The news of the abrupt closure of the Hilliards Corner Lounge, coming on the heels of the shuttering of the iconic Hilliards General Store has prompted some to call the community “a ghost town.” Indeed, Hillards now only has a mobile home park, the Knights of Columbus Hall and a park with a ball diamond.
Both the bar and the general store have had a rich history of being in business a long time.
The Michigan State Highway Department 53 years ago threatened to remove Hilliards from its maps, insisting it was just like so many ghost towns of days gone by that no longer exist. The archives of the Then and Now Historical Library yielded this fascinating story by Alexis Laggis, which is presented here, with some editing for clarity.
Hilliards fights to stay on the map
The Allegan County community of H
illiards (latest census count: 40) was supposed to quietly fade away — from future official Michigan State Highway Department maps.
And while some once-thriving West Michigan towns with intriguing names like Shiloh, Beverly, Locata, Bravo and Pearl and some 150 others will indeed disappear without loud dissent, Hilliards’ burial, if it comes at all, will be anything but quiet. An aroused, in fact downright angry, populace which few people thought existed in this crossroads community near the Little Rabbit River, is seeing to that.
State Highway Department map planners, who are making an 11th hour review of Hilliards’ plight early this week just before the final 1963 map goes to the printers for publication, were even more amazed when they were confronted with a petition bearing no fewer than 75 signatures, all from the immediate Hilliards area.
Among the protesters trying to save Hilliards from a mapless future are State Sen. Frederic Hilbert of Wayland and the mayors and village presidents of nearby towns sympathetic to their neighbor.
Meanwhile, Hilliards is keeping its collective fingers crossed while awaiting final word… Also, the traffic through Jack Smith’s general store, which serves as the village’s No. 1 meeting place, was a little heavier than usual.
“People stopped and talked to others a bit longer, too,” Smith noticed.
At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be enough residents living here to deliver much of a squawk about anything.
“That’s what those map planners thought, too,” says Dale Dawson, the man who first thought up the idea of getting a petition circulated.
Dawson, who admits to being “on the other side of 60,” is the self-acknowledged unofficial mayor of the community since Hilliards has never been incorporated and has no elected officers.
“When I first heard about it I was right darn sore,” he said. “It got me steaming under the collar so I decided to do something about it. I know that Hilliards was never anything but a wide place on the road, but I’m proud of this little town.”
The community’s seemingly deserted look — there are only about 20 buildings scattered along the road for almost a mile between the two signs which declare this is where Hilliards stands—can be deceiving. That’s because the part of town where our church is cannot be seen at first, explains Rev. Peter T. Jakubowski, whose parish, St. Stanislaus, sponsors such succulent Labor Day choice dinners that last year some 8,000 persons, including some from as far away as Traverse City and Detroit, packed this little community.
Rev. Jakubowski describes the community as basically Polish Catholics.
“It wasn’t too long ago that all our services here were given in Polish,” he pointed out. “Now we have some 650 members in the area and a parish school here with an enrollment of 136 students. Does that sound like this town is dying?”
St. Stanislaus church and parish houses are located about three blocks north of the village’s main street where the general store, an abandoned railroad station which last served as a pickle storage building storage building and a Knights of Columbus hall are the main buildings standing between the village limits.
A tavern is located on Hilliards Junction (of 135th Avenue and 18th Street), a few feet away from the west village limit.
Most persons who live here work in Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo. Among repeated arguments heard here on why the town should stay on the map are:
“Why everyone knows where such towns as Grand Rapids, Detroit and Kalamazoo are. But Hilliards, that’s a different story. Here’s a town that has to be on a map so that people can find it.”
“The town has been on the map for so long that it seems silly to change things now.”
Others, who remembered that the community’s post office was taken away from them several decades ago for economy, blame the whole matter on politics.
State Highway Department officials, pointed out that the list of towns which had shrunk too small to merit further mention was determined by a careful survey.
Martin Beaver, a Hilliards resident for 50 years, said, “I can remember when the train which went by here always stopped. That was when two lakeshore runs were added to the summer schedule and during the harvest season. Back when this was good potato growing country, one could see one string after another of box cars filled to the hilt with their loads of potatoes.
“Now nobody grows ‘em any more.”
The Penasee Globe in a story written by Scott Sullivan in 2000, reported on the changing of ownership of the general store.
Historic Hillards General Store ownership changes hands
What is Hilliards? A village? Hamlet? For lack of a better term, call it “wonderful.”
Now the flyspeck Polish community faces change.
The century-old Hilliards General Store—which, with the corner bar, ball diamond, Knights of Columbus Hall and homes with bathtub madonnas, IS Hilliards—has changed hands.
Fred and Connie (Fifelski) Holbrook, who bought the business from Millie Moraski 25 years ago, are retiring.
Jim and Jan Graczyk — who met when Jim pumped Jan’s gas 30 years ago while working for the Dorr station Connie’s parents owned — have bought the general store from the Holbrooks.
Almost everything, said the Graczyks, will stay the same. But in Hilliards, which cherishes constancy, ripples are tidal waves.
“It’s like giving up a child,” Connie Holbrook said.
No one knows the exact date the store was founded by Constance Adamczyk. But it stayed in the family until Moraski (which was Millie Adamczyk’s married name) sold to the Holbrooks on July 15, 1975.
“I hated the store at first,” said Connie. “All the hours, seven days a week. But it’s an experience that grows on you.”
“You know all your customers by their first names,” Fred Holbrook said. “They become like family.
“The store helped put all four of our kids through college,” Fred went on. “They worked here as children, but none of them wanted to take it over.”
The Graczyks did. Jim worked 25 years at Dorr’s Village Auto Body shop, plowed snow and did other jobs. Jan has worked at Byron Center State Bank for the past five years.
“Our two kids have grown up; now Jan and I are going to grow together,” Jim Graczyk said.
The Graczyks “inherit” Doug “Beans” Adamczyk with the store. Doug—whose Busia (Polish for “grandmother”) was store founder Constance Adamczyk — is the developmentally-disabled “mayor” of Hilliards, a fun-loving fixture at the store for some 50 years.
A historical document at Then and Now referred to Hillards as establishing the first Polish church in West Michigan in the 1870s:
The ancient history of Hilliards
“Some twenty miles south of G
rand Rapids, there was a sprinkling of Polish families in the North Dorr-New Salem area, settled principally by German farmers in the 1850s and first organized into some semblance of parochial units by Father Maciezewski. Archival correspondence of 1858 speaks of the “Austrian and Polish woodsmen” settled in the area. However, it was near the present hamlet of Hilliards, four miles west of Wayland and four miles South of Dorr, where a colony of Poznanian and Kashubian Polish farmers eventually settled in considerable numbers. Foremost among them was Michael Burchardt who emigrated from the Tuchola region, north of Posen, in 1868. Others in the vanguard were Franz Pattok, John Janinski, and the Lewandowski brothers – Wilhelm, Martin and Franz. In the early 1870s came the Jaworskis, Wisniewskis, Bawejas, Rybickis Chylewskis (Hilaskis), Icieks, Bellgraphs, etc.
Already in 1876, they had formed the St Stanislaus Society, a benevolent, social and religious organization, believed to be the first Polish church in West Michigan.
PHOTOS: This Penasee Globe photo, taken by Scott Sullivan in 2000, was of the new and former owners of the Hilliards General Store, which was closed last Dec. 31.
Hilliards still has a softball diamond at its park, and it long ago fielded a Hilliards Merchants baseball team.
