The two photographs below were taken in 1918 and feature my father, two of his younger brothers and a family friend. The water in the background of the second photo made me think they were taken on Belle Isle or perhaps across the Detroit River in Canada. I thought that I would be able to place the photos by using the cannon in the second picture. I was able to find several cannons in the Detroit area, unfortunately none looked like the one in the photo. The presence of a family friend makes me think it was taken in Detroit and not on a family trip to another state. At least it was labeled with names and dates.
Henry Cleage, Cornelius Henderson, Louis Cleage, Albert Cleage. 1918 Detroit.
Louis Cleage, Cornelius Henderson, Albert Cleage, Henry Cleage.
The prompt for this weeks Sepia Saturday is a photograph of a boy in front of a theater next a sign advertising a movie about an ex-convict. Standing on the far right side is a man with his head cut off by the photographer. I looked through my photos and was disappointed to find no sepia headless ones. I thought I had seen some in a box of photographs that came from my uncle Henry Cleage.
I came across this photograph in the box. Most of the photographs are of Henry’s first wife, Alice Stanton. She is the one in the front holding the purse. I noticed Doris Graham, my mother and Henry’s second wife, dancing in the background. I do not know who either of the men are. The photo was taken in 1939 or 1940 in Detroit. Henry and Alice were married on 3 September, 1941 in Detroit and divorced not too many years later. At first I thought that this photograph was taken the same day as the one below, but when I compared them, the news photo was of a much posher affair.
“Oh, Mr. Photographer! That’s what pretty Doris Graham (left) probably said as she glided by in the arms of Robert Douglass … Chesterfield club…” The incomplete caption at the bottom of this photo from my grandmother Fannie Graham’s scrapbook. Doris Graham, my mother. The newspaper was the Detroit Tribune which was published by my grandmother’s cousin, Edward McCall. The date was added by my grandmother.
For some reason, at this point, I noticed the address on the box that the photographs were kept in. It was addressed to Dr. L. J. Cleage at Homer Phillips Hospital in St.Louis.
The box.
Had my Uncle Louis done his medical internship at Homer Phillips Hospital? If so, it was probably around 1940. Although both Louis and my father were enumerated with their parents on Scotten Ave. in Detroit, both were listed as absent from the home. You can see them here in the 1940 Census. I went to Ancestry.com and looked for records for Louis Jacob Cleage. In the 1940 census he was indexed with his parents but there was also a Dr. Louis Cleage in St. Louis, MO. There he was, living in the doctor’s housing at Homer G. Phillips, as a Jr. intern.
Homer G. Phillips Hospital and surrounding area 1940.
The story of Homer G. Phillips hospital is a familiar one – black citizens tired of second class health care, black doctors tired of not being able to hospitalize and care for their own patients, of being unable to practice in the hospitals in their city. Click this link to read more about Homer G. Phillips Hospital’s interesting history. My husband’s younger siblings were born in St. Louis. He thought some of them might have been born at Homer G. Phillips. As luck would have it, his sister called right about then and confirmed that she and all of the youngest five Williams’ were born there from 1950 to 1963.
I seemed to be on a roll, so I decided to see if my father was enumerated in 1940 as a student at Oberlin where he attended Seminary. He did not turn up anywhere else outside of his parents home in the 1940 census. However, he was listed in the 1940 Oberlin Student Directory. His birth date is off by 9 years, but the home address is his parent’s Scotten Ave. address in Detroit.
After all this it was an anti-climax to find one photo with half a head missing – Henry holding up some fish while standing by Lake Idlewild. Since the focus is on the fish, perhaps this doesn’t really count. My family photographers seemed to have been more likely to leave lots of space with everybody crowded to the center than they were to chop off a head. Or maybe they just tossed all of those headless photographs.
This post continues a series using the Alphabet to go through streets that were significant in my life as part of the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge. I am remembering living at 160 Sixth Avenue, Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. We lived there for one year, I was 29 and Jim was 30. We had two daughters – Jilo, four and Ife, almost two. Jim was hired as director of the South Carolina office of the Emergency Land Fund, a group trying to stem the lose of Black Land. We moved from Atlanta, GA to Mt. Pleasant, SC. in October, 1974. His office was in Charleston. We were less than ten minutes from the ocean. For the first time, I was a “housewife”. I was a volunteer teacher with the children’s art program at the Charleston Museum. I learned how to drive. Got pregnant with our third daughter, Ayanna. In early November of 1975 the office was closed and we moved to Simpson County, Mississippi.
Ife with puppies and cat. Jilo inside.
