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Tales of the Villages illustrations

Drawing
This suite of 13 colored pencil and ink illustrations by Brian Cook to accompany text by Jim Schmiechen in the 2004 Saugatuck-Douglas Museum exhibition, "Tales of the Villages"
Crossing the River; Survival in Saugatuck and Douglas depended on crossing the river. In the beginning, Saugatuck people on the east side rowed themselves across the Kalamazoo River in little boats to get to coach roads, foot pathways and the rich trove of lumber on the west side. Then around 1833 a bridge was built at Mary Street - but it was so relentlessly battered by logs being pushed downstream and by the many schooners moving past it that it crashed into the river. Then it happened. A chain ferry was invented. The ferry was a flat-barged boat called a
Saugatuck's House of the Seven Gables; In February 1862 Reverend J. Rice Taylor braved the bitter cold journeying to Saugatuck by sleigh from Allegan to give a Helen's Chair and the History of the World; Summer cottages are the unchanging backgrounds against which many area families chart their growth - and many stories of adventure are hidden among the furniture of these time-worn places. The quaint old white house at 256 Spear Street is one of the oldest in the village and holds a century and a half of stories - those of ships, ship captains, lighthouse keepers, of a local doctor and his wife who saved a little girl by giving her a home, of boys returning from the tragic American Civil War, of women and men going off to Europe and Asia to serve their country. The world in peace and war. Still standing among theses ghosts is a tall highchair bought in 1808 for little Helen Job, the first of four daughters of an American diplomat, Frederick W. Job and his wife. Helen's ownership of the chair was followed by that of her sisters Virginia, Mary Bell, and Cordelia. AS a young woman, Helen worked for the Red Cross during World War I, while Cordelia, was a teacher in the Philippines when World War II broke out, and subsequently found herself a prisoner in a Japanese concentration camp for much of the war - to be liberated by the American general, McArthur, in 1945. The next generation of the family was three girls and five boys. All of the boys served in World War Two - William, Robert, Richard, Frederick, and Jack - some in the pacific some in Europe. William was an Army air bombardier who crash landed a number of his 26 missions, but came home without a scratch. And soon there was a third, then fourth, and now fifth generation - each and every one occupying He Heard Music in the Woods; John Wheeler left Ireland as a young man during the Great Famine, to work in New York, then Chicago. In 1853 he crossed Lake Michigan to become a carpenter at Singapore, the lumber town at the mouth of the Saugatuck harbor. Here he helped build the houses and furniture needed for mill workers. His specialty was interior finishing and furniture building. All his life he was awestruck by the many of varieties of beautiful wood found in the nearby forests. He made his own furniture and when he moved his family to Saugatuck, he became a seller of wood shingles, a furniture builder, the village ferryman, and violin maker. He sought to build the perfect house. Being the son of an Irish architect-house builder and the father of four daughters, Wheeler built one of the largest wooden houses in the village at the time. It was a tall L-shaped house with a corner tower in the fashionable Italian villa style, with 18 rooms and with views of the river and Mt. Baldhead. It was here that one of the Wheeler daughters was married on July 3, 1882. Later, the Wheeler girls turned this house into one of Saugatuck's very first A Boy Meets a Remarkable Man; The Famous Kids on Spear Street; When Burr Tillstrom had visitors to his Saugatuck home he would often bring one of his famous puppets into the conversation. First there was Kukla, then came the egotistical Ollie, followed by the whole troop: Madam Ooglepuss, Beulah the Witch, Cecil Bill, Fletcher Rabbit, Colonel Crackie - all of whom were called Under the Treaty Tree; One morning in 1896 the fair-complexioned and blue-eyed May Heath looked out of her kitchen window and saw the tree cutting crew, armed with axes and cross-cut saws, marching down Holland Street. A line of fallen trees marked their progress. She was aghast - they were approaching the old Two Brothers; It was 1938. Millions of young men and women were unsettled about their lives. America was still experiencing the economic collapse called the Great Depression, and war was on the horizon in Europe. Into this setting two Douglas boys, Orville and Stephen Millar introduced a gasoline station, in response to the public's passion for the automobile. The location was perfect - the Douglas end of the new bridge. The age-old Douglas-Saugatuck swing bridge had been removed and replaced by a modern bridge for a new highway called U.S. 31. Indeed, the station was proof that the new age of travel had arrived - offering not only to The White Squaw; Young Mary Elizabeth Peckham left her Vermont home in the 1830s looking for a life of adventure. She was the teacher at the rough-and- ready mill town of Singapore when she married Stephen Morrison to become Mary Morrison. Soon after, they moved to Saugatuck to live in a thicket of woods along the river, surrounded by the wigwam homes of the Indians - and near her husband's new mill. Being postmaster too, Mr. Morrison spent many days walking the trails, but his wife remained at home - facing the dangers of the forest and nearby Indians who frightened her with war yells and painted faces. Ultimately, the Indians became her Black Bears, Fat Men, and Mt. Baldhead; Mt. Baldhead. It was the home of big black bears and the place where Native Americans regularly danced on its Jonathan Wade's Dream; Jonathan Wade lost his job, his fortune, and his home when his mill at Singapore went Mrs. Swift's Heaven on Earth; Mrs. Gustafvus Swift, wife of the famous Chicago meatpacking millionaire, had joined the outrage of the 1890s. Thousands of people were crowding into Chicago, resulting in enormous moral and physical poverty, unemployment, corruption, and environmental pollution. One of the city's reformers, Reverend George W. Gray, believed that the lives of the poor children and young people could be transformed by experiencing the beauty and moral worth of God's landscape. The stillness of the woods, dunes, and lake at Saugatuck was to be the place. Gray's project, called Forward Movement Park, remade 160 acres of lakeshore and woods into a village of cottages, tents, outdoor worship areas, hiking trails, and beaches - introducing the idea of a spiritual and communal life through Mrs. Vosburgh's Chapel; It started with Sunday evening song fests on the Douglas beach in the late 1800s. After several years, one of the beach moms, Annie J. Vosburgh of Oak Park, Illinois, organized Sunday services in her Douglas cottage for lakeshore adults and children. Soon over a hundred worshippers were squeezing into Mrs. Vosburgh's cottage, and starting with $100 worth of pennies collected by the children, a little chapel was built on a dune on Farmer McVea's land, right smack on the border between Douglas and Saugatuck. It is said that the idea was finalized by a building committee during lunch at Marshall Field's Grill Room in Chicago. The design was by Harry L. Walker, a young architect from Oak Park, Illinois. The new Chapel thrilled the returning cottagers in the summer of 1904: a charming wood structure with a fine flared roof, wood clapboard siding, exposed interior structure, and big windows, each with 48 panes of clear glass - opening to the woods to welcome the roar of Lake Michigan beyond. It was built in a craftsman-prairie style - made popular by another Oak Park architect of the time, Frank Lloyd Wright - with the intent of unifying human life with nature and God. The simplicity of the chapel was to reflect the simplicity of the pastoral summer, away from the confusion and bustle of urban life. Folding chairs, donated by Annie Butts, a Chicago school teacher, were all the furniture that was needed. They had red plush seats and were used for 31 years. The first sermon preached in the Chapel approved of something Protestant reaching had often condemned. Tales of the Villages illustrations picture number 14

