blog, we've (directly or indirectly) uncovered the origins of, and the people behind, various road and place names in Mill Creek Hundred. We've hit things like Duncan Road , Brackinville Road , Little Baltimore Road , Loveville Road and McKennan's Church Road . Usually, the person behind the name is either a major landowner nearby, or a prominent figure in the community (like a preacher). This time, we'll look at a name (first and last) known by pretty much anyone who's spent any time living in or passing through Mill Creek Hundred -- Polly Drummond. And while she did live for a while in the area that bears her name, she was not a large landowner (by "large", I mean her property -- I have no idea about Polly's size) nor did she live there very long. Assuming the name started to be used while she was there, it's now been around almost ten times longer than she was. The very shor...

The Mystery Object I have something I want to put out for everyone to take a look at. My hope is that maybe someone might know what the heck it is. It was found in the woods near an old farmsite (I don't want to say exactly where just yet, on the off chance it might be rare), and I have no idea what it is. It seems to be made of copper, judging by the coloration and discoloration. If I remember correctly, it's roughly about two feet long, give or take. The catch here is that it may or may not have anything to do with the farm in which it was found. It's not very far from the barn, but it's sitting in a small creekbed. It may or may not be connected to some copper tubing that is visible nearby. The tubing comes out of the creekbank and may come from the barn as some sort of drainage system. Since the object is in this small creek, that, to me, at least raises the possibility that it could have been washed there from somewhere else, and have nothing to do with the farm. I...

I’ve been having a fascinating discussion on Twitter about introductions. My understanding of “the rules” is that gentlemen are always introduced to ladies (and here we’re talking about people of the same class, not the lower orders or servants).  High Change in Bond Street by Gillray, 1796 Men being anything but gentlemanly as they crowd the ladies into the dirty street.  This is because women are the ones with reputations to guard and it should always be up to them if they wish to have a gentleman presented to them or not. But one of my favorite people to blab with (who also happens to be British) quite firmly believes that a viscount’s daughter would be introduced to a duke because the duke is of a higher rank. On the one hand I get what she’s saying, as “the rules” also state that inferiors are introduced to superiors, but I’ve always understood that “the lady rule” trumps the “inferior/superior” rule. I went digging for some kind of actual documentation to clear the issue up, bu...

Woodside I know that this one, again, is technically a little outside of Mill Creek Hundred, but it's close and does have a connection. This particular topic came to my attention recently while researching the posts about Caleb Harlan and Plumgrove Farm . I had always figured that the Ferris School was built on land donated by Mr. Ferris, although until recently I had no idea who that might have been. As it turns out, though, the money to start the school came from John Ferris, but the property was purchased with that money by his cousin, Caleb Harlan. The property that Harlan purchased, known as Woodside, of course has its own history prior to the founding of the school. I'm not interested here in going into too much detail about the very early years of the house, or details about the house itself, for that matter. If I find more about those topics, perhaps I could come back to that someday, but the focus of this post is in a slightly different direction. In particular, I wa...

Fell Historic District area, c.1860 A couple years ago (have I been doing this that long?) we took a brief look at the history of the Fell Spice Mill at Faulkland. In that post, we focused primarily on the history of the spice mill itself, and the Fell family who ran it. I mentioned, however, that there are several other aspects of the story that are worthy of their own posts. I think the most obvious are the surrounding buildings in the Faulkland area that comprise the Fell Historic District, entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. There are eight buildings in the district, erected over a period of a century and a quarter, from 1800 to 1925. Some of them are visible from Faulkland Road, and some are not. You may even have driven by them without realizing their historic nature. We'll now take a look at these eight homes (they weren't all homes to begin with, but they are now), which I've divided into three periods -- Early, Middle, and Late (origina...

Source. When the Universal Machine Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia sought a more suitable location for its growing business, it relocated to a brand new building at the southwest corner of Twelfth Street (now Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Marantette. The choice of the location wasn't merely due to Detroit's preeminence among manufacturing centers--one of the company's owners, Philip Breitmeyer , was a former mayor of Detroit. His primary occupation was that of a florist, and he was one of the founding members of Florists' Transworld Delivery . The permit to build this factory was issued on June 11, 1913, and the company reincorporated in Michigan as the Universal Bottle Washer Company the following September. As the name implied, they manufactured bottle washing machines primarily used by breweries. Company officers, office management, and the most skilled machinists were relocated from Philadelphia to Detroit. The following illustration was either an attempt to e...

I just returned from a lovely few days at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with my daughter Mélanie (there we are at the Member Lounge, though Mel is still a little young to actually go the plays). Along with some wonderful Shakespeare my friends and I saw a great new play OSF commissioned, All the Way , by Robert Shenkkan, about Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act. Very much in the style of a Shakespeare history play, it's set on a broad canvas, with a wide cast of characters - politicians from both parties, Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, J. Edgar Hoover. I came home to Lauren's wonderful blog about Regencyland and the difficulties of "winkling out those elusive distinctions" of a specific year within a larger time period. As Lauren said, "Letters and diaries are even more revealing, the unmediated product of the moment." All the Way uses the actual words of the characters in many cases. It's set from November 1963 - November ...