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Wolverine Lake Seeks Help Bringing Past to the Present
Compiling the history of a 58-year- old community requires time and pa- tience, as members of the Wolverine Lake Historical Team can attest.
“We would like to research the origi- nal property owners when the village was nothing but farmland,” said Joann Sullivan, a member of the team work- ing on the task. “We would like to do more but we are limited by time and the (number of) people we have.”
The team, which was formed in 2004 when the Village celebrated its 50th an- niversary, has compartmentalized doc- umentation by scanning and archiving the information for the past eight years.
“We focused on sorting through newspapers clipping, photos and docu- mentation that had accumulated since 1954, when the village was formed,” Sullivan said.
The group is now looking for relics from the community’s past in order to give an accurate depiction of life in the Village throughout different decades of the Village’s history. For example, the village used to be coined a cottage community during the 40s and 50s. Sullivan said the team is hoping some individuals will step up and produce some historical photos of that era.
“We’ve also put together poster boards with photos and put a call out to residents to share old photos,” she said.
The group is also looking at going beyond pictures and the printed word. “We’ve been interviewing longtime
members, employees and council members of the community by video
and audio taping them to preserve some of the color of the village over the years,” she said.
Unlike people, some of the com- munity’s landmarks are easier to find – such as the Glengary dam between Benstein and Commerce, adjacent to
the Wolverine Lake Party Store.
“The dam has been recognized by a state of Michigan historical marker,”
Sullivan said.
The historical team is seeking more
residents to join in on the effort, such as an individual with genealogy knowl-
edge to research such websites as an- cestry.com.
Sullivan asks people interested in volunteering their time or knowledge to contact the village offices at (248) 624-1710.
3 Responses to Wolverine Lake Seeks Help Bringing Past to the Present
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Don
December 13, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Shame the Village Council does not have enough common sense to read, review and understand what historical records they already posses on hand. Maybe they’d be educated and or bright enough to realize that over half of the lake was, and still is a SWAMP (or series of several on the south end well as a small lake that existed on the north end) and that regardless of how many ridiculous ways and hundreds of thousands of dollars they have and are about to throw at this overly polluted mess of what they call a “lake”, not a single ounce of progress can nor ever will be made until the lake is sectionally partitioned, drained, excavated of all sediment, sewage and contamination and then re-flooded. Fat chance though.
Sandman
December 14, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today.
James Turner
January 18, 2013 at 2:30 pm
I have been working on a history of Wolverine Lake for over two years now and would like to participate in your group. The problem is I think I am on your “Do not invite list.” I would like to change that. I have been collecting early landowner information (Taylor family, Mays family, Howard Stuart, James Bicking, Hazen family. My father was a member of the committee opposed to consolidation. I lived on the lake from 1947-1965 and graduated from Walled Lake Senior High School. I have boxes of maps and have written about 30 short stories about growing up in a cottage in Stuart’s Oak Island Subdivision.