Posted on Tuesday, July 04, 2006 - 1:27 pm:

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Those blocks that Danny pointed out are mostly vacant. It's a bit scary to ride down them because it's like there's no end in sight, especially when all you see are boarded-up houses or empty lots. The street Philip is so bumpy between Kercheval and Jefferson that once you go down it you'll never do it again.

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Posted on Thursday, July 06, 2006 - 2:59 pm:

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The Siterlet House was built in 1853. Now 118 years old [pub. 1971], the house is the oldest documented house in the region. The basement still contains the original one-foot-thick, pioneer rounded oak beams.

Most of the pioneers lived off the land like the Indians, and like the Indians they gathered berries and went hungry when they found nothing; deer, bear, wild turkey, fox, wildcat, raccoon, squirrel, fowl, and fish were abundant at first. However, some of the pioneers chose to live not off the land, but off the naivete of other people - not only the Indians, but white settlers too. The very first pioneer in Fitzgerald, Gildersleeve Hurd, made his living by swindling other white pioneers.

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Posted on Thursday, July 06, 2006 - 3:56 pm:

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Another myth explodes under examination. The pioneers did not live in an open egalitarian society. From the beginning, there was great social stratification on the frontier. There were class differences among individual homesteaders, and even greater class differences between homesteaders and renters. The wealthiest homesteaders, like Hurd and Witherell, possessed considerable capital, and hired others to clear the land. Mary Sasançon, a homesteader from the Twelfth Street (Fenkell) Phillips family, suggests both the superiority and the sympathy that many homesteaders felt towards the renters:

I do not mean that renters were bad people, but they just were people who did not seem to get ahead. You know if you did not own anything you had a hard time to save your money to buy it. If you were fortunate enough to have somebody leave you something, perhaps a piece of a farm, you were pretty well set.

In spite of early land ownership, the Pocherts fell on hard times and became one of the poorest families. The father Pochert would not work, and the children never had enough to eat. Other girls at school would give part of their lunch to the Pochert girls, but they would still be hungry and would resort to taking other people’s food. Mrs. Horkey was their favorite target, as Rudy Nemecek reports:

Mrs. Horkey used to put skimmed milk, the whey, in a great big dishpan in the yard for the chickens. They had a high gate and kept it shut because they had a couple of savage dogs. But the Pochert girls would squeeze through that gate and eat that sour milk out ot those pans. They were hungry.

Like many poor people, the Pocherts tended to be touchy. The Pochert girls were never liked by their classmates, the other girls at school, even though these other girls condescended to give them some lunch. When a Pochert girl and another girl from school got into a fight, the Pochert girl’s mother, "Old Lady" Pochert, would really retaliate. Rudy Nemechek tells of one incident:

A Pochert girl was having some trouble with Eda Holman. They had quite a row. When the Pochert girl went home and told her mother, her mother went over to Eda Holman’s house and waited until Eda came out. She attacked Eda on the road and blacked her in the eye. "Old Lady" Pochert was a miserable buzzard.



The renters sensed their differences from the homesteaders, and formed their own society.

The leader of the "renters" was "Old Jake" or "Chicken Thief" Phillips, as the homesteaders called him. He was not a relative of the 12th Street Phillips’. He worked as a horse jockey (horse trader). Tough but understanding, he was the friend of the other less socially prominent members of the community, including “Nigger Kennedy" and "Black Jack" Cavanaugh.


The marginal house of "Chicken Thief" Phillips, on Six Mile and Monica.


Renters butcher hogs on Six Mile in 1916. The butcher, with a knife in hand, was a narcotics addict whom the renters seemed to treat with sad regret, even tenderness. "Old Jake" or "Chicken Thief" Phillips is seen at the far right of the picture.

"Black Jack" Cavanaugh was Irish, and an alcoholic. Frank Phillips tells how he lived and how he died:

The Cavanaughs still have an undertaking establishment. Bill Cavanaugh, Jack’s brother, laid all my family away. We called him "Black Jack" because he had whiskers that came way down to here and they were black and his hair was curly. He never liked to work. But Jack would not harm anybody. If he had a bottle of whiskey, he had all he wanted. In those days there were gypsies, so when we kids saw Jack we would run. He came up to the house one time and Dad said, 'Jack, you got any potatoes down there?' 'Oh, I might have one or two.' Dad said, 'Well, there is the fork, go out and dig some for yourself.'