Memories: The man plowing the field next to our house with a mule. Spanish moss in the oak trees. The Angel Oak, over 1,000 years, with branches on the ground as big as tree trunks. The local people’s way of talking. Getting shrimp and flounder fresh off the fishing boats. Swimming in the Atlantic. Picking up a bucket of sand dollars. Celebrating Kwanzaa. The family with 5 daughters next door, and next to them, a family with 2 boys and 3 girls and all the children in the three houses playing together in spite of the age differences. Buying day old chicks and all of them dying within a month. My great garden in that silt. Having almost no outside of the house involvement. Feeling outside of the ‘world”. Jilo going to church with the kids next door. Jilo and Ife going trick or treating in their jackets because it was so cold. Taking the bus to Michigan to visit my family, with the kids. Going to St. Louis in the VW bug for our first William’s family reunion. Visitors from Atlanta and Detroit. The end of the War in Vietnam.
The Angel Oak.
October 8, 1974 Hello Mommy and Henry, Well, everything here is moving right along. Jim still likes his job. The house is pretty well cleaned up and unpacked, but I’ll be glad when we get the furniture from Nanny and Poppy’s. We would like the dining room stuff too, if it’s available. I have enclosed a layout of our house and some postcards of our scenic view (smile) The only bad part is – the car’s broken down. After Jim drove it from Atlanta, it broke down. He is going to get a used transmission for it. I hope that does it because nothing is within easy walking. There’s a bus into Charleston, but it’s a good walk. I hope you all will be able to get down to visit this winter before we’re back to our normal living conditions. (smile). I read this article in McCall’s telling parents not to worry about their weird kids because around 30 they settle down.. Can this be true???
I found where the people had their garden and plan to put some lettuce, greens etc. in next week. I will be glad when we can meet some people! More soon – WRITE! A note from Ife (scribble scrabble) P.S. I may come for a week early Nov. 21, more later.
Love, Kris
A layout of the house I drew for my mother. The backyard is at the bottom and the front of the house and the road are at the top.
A view of 160 6th Avenue in 2012. When we lived there, there were only trees and bushes across the street and at the end of the road. The road was not paved, it was dirt. Where the small house to the right of our house is, there was only an okra field.
My father standing across the street from the market. Courtesy Paul Lee, Best Efforts, Inc.
In 1965 the idea of the Black Star Co-op was born at Central United Church of Christ. In 1968, the year after the Detroit riot, a grocery store was opened a block from the church. Due to a variety of reasons – inexperience of management and staff, costs of keeping enough stock, high prices – the store did not last long. Later the church operated a long running food co-op. Several people would go down to Eastern Market early Saturday morning and buy produce which was shared by everybody who paid $5 that week. There was no overhead and no paid staff. Later the church had a farm in Belleville, Michigan and the food for the co-op came off of that farm. Below is a short photographic story of the Black Star Market.
Sign on window.
Edward Vaughn and Norman Burton with the information and sign up table for the cooperative set up after church service. The photograph in the background is of the 1963 ‘Walk to Freedom’ in Detroit. Over 100,000 people marched down Woodward Ave.
Flyer for church members hand cut by my father on one of those blue stencils and run off on the church mimeograph machine.
Future home of the Black Star Market. Misty church steeple in the background.
Renovated store, ready for business. Courtesy Paul Lee, Best Efforts, Inc.
My father with women who worked in the store and a customer soon after the opening. Courtesy Paul Lee, Best Efforts, Inc.
The block where the store stood is now vacant land. The church is still there.
This post continues a series using the Alphabet to go through streets that were significant in my life as part of the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge. This week I remember living on St. John Road in Simpson County, Mississippi. However, since I already have an “S” street coming up and I needed an “R” street, I am using our mailing address, Route 1, Box 173 1/2, Braxton, MS. I don’t have a photo of our mailbox so I am using a return address from a letter I wrote back then.
We moved to Simpson County, Mississippi in the fall of 1975. I was pregnant with our third daughter who was born April 12, 1976 at the home of our midwife. We had never lived in the real country before this move. Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, outside of Charleston, was the closest we had been. My husband was working as an organizer with the Emergency Land Fund (E.L.F.), a group to help black farmers save their land, which was being lost at an alarming rate. We first lived at Rt. 1 Box 38 where the Emergency Land Fund had a model farm. Maybe I should say we helped setting up a model farm, complete with rabbits in the pen and tomatoes in Green houses and our own milk goats and chickens. When the Emergency Land Fund wanted to move us to the Mississippi Delta to run a soy bean farm we opted to stay in Simpson County and Jim quit working for E.L.F. We had to move from the farm and so bought our first house and 5 acres several miles away. The house was a Jim Walters House that had been built by former volunteers to the Voice of Calvary Church in Mendenhall. You can buy the house in various stages of completion and the more you finish yourself, the cheaper the cost. It was from the plans in this picture. Unfortunately there was not a big lake in the yard and there was no danger of flooding. We were much more likely to have a tornado come through and that caused me many anxious nights as storms rolled through and we were 10 feet off the ground. There was indoor water for the bath and the kitchen sink but there was no indoor toilet. There was an outhouse outback. There was electricity and my husband, Jim, hooked up the washing machine. It wasn’t too hard to run pipes since they were all exposed under the house. That caused problems when we forgot to drip the water when temperatures dropped. Eventually we did get an inside toilet but it was several years coming. Three of my six children were born in Mississippi.
