Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them

Pier Road

pier road nicholas delbanco Some years ago my wife and I bought a home in western Michigan , just north of the Indiana border. The building was, as real-estate agents say, a fixer-upper, in sore need of TLC. Bulldozers hovered nearby. It would have been simple enough to raze the thing and start anew—but we restored the old farmhouse , had it stripped and repaired and sanded and painted and, after a year’s worth of work, took possession. It’s mostly a place to escape to; we go there when we can. Eight hundred feet from Lake Michigan’s shore, the house stands beneath towering maple and ash trees, with a patchy, sloping lawn. This is, in fact, the oldest structure in the self-consciously historical hamlet of Lakeside. It’s known as Centennial Farm. A plaque in a flowerbed proclaims: michigan centennial 01 Text.indd 81 8/19/11 8:16 AM nicholas delbanco  commission: owned by the same family for more than one hundred years. They kept close quarters, clearly, but the roof sufficed. Windows and porches had been added; the outhouse was dismantled and the barn improved. Running water was available, so were heat and light. In a little local pamphlet called “Centennial History of Lakeside,” I found a photo of the place—recognizable as ours—built by James Abdon Wilkinson in the late 1850s. I was born in England and lived much of my life in New England. The 1850s still seem recent as a construction date to celebrate, and I remember being unimpressed. It takes five hundred years in England before a house seems ancient or can lay proper claim to ghosts; in New England it requires two centuries at least. But those who settled near Lake Michigan arrived much later than did those who settled Maine or Massachusetts , and members of the Wilkinson clan had indeed founded the town. Old John Wilkinson, James’s father, was the original trader and farmer in the region, and the place was first known as Wilkinson City; he planted fruit trees and established a trading lodge by the lake, with cleared land and cottages for the workers there. A small museum adjoins the post office, with photographs and artifacts and a 519-page journal recording the transactions of everyday life in 1857–58. Here are some prevailing prices: flour cost 3 cents a pound, beef 6 cents a pound, salt a penny a pound, sugar 14 cents a pound, butter 26 cents a pound, suet 4 cents a pound, 1 peck beans at 12 cents a pound, coffee 14 cents a pound, eggs 13 cents for a dozen, codfish 7 cents a pound. Tea was expensive at 70 cents a pound, but a pint of brandy was 40 cents and a bottle of cordial 15 cents. These last two items, bought in December, suggest Christmas baking projects , and if one fell ill or overindulged there were medicines 01 Text.indd 82 8/19/11 8:16 AM pier road  for sale such as castor oil, laudanum, salts, quinine, paregoric, alum, camphor, and the all-inclusive “pain reliever pills.” The women made their own clothing, it seems, and a good deal of the men’s. They bought “delain, blue cotton, shirting , satinett, lining, factory blue flannel, calico, denim, sheeps gray, linsey Woolsey, diaper, cottonade, crash, linen, drilling, muslin, ticking, gingham, velvet, ribbon, sheeting, cambric, cashmere, pants stuff, jaconet, tweed, tablecloth, more antique , bared mull.” Some of the service payments have been recorded as follows: “keeping team in barn, 12 days for $7.01, 250 pounds of hay for a dollar, digging well, $2.50, 12 rods of ditch for $4.50.” The shingling of a house cost $15.00, though the shingles themselves amounted to $45.50. Things were cheaper then. Mr. Wilkinson, however, sympathized with those who paid their workers nothing at all, and whose labor force was black. His family came from Virginia, and had he had his druthers those cottages behind the lodge would have quartered slaves. When his side lost the Civil War, and he headed south again— how far, one wonders, ahead of the prospect of tar and feathers ?—the good citizens of Wilkinson City remarked to each other, “We need a new name.” Looking at the nearby shore, they said, “Let’s call ourselves ‘Lakeside,’” and Lakeside it’s been ever since. The house had an ill-pointed chimney...