In 1824 thirty-eight-year-old Orange Risdon and thirty-two-year-old Samuel Dexter spent four months on horseback exploring mostly uninhabited land in southeast Michigan. At the end of the 2,000-mile trip, they settled within a...
Read MoreJerry Colone tested trucks at the Chrysler Proving Grounds for thirty-four years. Now, he says, the huge complex southwest of Chelsea is “like a ghost town.”Employment at the grounds has fallen from 700 five years...
Read MoreRobin Warner sits just inside the door of the Pittsfield Grange Hall, a simple white clapboard building on Ann Arbor–Saline Road, collecting admission. Gray-haired and dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, he pauses to chat with...
Read MoreIt’s a brisk but sunny spring day as Jeff Messman pulls his pickup into Dave and Gordon Whelan’s dairy farm near Tipton in Lenawee County. Messman makes the drive from Fredonia to the Whelan farm every two weeks....
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“He’s always liked guns.”Seventeen-year-old Benjamin Lucas is sweating bullets. He’s on the witness stand at the 14A District Courthouse in Pittsfield Township, testifying for the prosecution at the...
Read MoreThe Bell Road Bridge in Dexter Township is on the National Register of Historic Places. The plaque so designating it, however, is sitting in neighbor Bill Klinke’s garage—because for twelve years the nineteenth-century...
Read MoreRichard and Carole Murphy were driving through North Dakota several years ago when they noticed three enormous metal blades spinning slowly in the prairie wind.”We were curious, so I turned around and drove back until we...
Read MoreIn this town I could be happy, in this town I’d make new friends—In this town . . . I could start all over again.—The cover of Annie and Rod Capps’s fifth album, In This Town, shows the local folk duo lounging...
Read More“Why are so many of the buildings going up around town so ugly?” asks Joan Lowenstein. Standing in City Hall’s cramped main entrance, the not-yet-former city council representative isn’t afraid to name...
Read MoreGershom Avery spent last summer and fall tirelessly gathering signatures to get an initiative to legalize medical marijuana on the Michigan ballot. And during those same months, Avery, fifty-three, says he was waging a secret...
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