A letter I wrote home from Mississippi not too long after we moved in.
January 19, 1977
Dear Mommy and Henry,
Here’s your late gift box. I’m sending some books – not to keep but to read (smile). The Tatasaday book should be read with the Iks in mind. I hope the hats fit and the cake is o.k. It didn’t come out as god as the last but i figured i’d better send it on.
It snowed here – about 2 1/2 inches and it’s still on the ground! Boy oh boy – first time the temp went to 6 degrees here – ever and most snow since 1958. Jilo’s schools been closed 2 days. We went for a walk in the woods yesterday. it was nice. Jim’s been going out with a neighbor down the road to cut pulpwood. Do you have those big trucks up there? He likes it fine. But it keeps him busy and working nights.
The goats are fine. 1 month until 3 more are due. The chickens are giving us 6>9 eggs daily with 13 hens. Still 4 aren’t laying i think. The midwife’s parents came over and told me to keep them locked up until non and keep food and water there and they’d probably start up – and they did. The garden isn’t started – luckily for it.
Ife cut her hair in places so i just gave her an afro. She looks so grown up! It looks nice though. Ayanna has 4 teeth and crawls funny but gets wher she’s going and is still happy. I braided her hair last week in the front where it was long enough. it rounds her head up so she looks more like the other two round heads at that age. The sun just went down and it sure droped the temp in here. We have solar heat benefit of those 2 south facing double doors.
Jim’s fine and we both read and liked the book. We had his other one – Welcome to Hard Times – have you read it? I’m ok too. Not keeping a Betty Crocker house but at least keeping up with the dishes. Jilo’s fine too, has had a sub(stitute teacher) since Christmas vacation and seems to make them work a bit harder – the teacher who had that grade before.
Write soon – Love Kris
P.S. Ife did the farm picture. She did it by looking as at a picture in Jilo’s cook book. Isn’t that good perspective and stuff. I told her we’ll start doing from life soon.
Also, the pigs still alive in this cold. it’s a wonder.
Going to milk the goats.
For more about living in Mississippi, including goats, killing chickens, heating with a wood stove, midwives, friends and work shoes read these posts.
These are friends of my grandfather, MC Graham (Poppy). I used this photograph before but never as the featured photo. I thought the bowler hat theme was perfect for this. I don’t know who they are. The photograph was probably taken between 1917 in Montgomery before my grandfather married or 1919 in Detroit. Unfortunately it’s undated and unidentified. I am going by the clothes my grandfather wore that day and in other photos that are dated.
My grandfather and unidentified friend.
This photo is un-photoshopped. I couldn’t get the woman’s face right so I just included it as is. You can see more of the coat in this one. We are left to guess at the dress underneath.
Today would have been Mignon’s birthday. She was born in Tennessee in 1909. Her parents, Moses and Jean Walker, were old friends of my grandparents from Montgomery, Alabama. My grandparents roomed with them when they first arrived in Detroit.
This post continues a series using the Alphabet to go through streets that were significant in my life as part of the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge. Amazing I know, but Q is a letter I do not have a street for. Someone suggested I do “A quiet street” for Q so this post will be about the house on Water Mill Lake, the quietest place I ever lived. Except for that one night something was killing something out in the forest. And there were those duck feathers strewn around the pathways as the ducks down the road disappeared, one by one.
Photos from 1976 to 2007 taken on Watermill Lake, Lake County, MI.
In 1976, soon after the birth of my third daughter, my mother and Henry moved from the house on Fairfield in Detroit to the house on Water Mill Lake in Lake county. Water Mill is a much smaller lake than Idlewild and is less than a 5 minute drive away. Lake county is a 4 hours drive from Detroit. The house was separated from it’s lake front by a dirt road. In the back, through trees and underbrush, was the Pere Marquette River. This house was in the Manistee National Forest. Houses were few and far between. My mother and Henry planted a wonderful organic garden, fished and froze the bluegills they caught for winter eating and installed a wood furnace to cut down on the heating bill. I would go up for several weeks in the summer during June, with my children after the Williams Reunion in St. Louis. We lived in Simpson County Mississippi at that time.
In 1978, shortly after the birth of my fourth daughter, my mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She had noticed bleeding but ignored it for too long and after several years of treatments that took them to Detroit far too often, she died in 1982. Just after the birth of my son. Henry continued to live there by himself, seeing his brothers, sisters and friends who came up to Idlewild in the summer. In the winter there weren’t too many visitors.