"Black Jack" went down off Six Mile and Hamilton and took two of those old piano boxes and put them together. There was a hole in the bottom and he crawled in that hole. It snowed and it was pretty cold, and Dad wanted to see him for something, so we got a horse and a wagon and went on down. Jack lived way back in the woods. I went and knocked on his place and there was no answer; so I went back to Dad and he said, "He must be there because there are no tracks in the snow." So Dad went to look while I held the horses; he found Jack dead. He may have frozen to death. We never knew. His brother buried him, but not from his luneral parlor.

By 1890 farmers began to work the land as a market garden for Detroit. As Detroit grew, the need for huge quantities of vegetables became pressing, and farmers expanded their gardening, which had originally just provided food for their own families. They turned from such products as milk, oats, hay, hogs, and cows, to such cash crops as melons, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and green onions, and still later to Will Barr’s berries, especially strawberries. People began to buy automobiles and trucks. Most people no longer had that dirt-poor, that Appalachian poor, look to them.

Gradually, the value of the farms increased. Some farm families did very well. For instance, in 1852, Frederick W. Pochert paid one hundred and sixty dollars for forty acres of land at the southwest corner of McNichols and Livernois. In 1916 the same land (no longer owned by Pochert) sold for two thousand dollars an acre. That is, its value increased five hundred times in sixty-four years. The rise in value was coincident with the expansion of the City of Detroit. Some families, such as the Meyers, did very well indeed.

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Posted on Monday, July 10, 2006 - 3:06 pm:

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Dougw, read a little Jane Jacobs. She will explain in exhaustive detail why long city blocks suck, particularly that they isolate parts of neighborhoods because pedestrians (and drivers) have fewer routes to get to points of interest, shopping, etc. With long city blocks people on one side of the block are a lot less likely to visit the other side of the block.

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Posted on Thursday, July 13, 2006 - 1:07 am:

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Hurd and Witherell: The Pioneer Syndicate

Gildersleeve Hurd was the first white pioneer in the region. Arriving from Fair Haven, Vermont in Detroit in 1826, he settled up the entire area of what was to become the University of Detroit (from McNichols to Puritan and from Livernois to Fairfield) in 1835. He would seem to be a perfect pioneer with all the red, white and blue credentials. He was a portrait artist, and one of his portraits, of Mrs. James Witherell, is held today by the Detroit Historical Society.

Gildersleeve Hurd had followed his brother, Dr. Ebenezer Hurd, to Detroit. Dr. Hurd seems a brave man:

One summer evening in 1858 Dr. Hurd’s daughter Elizabeth was crossing the railroad bridge which spans the avenue at Dequindre Street. Suddenly a colored man of Herculean build emerged on the bridge from the abutment below and, pointing across the river, said, “I want to get over there. I want to be free.”

Elizabeth went home and informed her father, who immediately put on his hat and coat and sallied forth. He took the fugitive up the river to Pitts Lumber Yard and procured a boat. The fugitive said he could row. He pulled out of the slip with superhuman energy and the boat went swiftly across the river. The doctor watched the boat until it was out of sight, and went home with the consciousness of a good deed well done. (The Sunday News-Tribune, October 25, 1896.)

Dr. Ebenezer Hurd, abolitionist, was also Fitzgerald’s first doctor and probably its best. He married a Witherell of that distinguished Revolutionary War family after whom a downtown street is named; another marriage in the family united the Palmers with the Witherell-Hurds. All this points to a neighborhood pioneer family history of culture, patriotism, and humanism; but it is not the full story.

The incident of the runaway at the bridge also involved Dr. Ebenezer Hurd’s brother-in-law Judge Benjamin Franklin Hawkins Witherell. Before going to her father, Elizabeth Hurd had gone to Witherell, as The Sunday News-Tribune had also reported:

After a moment’s thought she concluded not to summon her father, who was then seventy-nine years of age and generally exhausted after his daily round of calls. So she went to the house of her uncle, B. F. H. Witherell, which was close by.

She found her uncle at home and asked him to get the slave across the river. “What!” said the judge sternly, “Go home. You must not talk to me that way.”

