Detroit Farms

[Brock7]

Someone in another thread said there was until the early sixties the remnant of the farm with a barn and horse that occupied the land Eastland was built on. You can see it in the upper left corner of this aerial photo from 1962.

A 1915 map shows most of the land in the northeast corner of Detroit where I live was still farmland parcels. A 1936 map shows most of the land subdivided as it is now, while the majority of Harper Woods was still farmland.

The subdivision I live in, bounded by Hayes, Brock, 7 Mile and State Fair, was one of the parcels John Salter Jr. farmed. The house his father built in the 1870's stood on 7 Mile until the early 1990's. When it was razed they found it had been built on the site of an older log cabin. The old woman who lived there sometimes hung out at the Brock party store shooting the breeze with the proprietors. There's a farmhouse still standing on Gratiot that I believe may have been built by Xavier Bringard during the civil war or the decade following. There are a couple of others still surviving on more residential streets.