Many people best know the metro Detroit community of Troy for high-rise office buildings, busy boulevards and sprawling shopping malls, but the Troy Historic Village offers a different glimpse of the city.
Settlers emigrating from New York established a farming community known for corn, wheat, wool, melons, other fruits, and dairy products at Troy Township in the 1820s.
Troy lacked the hydropower for lumber or grist mills, and the Detroit and Milwaukee Railroad bypassed the area in favor of communities like Detroit, Royal Oak, and Pontiac. Detroit United Railroad provided electric trolley service to Troy from 1898 through 1931, but it wasn't until after World War II that Troy experienced massive growth.
Today, the city (and my mother's new home town) has a culturally diverse population of 81,000, with many residents claiming their heritage from countries like India, Pakistan, China, Japan, the Philippines, and more.
Troy Historic Village harkens back to Troy's early days with a variety of vintage, restored, renovated, and replicated buildings assembled to represent life in a nineteenth-century farming community.
The village's main building was Troy's township/city hall. Architect J. Bissel designed it in 1927 under the direction of then-township supervisor Morris Wattles, modeling it after a Dutch colonial-style tavern in the city of Troy, New York. Today the building houses a museum, gift store, offices, and a reference library.
Other village buildings include: an 1840 log cabin; an 1832 Greek revival home; an 1837 Methodist church; an 1870s cruciform-shaped parsonage restored to its early twentieth-century appearance; the 1877 one-room Poppleton School; a town hall originally built as a school in 1864; an 1870s wagon shop once home to a 1970s antique shop; a print shop replicated in an old water meter testing building; and a "representation" of a general store built at the village in 1989.
Most of the buildings came to the historic village from elsewhere in Troy, and some came to the village in pieces, dismantled before a move and reassembled at the village site.
The Poppleton School moved from several miles away in Troy. The 83-ton building proved too heavy for a nearby I-75 overpass and too tall to move underneath the overpass. Workers dismantled the school, moved it to the village, and reassembled it in 1980.
The Niles-Barnard House is the most recent addition to the village's collection. Pioneering Troy settler Johnson Niles built it during the 1820s, and the home moved to the village in fall of 2010.
We visited the village as part of a local history conference. Docents in each of the buildings, many of them costumed in nineteenth-century clothing, were well informed and enthusiastic about showing visitors around and answering questions. The village staged tasting stations for our conference with selections like turducken, hot cider, wine, cheese and cookies in each building and an opportunity to make s'mores over and open fire by the 1840-era cabin.
The docent at the village church was particularly good about pointing out the building's special features, telling visitors that some of the stained glass windows had unique colors no longer possible to produce because craftspeople creating them at the turn-of-the-century used arsenic to get those hues!
The village is open year round and draws over 25,000 visitors annually.
Parents with younger children who feel a much larger museum or a massive historic complex like Greenfield Village is too large or pricey to tackle with them should find the Troy Historic Village a great choice for a field trip.
You can rent the village or buildings in the complex for meetings, classes or special events like meetings, plays, or weddings. You can also rent time at the village to stage photography sessions for family, graduation, or other memorable occasions.
Village officials encourage visitors to bring a picnic lunch or a good book with them and simply enjoy the village green, and we found it a great place to take photos.
The largely volunteer-run museum struggles in the face of uncertain city funding from year to year, but the Troy Historical Society continues efforts to raise money to maintain and grow the village.
The Troy Historic Village is at 60 W. Wattles Road, just west of Livernois Road, in Troy. The complex is open 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, on select Saturdays, and for special events. Admission is $3 for adults and teens, $2 for children ages 6 through 12, and free for kids under 5 years old.
© Dominique King 2012 All rights reserved
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