Grosse Ile Fall Traditions That Open Historic Landmarks

Most of the year, the things that make Grosse Ile's history tangible are off limits. The lighthouse on the northeast shoreline sits behind a private residence. The gardens that gave the island one of its longest-running festivals are a working nursery, not a park. The old airfield where teenagers used to watch for Nike missile crews is now leased hangar space and a soccer complex. None of it is designed for visitors, because none of it was built to be a museum. Then fall arrives, and for a handful of weekends, the island's nonprofits and family businesses quietly open some of what stays closed the rest of the year.

That pattern, not pumpkins or cider, is what actually defines the season here. Understanding it means understanding three places that have almost nothing in common except the fall events they host.

One Sunday With the Lighthouse

The Grosse Ile North Channel Front Range Lighthouse has been standing on Hennepin Point since 1894, when Congress funded a second set of range lights to help down bound ships navigate past Fighting Island and Mamajuda Island on the Detroit River. The original structure looked like a water tower propped on stilts, built along a 170 foot pier from shore. It was rebuilt in 1906 into the white clapboard tower that's still there today, its interior paneled in tongue and groove varnished pine, its exterior painted cedar, with a circular wooden staircase winding up to a light stanchion that no longer holds a working lamp.

The lighthouse keeper and his family once lived in a one room cabin near the rear tower until a larger house went up on the property in 1904. That house still stands. It's a private residence now, which is the reason the lighthouse itself can't just be visited on a whim. The Grosse Ile Historical Society, a volunteer nonprofit founded in 1959, holds the only public tour of the structure once a year, on a single Sunday each September. Last year's tour ran September 14. The society has described it as the only time all year the lighthouse is open to anyone outside the family that lives beside it.

The same organization keeps the island's other closed doors on a similar schedule. Its museum, housed in the old Michigan Central Railroad Depot at 25020 East River Road, sits inside a stretch of road that also includes the 1873 U.S. Customs House and the 1867 St. James Episcopal Church Chapel, part of what's recognized as the East River Road Historic District. Museum hours are limited to Thursday mornings and Sunday afternoons, and there's no entrance fee, just a donation box. It's not a place built for foot traffic. It's a place a handful of volunteers keep running because the island's records would otherwise have nowhere to live.

A Farm Older Than the Country Around It

Westcroft Gardens traces back to the Macomb family, who have held the land since 1776, which makes it the oldest farm in Michigan still maintained by the same family line. For most of its history it was a hay farm. That changed after World War I, when Earnest Stanton, a Macomb descendant, came home needing work to help with his recovery and started experimenting in one of the farm's greenhouses with azaleas and rhododendrons, plants that don't naturally grow well in Michigan's less acidic, drier soil. Stanton spent years amending the ground until it could support them anyway, along with laurels and dogwood, and by the time he was done, the farm's treeless hay fields had become five and a half acres of landscaped gardens.

In 1984, Denise de Beausset, the seventh generation of the family to run Westcroft, decided the story deserved a celebration and started what became Islandfest. The event outgrew the gardens fast. Within a couple of years it had spread to Macomb Street, where the local business association took over logistics, and by 2002 it needed even more room, so it moved to its current home at the Grosse Ile Municipal Airport, where organizers cited the need for space for vendors and the growing list of activities. Islandfest now runs in late spring, one of the first festivals to open the season on the Downriver calendar.

What stays behind on the original land is Westcroft's fall event: the Phantom Forest hayride, which has run for well over a decade on weekends from late September through late October, with extra nights added around Halloween itself. The format splits the difference between the farm's two identities. There are non-scary day rides through the gardens for families and younger kids, and after dark, the same wooded paths turn into something built to unsettle teenagers and adults. It's the same 250 year old ground either way, just lit differently depending on the hour.

The Same Ground, a Different Season

The airport that now hosts Islandfest has its own layered history, most of which has nothing to do with festivals. The U.S. Army installed a Nike Ajax missile base there in 1954, part of the Cold War ring of air defense sites around Detroit, and ran it until 1963. The Navy held the property a few more years before closing it in 1969, and the federal government handed it over to the township in 1971 for use as a civilian general aviation airport, which is what it remains today.

That same site does double duty every October, when the Grosse Ile Youth Recreational Association runs its annual Halloween haunted house on the grounds. GIYRA is better known for organizing the island's youth football, cheer, flag football, basketball, baseball, and softball leagues, which makes the haunted house something of a side project, a fundraiser built by the same volunteer network that keeps youth sports running the rest of the year. It's worth noticing that the island's spring festival and its fall haunted house both land on land that spent its early years fenced off for military use. Nothing about that land was designed for public gathering. It became a gathering place because a small number of local organizations decided it should be, one event at a time.

None of this is unusual for a community that only connects to the mainland by a single Wayne County bridge. Grosse Ile runs its own school district, library association, and recreation programs largely because it has to, being physically separated from the townships around it. That same separateness seems to be what pushes so much of the island's history into private hands rather than public ones. The lighthouse belongs, functionally, to whoever owns the house next to it. The gardens belong to a family that's farmed the same acreage since before the country existed. The airport belonged to the federal government before it belonged to anyone on the island at all. Fall is one of the seasons when access briefly changes hands.

If you've lived here long enough to have a favorite spot along East River Road or a standing plan for the third Sunday in September, none of this will surprise you. If you're newer to the island, the pattern is worth watching for. The next time a fence comes down for a weekend, notice what's usually behind it the rest of the year, and you'll understand a little more about why the island holds onto things the way it does.

If you're curious how a piece of that same history, an old cottage, a lot backing up to the river, a house inside one of the historic districts, might fit into your own plans, Sage Premier Real Estate is always happy to talk through what's currently available on the island.