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Michigan has so many places you can feel on top of the world. Not with mountains. Cuz we don’t have any. But peninsulas jutting north into the great lakes. Michigan Now’s Chris McCarus takes us to the very tip of the thumb… to a village established 150 years ago. This is the last weekend of the year you can take a guided tour there.
TRX1: Huron City is still on the map, even though it has only about a dozen buildings and two year round residents….Charlie Parcells and his brother.
AX0: “We didn’t get to 150 years by accident.”
TRX01: Their great great grandfather built the whole village. His name was Langdon Hubbard.
AX1: “Langdon got to Michigan in the 1830’s right after statehood. Built a big dock in Lexington. And then moved up here, took over a struggling lumber operation. Built a half mile long dock out there and that made the place rock.”
TRX2: Charlie Parcells is 60 and playful. He zips around the property on motorcycles. He made his own money designing roller blade wheels. Parcells doesn’t say how much he’s worth or the estate’s worth.
AX2: “By the way it’s on the books at $20,000. The last time it changed hands that’s what it was worth.”
TRX3: M25 follows the Lake Huron shore. The road cuts across the family’s 430 acres of farmland. They have another 1,000 acres of woodland. But cars don’t come every minute.
AX3: “I don’t care how rich you are. There was no helicopter to come pick you up. There was no ambulance to rush out here. If you go back far enough there was no equipment to haul gravel. They were basically just cleared of vegetation and when they got muddy you might not go to town for weeks or a month. And in fact in family letters they would say the best time to come visit us in the winter when the sleighs will wisk you the last 8 miles from Port Austin to get here. I don’t care how much money you had. This was hard living.”
TRX4: Hard times have hit Charlie and his brother a bit this year. They can’t afford to hire tour guides and groundskeepers. So they’re doing those jobs.
NS entering the main house
TRX5: The main house has 7 bedrooms. Langdon Hubbard rebuilt it after two fires. Hubbard had three kids. One married a Yale English professor, considered by Time Magazine to be the most influential book critic ever up until then. His name was William Lyon Phelps. Charlie Parcell’s goes to Phelp’s study. A wall is lined with books and a taxidermy owl. Phelps’ photograph lies on a table.
AX4: “So, here’s Billy Phelps sitting in this room in 1938 reading books. The bookshelves got added in his era. He didn’t buy books. He didn’t have to. He was a New York Times book reviewer. And publishers when they found out he was here would start shipping him books. And they piled up so fast he would leave them on the porch and neighbors would come by and take the ones they wanted.”
TRX6: The big house still has a pool table made in Detroit in 1883. The legs are carved into faces of tribal men. Wall to wall carpeting in the house was detached every spring and beat with sticks outside.
NS upstairs
TRX7: The tour continues to Billy Phelps second floor study. He gave sermons in the village church that drew 1,000 people. Literature could go into scripture and back. Phelps didn’t need to be trained as a pastor.
AX5: “His lifestyle—up at 6. Breakfast, work, write books correspond in here til noon. Lunch, play golf, dinner, read books down in the library. And if the house got too noisy there were usually plenty of guests around the story is that he would ring that bell to quiet everybody down.”
TRX8: Charles Parcells the 3rd loved his 16 siblings and cousins. But he hated this family ritual.
AX6: “Before dinner, start in the double parlor, march through here hand on shoulder one behind the other singing this song. ……..he’s a champion beyond compare,” over and over until we got to the dining room. Eventually I realized the purpose was to embarrass the dinner guests who didn’t know what was up. And when it was over they would crack these huge smiles and it would guarantee that the dinner table would be lively.”
TRX9: Historic preservation runs deep within Parcells.
AX7: “ I spent my childhood coming to this place. People are amazed by all this old stuff. I don’t get that part. The idea of living with new furniture seems like living at the airport. The stuff you put around you needs to have a story. It needs to go back a ways. It needs to mean something. I like it that way.”
