Weird things found on the internet...

[jhetley]

...personal connections division.

Okay, there's this internet site devoted to a particular subset of Victorian-era insane asylums (or  state hospitals, the polite term).  Which I found featured in one of my junk-mail architectural magazines.  And one of the asylums listed:

http://www.kirkbridebuildings.com/buildings/traversecity/

The personal connection -- my grandfather ran the place for about a decade, back around the turn of the previous century, and my mother was born there.  We have, downstairs, an inlaid walnut cribbage board and a "Petoskey Stone" napkin ring made by inmates as presents to the family...

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Oh, geez, big world folded over a lot. For most of their lives, my paternal grandparents used to live just outside of Wellston, and we made regular trips to Traverse City for groceries and the like. I haven't been back up there since 1982, but the Czarina and I are making plans: I understand that Traverse City isn't even close to being the town it was back then, and I mean that as a high compliment.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I read "Wellston" and thought you'd typo'd "Pellston", because Wife studied at the Biological Station near there. Then I checked a map. Did they even widen the road at Wellston?

Traverse City has grown mightily since we last visited (1970, +/-), and I am probably no longer related to half the residents.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

It's funny that you say that, because it got narrowed after GM and Chrysler laid off everyone in the Seventies. My grandfather's old grocery store, shut down over thirty years ago, literally marked where the highway went from four lanes to two. Again, I need to make the trip back up that way, if only for closure's sake.

[cailleuch.livejournal.com]

Last summer had coffee in a shop that is part of the mixed use renovation. They have some really interesting ideas for the re-use of the buildings. I looked into it pretty extensively as they have some really good deals if you are an artist, which I am. The setting is so beautiful that I think they will probably make a go of it.

Traverse City is nearly unrecogizable from what it looked like in the 1980's when I first traveled there.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I would imagine that the setting is improved by the removal (I assume...) of the pig farm that used to be part of the complex...

[cailleuch.livejournal.com]

Oh my yes! NO pigs!

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

'Way back when, the agricultural aspect became obvious for a mile downwind. They grew most of the food for the Hospital, with a surplus for the state prison system.

So said my mother.

[cailleuch.livejournal.com]

Growing up on a dairy farm in Vermont the "agricultural aspect" as you call it is something you don't forget. Must have been interesting in the day because most of the old downtown seems to me to have been downwind of the Hospital.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

According to my mother, yes, you could smell it at the Hannah and Lay Docks if the wind was right. Her family moved from the Superintendent's House to a place on South Union when her father was promoted to another state post, but the memories followed them...

[pernishus.livejournal.com]

I have a Petoskey stone, polished, in my top desk drawer as I type this -- and an invitation to spend a week at Lake Leelanau this July from my friends and former pastor David and Mary and their two children. My summers in the early nineteen sixties were spent there -- or a week or two of them, anyway. My uncle's land on the upper end of the lake is one of the very few pieces still undeveloped.