Where Do We Park?

Stony Creek Cemetery 

Date Visited:  July 21, 2019

Stop:  #24

A trip to an historical village would not be complete without a trip to its cemetery, which was exactly our next stop on our historical tour of Stony Creek Village.  Surprisingly, the cemetery was actually quite a distance away – nearly a mile away from the schoolhouse. Looking at a map, however, one can imagine that the inhabitants of Stony Creek Village probably made the trek to the cemetery by way of the Old Romeo Road (which is now a foot trail), which reduced the distance to 0.6 miles from the schoolhouse.  In any event, we headed westward on Tienken Road to Letica Drive, and then headed south for about 0.38 miles. The cemetery is on the east side of Letica Drive, at the top of a hill, and just before you get to Romeo Street. The challenging part about accessing the cemetery is that it is closed off and there is no parking. Based on my observations, there are a couple of options – park on Moran Drive or Krista Court (north of the cemetery and a walk of about 750 feet), or park at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church (southwest of the cemetery on Romeo Street and a walk of about 0.32 miles), or try to park in the very small drive at the site of the historical marker (preferred, but I struggled to get my Suburban to fit in the space without my rear bumper sticking out into Letica Drive).

The historical marker is a two-sided sign located at the northern gate to the cemetery.  Both sides are titled Stony Creek Cemetery, but the cemetery is now referred to as “Stoney” Creek Cemetery (check out the sign that spans the southern entrance to the cemetery - see photo below).  The “frontside” of the sign provides a little history about the cemetery. It mentions that Nathaniel and Sally Millerd donated 1.7 acres of this land in 1839 to serve “forever” as a burying ground for the public.  Nathaniel was a very prominant person in his time – he built a grist mill in Stony Creek Village in 1824, operated a general store, and ran a Post Office out of his home. He also served as Oakland County’s second probate judge.  Both Nathaniel and Sally are buried in this cemetery. The sign also mentions that the Stony Creek Masonic Lodge No. 5 (see my Stop #21 blog for more info about this Lodge) owned the cemetery from 1924 until 1981. The cornerstone from the original Lodge resides as part of a monument that is located in the cemetery.

The backside of the marker focuses on the important historical figures that are buried in the cemetery.  The first person buried here was Michael Van Wagoner Sr. in 1825. You won’t find his grave because it is unmarked, but the historical marker will tell you that a monument was erected in his honor in 1978.  Also buried here are:

1. Lemuel and Sarah Taylor (referenced in my Stop #22 blog)
2. Lemuel and Sarah’s son, Joshua, who participated in drafting Michigan´s constitution in 1836
3. Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen (referenced in my Stop #22 blog)
4. Dr. Sarah Van Hoosen Jones (Bertha’s niece, and also referenced in the same Stop #22 blog)

The last burial took place here in 2017.

It would have been fascinating to walk around the cemetery looking for these important historical people, but the north gate was locked, and none of us thought to walk down to the south gate and check if it was open.  So, we loaded up and headed to downtown Rochester to hit our next targeted historical marker.

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To "E" or not To "E"

Stoney Creek School 

Date Visited:  July 21, 2019

Stop:  #23

At this point, it only seems appropriate that we have a lesson in spelling.  Afterall, our next visit was to the schoolhouse built for the children who lived at Stoney Creek Village.  If you have read my two prior blogs, you may have noticed something strange, or confounding, about this area.  It constantly baffled me to the point where I had to finally look it up in Google to see if they could shed any light on the subject.  In the various signs scattered about this area, you will notice that there are two different spellings used to describe this area – Stony and Stoney!!  With or without the E. Why? Why is the creek called Stony Creek while the village is called Stoney Creek? Why does the historical marker describing the history of the masons in this area refer to the Stony Creek Lodge while the historical marker describing the history of the village, a mere 305 feet away, refers to the area as the Stoney Creek Village.  I could not rationally explain this away in my mind, so I turned to Google to get an answer, and sure enough, I was provided one, albeit a very unsatisfying answer. But at least I know now that I am not imagining things. The best way to describe what is going on is to just provide you with a link to the article I found but suffice it to say, either spelling is acceptable and used interchangeably.  For more details on this, read the article at https://www.rochesterhills.org/DocumentCenter/Home/View/1077.  

So, are you satisfied with the answer?  I’m not so sure that I am. I was hoping for something more intriguing, but it is a bit comical that this issue, if you can call it that, has been going on for nearly 200 years.

The school, located on the eastern edges of the historic Stoney Creek Village, is a popular place to visit.  The Rochester area schools have offered a program for years where third grade students spend a couple of days at the school, wearing appropriate period-age clothes, and learning what it was like to go to school during the 1800’s and the history of that era.  They actually use McGuffey Readers, slates, and copybooks.

