Lots of Christmas Trees

This stately old home, formerly owned by the "Strawberry King" R.M. Kellogg, has been beautifully restored and features several Christmas trees in its large bay windows. On Hoffman.

Home Sweet Home

I've been thinking about starting a series of photos of the many interesting homes in Three Rivers, but the morning was sunny so I went out on the Portage River - and found an interesting home... well, it is for wood ducks, but has a great location!

Tree with Matching House

This house on Garden Street seems to have been painted to match the beautiful fall color of the small tree beside it.

Monochrome

Shadows and reflections on the beautiful mansion built by EJ Buys in the 1890s. A downtown storefront still has a stained glass window that features his name. I did get to tour the house, which is now a bed-and-breakfast (Voyagers Inn). Besides the beautiful windows and woodwork, its interesting to see how people lived then, with the public and private spaces, and the servants' section of the house.

Flowers in the rain

Even in the pouring rain, these flowers in front of a home on 12th Street seem to glow.

Heimbach Road

Heimbach Road runs just north of town, named for a farming family that built this home sometime in the 1850s. Long buried in a dense and tangled woods by the side of the road, the house is now visible for the first time in many years as the land is being cleared for a farm equipment dealer. Heimbachs still live in the area, and a very elderly Heimbach pointed out to me a similar house just down the road as having been built by his great-grandfather.

The curved "eyebrow" windows at the top of the house are a very unusual feature.

The Three Rivers Commericial newspaper has an article ("Heimbach home to pass into memory", by Rick Cordes, 18 August 2009) about the house. In the article, nearby residents of a similar house speculate that the land on which the house sits may have been "part of the 1832 land grant that parceled property in Southwest Michigan to early European-ancestry settlers."

The Homestead Act was not passed until 1862; before that there was the Preemption Act of 1841, which encouraged farmers from the eastern United States to move onto government-owned land in the west, including Michigan. The Treaty of St. Joseph in 1827 ceded most Potawatomi land in Michigan to the Federal Government, but reserved several large areas near Three Rivers. Treaties after the Blackhawk War (1832) led to general "removal" of Indians, but local Potawatomi held onto their land until the late 1830s, and a few managed to resist removal entirely. Their descendants still live in southwest Michigan.

As do the descendants of the Heimbach family!

Housework

A lovely bungalow on Portage Avenue is now decorated with scaffolding. Two men brave a drizzle to repoint the chimney.