In 1986 we moved to the house on Idlewild Lake. Of course Henry became part of our life, eating dinner with us often, us visiting him and him visiting us. He contributed lively discussion, the same kind I remembered from my growing up years, to my children’s growing up. In 1996, shortly after being diagnosed with liver cancer, Henry died. He left us his house. We rented it out for several years. Our oldest daughter lived there when she returned to Lake County as Assistant principal of the local high school.
In January of 2005, with only one of the children left at home and serious foundation problems with the house on Idlewild Lake, we decided to move to Henry’s. We added a few windows and had the attic turned into another bedroom. We had to replace the septic system which took out a few trees behind the garage so we put a garden in back there. We bought the lot next door at an auction. There were deer in the yard, racoons trying to get into the garbage cans. Racoons are so much bigger then they look in children’s picture books. At one time there had been a lot of people who came to that road to fish but the owner of the property had posted it so there was not much traffic on the road and not many people coming to fish. The lake was too small for jet skis and speed boats, that was nice. We had to walk up to the corner to get the mail because the mail man didn’t come down that road to deliver. There were only 4 houses on the road and only ours and one at the corner were occupied all the time.
Our third daughter moved home after graduating from University of Michigan while searching for a job. The spring of 2005 another of our daughters and her family moved to Idlewild on the way from Seattle to wherever she found a job, which turned out to be Atlanta. During that summer we had visits from the other children. They stayed between our house and the old house on Idlewld Lake. It was good to have everybody close by again. In the fall of 2005, our youngest son moved to Atlanta to work with AmeriCorps, then the second daughter moved to Atlanta. Somewhere in there the third daughter moved to Indianapolis for her new job. Our two elderly dogs died. We were down to one cat. My husband and I were alone for the first time in forever. It was wonderful. It was peaceful.
In 2006 our daughter who lived in Detroit moved to Atlanta. In the summer of 2007 we helped our third daughter move from Indianapolis to Atlanta and decided to look around and see what we could find because it seemed to make sense that we all settle in one place to be both support and company for each other. We found the house with the solarium (which is on Venetian so I will be writing about it in a few more posts) and that decided us. Just as the Michigan housing market went downhill, we sold the Water Mill house and bought the one Atlanta just before that market went downhill. We sometimes talk about how we could have done it differently and held on to that house in Idlewild while spending some of the winter months in Atlanta. Moving made sense but I really miss being on the water and being out of the city.
We used this to heat our small house in Simpson County, Mississippi. We used a pickup or two of wood for the entire winter. Sometimes I cooked on it if the bottled gas ran out. It was also great for drying diapers hung on lines across the room.
For those who haven’t used a wood burning stove like the Atlanta Stove Works we used, here is a diagram of safety measures. When we first started, my husband didn’t realize why the stove was set out so far from the wall and moved it closer. Luckily we just ended up with a scorched piece of paneling and not a house fire.
Wood/coal burning furnace we used in Idlewild, Michigan.
This was not a very efficient furnace. It took enormous amounts of wood. My husband spent much time cutting, hauling and splitting wood all winter long. Because he worked long hours from spring through fall it wasn’t possible to get all the wood needed during the snow free months. Luckily we lived in the Manistee National forest and there was plenty of wood around. A few times we burned coal. It burned hot but it was so dirty. Soot everywhere. Up and down the stairs all winter long to keep the fire going.
A few weeks worth of wood.
Combination wood and electric stove on the deck on it’s way to the garage.
Furnace we heated with on Willis Mill.
The cook stove we used for several years in the Idlewild Lake house was a combination of wood burning on one side and electric on the other. The only photo in my collection and the one above. The stove was on it’s way from the kitchen to the garage after the insurance inspector said it didn’t meet guidelines for safe use.
When we moved to the house on Water Mill Lake we had a wood furnace like this one. It was very efficient and could burn one load almost all day. That meant a bit less wood (by now we also had a wood splitter) and a few less steps up and down the stairs to keep it going. Wonderful!
Stove we now use to supplement the furnace and heat the house.
When we moved to the house we now live in in Atlanta, Ga we found this stove already in place. The house is passive solar and has a berm against the north wall and a wall of windows on the south side. We burn wood to take the chill off in the winter if there is no sun out. If the sun is out it heats all by itself. We also have an gas furnace we use only rarely when we don’t feel like building the fire. We are back to a couple of pick up loads a winter and with all the trees that topple over in Atlanta we have no lack of wood available. If only we’d brought the wood splitter.
Jim adding wood to the heater at the end of the solarium. Maybe one day we will change it for one that will let us see the flames dancing.
