93. The Kirby House

Location: 294 Center Street, Douglas
Date: 1890

Sarah Gill Kirby, the wife of a Douglas businessman Frank Kirby, hired local contractor George Kurz to build this house for her family when she was 35 years old. Unusual for its 1890s, Sarah mortgaged the lot in her own name. Her husband Frank died in 1896 but Sarah continued to live at “the Kirby,” along with her two children, as one of the area’s reigning social matriarchs. By the 1920s she was renting rooms to tourists and growing ginseng for commercial purposes. She moved to California in 1932, where she lived until her death in 1951. Sarah Kirby’s daughter Faith Kirby Nevins inherited the house and turned it into the area’s first hospital in 1931. After 1960, when the hospital moved to a modern facility, the grand Queen Anne-style home was restored to serve as the Kirby House B&B, an early LGBTQ+-friendly lodging establishment. The house was listed on the Michigan Register of Historic Places in 1987.