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.
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