The William Brooks Farm, also known as the Washington Stanley Farm, is a farmsite located at 3521 Big Beaver Road in

Troy, Michigan Troy is a city in Oakland County, Michigan, United States. Its population was 87,294 at the 2020 U.S. census, making Troy the most populous city in the county and the 13th most-populous municipality in the state. Troy is a northern suburb of Me ...

. It was designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1971 and listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...

in 1972.

History

Washington Stanley was born in

Shaftsbury, Vermont Shaftsbury is a town in Bennington County, Vermont, United States. The population was 3,598 at the 2020 census. History The town was chartered on August 20, 1761. It was named after the Earl of Shaftesbury. In June 1843, escaped slaves hid at ...

in 1807. There he married a young wife, Lydia, and in 1826 moved with his wife and widowed mother to this site. He built a log cabin and began farming. Washington and Lydia Stanley had six children over the next 15 years, and when Lydia died, Stanley remarried Catherine Elisha Barringer in Macomb, Michigan, on 16 Feb 1842. In 1852, Stanley built the two-story fieldstone house that sits on the site. Stanley died in 1873 and the farm passed to his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Frank Ford. The Fords continued to farm the property, and in 1911 their daughter, Alta Ford Peabody, sold the farm to William Brooks. The Brooks family used it as a dairy until 1960, when they sold most of the property to developers. The Brooks family continued to live in the house until the mid-1970s, when they sold it to the

Kresge Foundation The Kresge Foundation is a philanthropic private foundation headquartered in Troy, Michigan, United States. The foundation works to expand opportunities in America's cities through grantmaking and investing in arts and culture, education, envir ...

. The Foundation continues to use the property as their headquarters, and has connected the original farmhouse and barn with a modern addition in 2006.

Description

The William Brooks Farm consists of a farmhouse and various outbuildings, including a machine shop with a smokehouse, hog barns, dairy barns, a milk house, a silo, and a corn crib. The farmhouse is a well-preserved two-story fieldstone

Greek Revival The Greek Revival was an architectural movement which began in the middle of the 18th century but which particularly flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in northern Europe and the United States and Canada, but a ...

structure built on a rectangular plan with side

gable A gable is the generally triangular portion of a wall between the edges of intersecting roof pitches. The shape of the gable and how it is detailed depends on the structural system used, which reflects climate, material availability, and aesth ...

s. The windows are six-over-six anes with shutters. The front facade has a single-story, columned porch with Gothic detail, and the date of construction (1852) is carved into a stone block above the east-side window. A covered porch is built on the rear.

History

Description

References

Further reading