Yes, that is the whole of the town. Not that it is insignificant. The building in the middle, white on the bottom dark on the top with white frames on the windows used to be a stop for stagecoaches and other travelers going from Detroit to Chicago. The main road you see, running from east in the center and heading west to the right, is U.S. Highway 12 which originates in Detroit and ends in Aberdeen, Washington. It follows the path of an old Indian trail, and is known for portions of its length as Michigan Avenue. The section we lived on is called Chicago Road. It is still a major route for semis going from here to there across the bottom of Michigan.
This is one quarter of the cross-roads of US 12 and Somerset Road that makes up the heart of Somerset. On this southwest corner is the on-again off-again gas station, mostly hidden by vehicles in this picture. For a while, in the 1970s (including the glorious year of 1976), this was actually a name brand Union 76 station, appropriately enough.
The trailer has been there, in the same position since we moved to town in the late 1960s. It used to have a companion trailer that sat in between the remaining one and the white house. This companion trailer housed the Post Office for Somerset, and was painted postal colors of navy blue and white. Eventually, the Post Office moved across the street, where it remained for many years. In the late 1980s or early 90s, the Post Office closed but postal activities still took place at the doctor's office on the east end of the town. Sadly, the last time I went looking for the Somerset zip code, 49281, it appeared to be no longer in existence. It must have been combined with the Somerset Center zip code 49282 just a couple miles west down 12.
On the other side of Somerset Road, beyond the house that once was a stagecoach hotel, is a soft serve ice cream restaurant called Freddie's Freeze. Freddie lives in the former hotel and now runs in the Freeze. In the past, he used to issue coupons from "The Largest Dairy Treat in Somerset Michigan". Of course it was the only dairy treat in Somerset Michigan.
Across US 12 from the Freeze was a manufacturer called Alson's which made shower heads. They closed eventually and moved their operations to Hillsdale, the county seat. But they are still in business: alsons.com.
And finally, on the corner across from the trailer is a former 1800s general store which served as a warehouse for Alson's. Attached to it was the Post Office, once it had moved out of the trailer. This is the corner where we would wait to catch the school bus.
This is the small church on the north end of Somerset Road that I used to attend. It was handy -- all I had to do on Sunday mornings was wake up, make myself some breakfast and head across the field for Sunday School. Generally, the field was corn although sometimes, as in this case, it was planted in alfalfa. One of the houses near the church (which can't be seen in this picture), pre-dates the house I grew up in. The story is that it was originally built on the site and instead of tearing it down, it was split in half. One half was placed on a lot on Somerset Road and the other half directly across Chicago Road. That second half has since been torn down.
Here is the house that I grew up in. It was built in 1888 for the Smith family. My parents purchased it in 1968 from the Smiths which was the first time it had been out of the family. The Smiths were and are quite prominent in the area. And their house was too. We often gave our address as The Brick House, Somerset, Michigan, and mail easily found its way to us.
I went to school with many of the Smith family relatives and the father of one of them, Nick Smith, was recently a Congressman. Because it was such a large and prosperous family, many of them hated to see the house "go" and so bunches of them would appear at our door on weekends asking for a tour of the house that they hadn't been in for decades, not since they were a child. I loved the concept of house-as-tourist-attraction. For the most part, my parents did not, although they learned quite a bit about the house itself from our visitors. Me, I was all for putting up velvet ropes across the doorway to my bedroom and charging admission to come in.
To the west of our house was a barn, owned by the Ferris's who lived about a mile away. They owned the field behind us as well as the one across the road. This barn held all the young female cows which had not yet had a calf and generally a bull. Once the cows were pregnant and about to give birth, they were taken to another barn and eventually they became dairy cattle.
The barn was left to decay over the years, even during the time I lived there, and by 1989 was in bad disrepair and no longer used. The small white building in front used to be a milkhouse, from the days when the barn held milking cows. From the time we lived there though the milkhouse was no longer used. Sometimes my brother and I would beg Mr. Ferris to open the rusty lock that held the door closed so we could stare at the ancient equipment and stalls, all covered with cobwebs and smelling of mouse pee.
There was also a long shed between the main barn and our house. The section closest to the barn had slatted walls and was used for storage: farm equipment such as hay wagons and ones for hauling corn, and sometimes corn itself or hay if there was an over-abundance one year. Mr. Ferris did not like us playing in this section of barn. He absolutely forbid us to play on the piles of corn since it could easily shift and suffocate someone. He wasn't too keen on us climbing the bales of hay either because we could get a leg stuck in between the bales unexpectedly and break it. We didn't tell him that we liked to also climb up inside the grain wagons and slide down their sloping interior walls.
Our family took over the other end of the shed and used it for years to store outdoor tools, our bikes, old flower pots and so on. There was an old washing machine against a wall at one end and my brother and his friend discovered that if you used a stack of old newspapers to climb up onto the top of the machine and from there you could inch along a narrow beam using the gaps between the boards in the barn walls as handholds. From there you could walk across the loft, which was a platform over one third of the space and then balance across several beams to grab a door that led into an enclosed loft on the other side. It was a tricky process, especially the part about balancing on the beams and knowing just how to grab the door and use the momentum as it swung to propel you into the room. But they taught me how to do it and we used that loft space as a fort. Down below my mother decorated the outside of the shed in country fashion with a yoke, a wagon wheel and a horseshoe, not knowing we were making like rock climbers and monkeys inside.
Despite the fact we had moved from the suburbs outside of Detroit to the county and both my parents and all of their parents had been urban- and suburbanites, it didn't take all the long for them to embrace the old country tradition of having junk cars laying around the property. Even the presence of Lake Somerset, a man-made lake populated by fellow ex-Detroit suburbanites just beyond the field behind us, wasn't enough of an influence to convince them the cars were unsightly. Those cars were still "good" and could be put to some use someday in the distant future. Welcome to rural America!
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