The first schoolhouse was built in 1825, but it burned to the ground and was replaced by the current school in 1848, nineteen years after the Stoney Creek School District was created.  Like many one-room schoolhouses of the times, children of all ages and grades (elementary through high school) attended classes here. It remained that way until 1931 when the high school students began to attend Rochester High School.   The first school teacher at Stoney Creek School was John Chapman, who was a mathematician. He taught several subjects during a typical school day, including spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, and physiology.  A school year consisted of two semesters – a winter semester, usually taught by a man, and a summer semester, usually taught by a woman. The two most prominent people to attend this school were Bertha Van Hoosen and Sarah Van Hoosen Jones, both of whom I wrote about in my previous blog.

The northern wing was added in 1952, but shortly after its completion, the Stoney Creek District Number 1 chose to join the Rochester Community School District, and the schoolhouse was closed.  It was used periodically over the years to help with overcrowding in a nearby elementary school. The schoolhouse was restored in 1976 and re-opened in 1982 as a living history classroom for third graders in the Rochester area.  Both my kids had the opportunity to participate in this learning experience and remains one of their favorite childhood memories.

#michiganwinesandsigns #michigan #history #michiganhistory #wine #michiganwine #winetasting #historyisbetterwithwine

A Legacy of Farming in Rochester Hills

Stoney Creek Village 

Date Visited:  July 21, 2019

Stop:  #22

We continued our visit at Stony Creek Village by exploring the grounds of the Van Hoosen House.  There is much to explore here and we were lucky to have the whole place practically to ourselves despite the near perfect day.  Sarah and David went to the gazebo and proceeded to antagonize Kathy by taking a total of 16 goofy pictures before they finally took a nice one.  Having grown up with any number of Kathy’s camera lenses pointed at them, they had decided a long time ago to make each picture taking session a five-minute episode of weird poses and goofy faces.  After finally getting a keeper, we wandered over to the gardens behind the house and took several more pics before following a path that took us over a wooden bridge spanning a small brook that emptied into the Stony Creek.  On the other side of the bridge was a vast expanse of manicured lawn with picnic tables scattered about. David and I walked over to the banks of the Stony Creek, while Kathy and Sarah took selfies on the wooden bridge. Eventually we headed up towards the house in search of the historical marker.

The marker, which is located at the south entrance to the Van Hoosen House (at the intersection of Van Hoosen Road and Runyon Road), describes the early history of Stony Creek Village.  The Stony Creek area was settled by Lemuel Taylor and his family in 1823. Within a year, Lemuel had built a dam and gristmill and by 1825, the village had a blacksmith, distillery, store, and post office. A hotel was built in the 1830s and a woolen mill was built just after the Civil War.  However, the village did not grow much beyond this due, in large part, to the proximity of the much larger city of Rochester.

One of the important families in Stony Creek history were the Van Hoosen’s, who arrived in 1836 with then-six-year old Joshua Van Hoosen.  Joshua purchased part of the farm in 1851, then went to California during the gold rush, hoping to make it rich. Two years later, he returned to Stoney Creek and purchased the remaining interest in the farm with the gold he found in California, and married Sarah Taylor, Lemuel Taylor's granddaughter (the engagement ring he gave her had been made from a gold nugget he found in California).  By 1880, Joshua Van Hoosen owned nearly 300 acres of land in the vicinity.  

One of Joshua’s and Sarah’s daughters, Bertha (1863-1952), became an internationally known surgeon.  Their granddaughter, Sarah Van Hoosen Jones, was born in 1892. Joshua died three years later and the family farm was eventually passed on to Sarah. She continued farming the area, and in 1921 became the first woman in the United States to receive a doctorate in animal genetics.  She raised herds of prized dairy cattle and ran the estate as a scientific and efficient dairy farm from 1923 until 1952. Jones deeded the farm to Michigan State University in 1954, and upon her death in 1972, several more buildings were donated to the university. The University later donated the Van Hoosen Farmhouse and three acres to Avon Township, and in 1989, the City of Rochester Hills acquired the Van Hoosen Farm buildings and 13 surrounding acres. It is now a museum operated by the city.

It would be very easy to spend a whole day at the farm.  There are several educational signs scattered about the grounds that fill in a lot of the details about what went on here, with all the experiments and innovations that took place.  We did not have time to stay too long, but our visit was a lot of fun and gave us a reason to return again sometime in the future.

