cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

Happy Purim, everyone! (Okay, it was yesterday, but whatever.) Purim is one of my favorite holidays; it's the Jewish celebration of the story of Esther (which I encourage you to read  if you haven't, it's a fantastic story with a royal divorce, a beauty pageant, both comical comeuppance and tragic comeuppance (both of the same guy), a fifty-foot-tall gallows, a plot to kill all the Jews, a brave young woman saving her people, and a king who despite being kind of a jerk still is willing to grant his wife any request, even unto half his kingdom), and it also has some truly delicious cookies associated with it: hamantaschen. Hamantaschen are triangle-shaped cookies filled with thick, jammy goodness, some of the most traditional flavors being prune, apricot, and poppyseed. They look like this: ( photo by Infrogmation, via Wikimedia Commons ) Here are the ones I made (hanging out with our Hulk): While tracking down a new recipe for prune filling this year  (it's DELICIOUS),...

I'm here to unilaterally declare Saturday's Inaugural Mill Creek Hundred History Gathering a smashing success. (Did you not see the three -- count 'em, three -- exclamation points in the title? I don't use them lightly.) The day was a bit dreary, but luckily it wasn't really raining while we were there. The venue was fabulous. How perfect was it to be talking about history in a 200+ year old house, overlooking a 200+ year old mill on the site of one a century older? It certainly made all our talk seem very appropriate. Many thanks go out to Greenbank Mill Associates for allowing us the use of the room. And thanks to the generosity of our attendees, we ended up making a $90 donation to GMA as a way of showing our appreciation. "Thanks" to everyone!! I couldn't have been happier with how it all went. I'm a very bad host and didn't get a precise count of how many people we had, but I'm pretty sure there were about 22 or 23 of us, give or take....

Two important sources deserve special acknowledgement: my neighbor Ann Aldridge, who loaned me her collection newspaper and magazine clippings about Ethel Claes; and the 1962 book Profile of a Metropolis: A Case Book by Robert J. Mowitz and Deil S. Wright, which dedicates a whole chapter to Corktown's urban renewal in the 1950s. "The Queen of Corktown" On October 9, 1982, a Detroit Free Press obituary declared, "The Queen of Corktown is dead." Ethel Claes, a Corktown resident for over fifty years and longtime president of its homeowners' organization, had passed away at the age of sixty-nine. The neighborhood--or at least what was left of it--partly owed its existence to the co-owner of a Corktown book shop run out of a Victorian house on the corner of Leverette and 11th Street. Miss Claes ( pronounced " klahs " ) was born in Duluth, Minnesota on July 24, 1913. Her father Bernard had immigrated from the Netherlands, and her mother Hilja from F...

Greenbank Mill and the Madison Factory In Part 1 of this post, we traced the early history of the Greenbank Mill and the Philips House, which are located on Greenbank Road just down the hill from Price's Corner. We saw that the original log "Swedes Mill" was purchased in 1773 by Robert Philips, who then built a larger frame mill next to it in 1790. A few years after that he built a new stone house for himself and his family. Around the time of the War of 1812, Robert and son John R. Philips entered the wool manufacturing business, and built the stone Madison Factory on the site of the recently razed Swedes Mill. The wool business was not kind to them, and by the early 1820's the mill had been seized by the sheriff for unpaid debts, and John R. had moved away. Robert Philips died in late 1828, and in 1830 the property was finally sold to his nephew, John C. Philips. For the next twenty years or so, John C. Philips (1782-1854) operated the grist mill, as well as a saw ...

Greenbank Mill in the 1960's, before the fire The power of the many streams and creeks of Mill Creek Hundred has been harnessed for almost 340 years now, as the water flows from the Piedmont down to the sea. There have been literally dozens of sites throughout the hundred where waterwheels once turned, but today only one remains. Nestled on the west bank of Red Clay Creek, the Greenbank Mill stands as a living testament to the nearly three and a half century tradition of water-powered milling in MCH. The millseat at Greenbank is special to the story of MCH for several reasons -- it was one of the first harnessed here, it's the longest-serving, and it's the only one still in operable condition. The fact that it now serves as a teaching tool only makes it more special, at least in my eyes. The early history of the millseat at Greenbank is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside....Ok, it's not quite that bad, but the actual facts are far from clear. The precise details (su...