Judge Witherell was a Copperhead, a Northerner with slave-holding sympathies. The Copperheads in Detroit succeeded in burning down the black ghetto in 1863 as part of their “fire in the rear” policy, best exemplified by the “draft riots” in New York in the same year. In 1860, Witherell publicized a one-sided history of an 1833 black rebellion in Detroit in an attempt to create an atmosphere of fear and racism on the eve of the Civil War. Part of the account of the rebellion reads as follows:

During the revolt, the lives and property of the citizens were jeopardized to an extent which rendered it necessary for the Common Council and the Mayor to solicit aid and protection of government troops from Fort Gratiot.

Sheriff Wilson had been dangerously wounded in the execution of his duties. An old Negress, carrying a white rag on the top of a pole, is said to have led a motley crew of Negroes, under her flag, through the principal streets of the city. At length the troops were reported approaching the city and a general scramble for Canada was the result.

The actual historic facts, as opposed to Witherell’s one-sided account, are that in July of 1833 a runaway couple who had been in Detroit for over a year was caught by the local sheriff and jailed for shipment South. A black woman visited the wife in jail and changed places, freeing the woman. “They all looked alike,” even in those days. The next morning the husband was freed by the entire black population, armed to the teeth, who slew the resisting deputy sheriff and seriously injured the sheriff, literally at the southbound stagecoach. This black rebellion ended the hunt for fugitive slaves in Michigan.

Judge Witherell also purchased a large tract to the immediate east of what is today the University of Detroit (McNichols to Puritan, Fairfield to Log Cabin.) He set up his brother-in-law, Gildersleeve Hurd on the very land which was to become the University of Detroit, then the two worked on a flim-flam:

Judge B. F. H. Witherell was a speculator in north Woodward property. He laid out a big parcel of property into lots, in section 15 of the township of Green field, about nine miles from the city hall. They called it Cassandra. He had a wicked partner (Gildersleeve Hurd) who sought to stimulate the sale of lots in an illegitimate manner. This “w.p.” sent down to Ohio and procured several wagon loads of iron ore, which was brought to the subdivision and half-buried in the land. Subsequently the iron was “found” and the newspapers of the day, in advertising Cassandra, dilated on its mineral rocks. (Detroit News Tribune, October 28, 1900.)

Thus, the first white Fitzgerald landowners, Hurd and Witherell, were swindlers, and Witherell was also a racist of treasonable proportions. Nor were Witherells contempories fooled. Wags of the town had a nickname for the portly judge, B. F. H. “Big Fat Hog” Witherell; Witherell, of course, had bankrolled the job. But for all the public scandal, the two robber barons got away with it. Witherell became Michigan Supreme Court Justice, President of the Michigan Historic Society (of which both Hurds were prominent members), and died with great public honor, elaborate tribute from the Michigan Bar and, most of all, with wealth. Hurd, his muscle, had $3,000 worth of property in 1850, a tremendous amount for that day.

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Posted on Thursday, July 13, 2006 - 1:55 am:

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Another important feature of today's landscape, the University of Detroit, was gradually moved during the 1920's from its original downtown site to the present campus in Fitzgerald. The campus occupied land once owned by Gildersleeve Hurd, but most recently by the Horkey family. The Horkeys had several farmhouses, one, the oldest, on Livernois and three on Six Mile. Their land, partially boggy at first, had gradually been improved and agricultural production had intensified with the coming of truck farming. The Horkeys had gone in for green onions in a big way, and had prospered. Except for the elder Horkey's anti-theism, the family was highly conservative.

When Father McNichols, who led the move of the University to its present campus, came to purchase the property, the assembled Horkeys insisted on payment in one dollar bills. Father McNichols was stunned, but evidently retained his practicality, for he and his aides dutifully marched off to the bank and returned with an enormous was of one dollar bills, which the Horkeys counted carefully. After the papers had been signed and the Father had departed, the Horkey family carefully divided the money into small piles, rushed out to the hen house, and placed the piles under various nesting hens. There were enough country slickers around so that the farmers were afraid of robbery, and the entire male contingent of the Horkey clan stood armed guard in the hen house all night, waiting for the bank to open in the morning.

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Posted on Thursday, July 13, 2006 - 10:20 am:

and you knew who you were then,
girls were girls and men were men
Mr we could use a man like Witherell ... Poindexter ... Dennis Archer(?!) ... LBpatterson again
...
those were the days