#michiganwinesandsigns #michigan #history #michiganhistory #wine #michiganwine #winetasting #historyisbetterwithwine

A Rookie Mistake

Stony Creek Masonic Lodge No. 5 and Mount Moriah

Date Visited:  July 21, 2019

Stop:  #21

It was another perfect summer day – too nice to spend the day indoors recovering.  You see, we had been at a wedding and reception on Saturday, and we had a great time.  It was a late night, and there may have been some alcoholic beverages consumed.  But mostly, it was a lot of eating, dancing, talking, and laughing, and we were pretty wiped out Sunday morning.  But with the weather being so great, and with both my son and daughter home at the same time for the first time since we started our Michigan Wines and Signs quest, it seemed like a perfect day to spend on a quest.  The plan was to hit the many historical markers scattered around the Rochester area, and hit a couple of wineries in the area as well.  But as is the case far too many times, the best laid plans don’t always come to fruition.  We did make it to many historical markers, but because of a time constraint – my son needed to leave around 5:00 pm to get back to the west side of the state – we did not make it to any wineries as planned.  So, the next several blogs will focus on our visits to historical markers.

Our plan was to visit the Stony Creek Village Historic District first, located northeast of downtown Rochester off of Tienken Road.  There are three historical markers in this area, which is a popular tourist destination comprised of 17 historical buildings dating from the 1820’s and 1830’s.  This historic district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.  The most popular sites to visit are the Van Hoosen Farm and House, the Rochester Hills Museum, and the Stony Creek Schoolhouse.

We parked in the parking lot at the Van Hoosen Farm and decided that the first marker we would visit would be the Mount Moriah historical marker.  We walked through the parking lot to the Old Romeo Road Trail, a dirt and gravel path leading to Stony Creek and beyond.  The marker itself is located on the right side of the path as you are walking southwest, just before you get to the bridge that crosses the Stony Creek.

Mount Moriah was the name given to a large hill just west of the village of Stony Creek (founded 1823).  In 1847, the Stony Creek Masons decided to build a temple at the summit of Mount Moriah, and on July 4, 1849, the building was completed and dedicated in full Masonic honors.  This building had the distinction of being the first building in the state of Michigan built solely for Masonic purposes.  The building no longer exists – the lodge was moved to Rochester in 1853 and the building itself was dismantled and its materials used to build a barn.  The only existing evidence of the building is the cornerstone, which was incorporated into a Masonic monument erected at Stony Creek Cemetery in 1929.

The Temple itself was a modest octagonal wood frame structure, painted red, standing upon a stone foundation a few feet high.  The entrance was through a single door in the foundation and members had to use a ladder to get to the meeting room above.  The Stony Creek Masons built this Temple to commemorate that the Stony Creek Lodge, organized around 1825, was the oldest continuously operating lodge in Michigan at that time. 

Without any evidence of the building to explore, we took a few pictures, and then decided to explore the grounds in the area, totally forgetting to check the backside of the marker to ensure there wasn’t any additional information to read.  This was a rookie mistake because up until this time, we always checked the backside of the sign.  As a result, we completely missed the description of the Stony Creek Masonic Lodge No. 5, which is actually the FRONT side of the marker.  Once I realized my mistake (several days later), I knew I had to revisit the marker and get pics of the front side.  It wasn’t until August 25 when I finally returned to the scene of the rookie mistake, this time with just Kathy.  We could not park in the same parking lot as our first visit since they were hosting a private event (a wedding) at the Van Hoosen Farm, so I had to park at the beginning of the path.  Kathy did not have any interest in walking back to the sign, so I hoofed it up the path, read the sign, took the required pics for evidence, and returned to the car.

The frontside of the marker describes the early history of the area and the Stony Creek Masons.  The Masons had a strong presence in this area, and in or around 1825, William Burt led members of the Stony Creek Lodge in petitioning the Grand Lodge of Michigan for a charter.  The charter was approved in 1827 by the Grand Master, who just happened to be the governor of Michigan at that time and one of Michigan’s most famous historical figures, Lewis Cass.  However, the Grand Lodge suspended operations from 1829 until 1841 because of anti-Masonic mania sweeping the nation and the granting of the Stony Creek charter was delayed.  The Stony Creek Lodge continued to meet, whether it was at the local schoolhouse or in the homes of members, due to the efforts of Daniel Taylor, the tavern keeper at Stony Creek.  This was the only Masonic Lodge in Michigan that continued to meet during this period, and in 1844, the lodge was reconstituted.  The rest of the history was described in the Mount Moriah side of the marker.

After this experience, it will be a long time before we forget to check both sides of a sign again!!!  Now back to our regularly scheduled program, which will be continued on my next blog!!!

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