2022.03.03

Colored Pencil

Taylor, J. Rice 1818-1900, ReverendMorrison, Mary Elizabeth (Peckham) 1816-1881Simonds, O.C. 1855-1931Job, Frederick William 1862-1935Job, CordeliaWade, Jonathan 1808-1868Vosburgh, Annie (Jones) 1860-1926Tillstrom, Burr 1917-1985KuklaOllie the DragonMillar, Orville Wendell 1911-1999Millar, Stephan "Steve" N. Jr. 1907-1989

SDHC Exhibits

Winthers, Sally

Cook, Brian

11 in

13-1/2 in

Flat Files drawer 07 SDHC/SDHS oversize items

Schmiechen, James A.Cook, BrianHouse of Seven Gables/Rice Taylor houseOld Chain Ferry ScowsMount Baldhead Steps/StairsMount Baldhead Dune/ParkLake Shore Chapel ShorewoodPalazzolo's/Summertime Market/Dry Cleaner/G. Sewers Fish Market/Millar Standard Oil Gas StationSwift Villa/Tumble InnPresbyterian Camp/Camp Gray/Forward Movement Park 1899-2014Gray, Reverend George W.Heath, May (Francis) 1873-1961Wheeler, John 1824-1910Treaty Tree

Tales of the Villages Mapping the Saugatuck-Douglas Storybook 2004 Saugatuck-Douglas Museum Exhibit
Tales of the Villages HomePage
Stylized Map for "Tales of the Villages"

02/02/2022

08/16/2024