by Robert M. Traxler

After I retired from the Army and later my wife retired from teaching, we were living in Illinois, near Fort Sheridan and Great Lakes Naval Base, in what was referred to as the far northern suburbs of Chicago.

The final straw that convinced us to move was when five people in our little community were tied to chairs and shot in the head, a drug deal gone bad. My wife is from upstate New York, and my family ended up in South Haven after my dad’s 26 years in the Army. The question was, settle in Michigan or New York? We did a cost benefit analysis and calculated that it it was 10% cheaper to live in Michigan than New York, even upstate New York.

We found a three-acre plot in North Dorr, with a stream in the back, a nice hill to build on, and we built a home. The land was across the street from a house built in the 1860s on the stagecoach road just down from the hotel and restaurant that became the North Dorr General Store.

While we were busy moving and getting settled, we did not give much thought to an old stone and concrete foundation next to the road; it was mostly covered with dirt and did not interfere with the lawn. Let a decade pass and after reading a book on the history of Allegan County, my old criminal investigator’s curiosity was aroused. The foundation was from an old mill or an old store, could have been both at different times dating back to the 1870s. There also was the mystery of the origin of the 11 five-gallon buckets of broken glass I pulled out of the stream, so I purchased a metal detector and a “pointer,” a small detector to pinpoint items, and went to work.

It seems that after the end of prohibition on Dec. 5, 1933, with the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, some counties in Michigan went wet and some stayed dry. North Dorr was a close place for folks to purchase legal alcohol and a good place to drink, as it was in a wet county, not far from the stream on what would become our property 91 years later.

One historical text tells us the term “going to North Dorr” meant going out drinking. One mystery was solved, as other evidence was found that supported the conclusion. No doubt the stream was a convenient place to toss the empties.

Next is the old foundation. So far, the site has yielded up an old iron gear and a glass insert of a canning jar and a few hundred old iron square nails, bits and pieces of barbed wire and bits of iron of yet unknown origin. After hours of removing dirt and rust from the gear I found that it is dated from 1901 to 1930, and the glass insert was made between 1857 and 1901. Who knows when they were dropped or buried.

So far, no evidence has been found to support exactly what or when the site was, but the investigation continues. My hopes were raised when I found what appeared to be an old coin at the two-foot level,. It turned out to be an old iron washer.

After at least 90 years the site is not going anywhere, so we will see what can be dug up.