The Whitney Tavern Stand served as an inn and local gathering place in Cascade Township, Michigan for fifty years after its construction in the 1852-53 period. In its first few years it served as a stop for stagecoaches on the lines that, connecting Battle Creek, Hastings, and Kalamazoo with Grand Rapids, passed through Whitneyville. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Significance The Whitney Tavern Stand served as an inn and local gathering place in Cascade Township, Michigan for fifty years after its construction in the 1852-53 period. In its first few years it served as a stop for stagecoaches on the lines that, connecting Grand Rapids with Battle Creek, Hastings, and Kalamazoo. Following the completion of a more direct plank road between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids that siphoned off traffic, it continued to serve the stage line between Battle Creek and Grand Rapids via Hastings until around 1870. At that point stage service ended with the completion of the Grand River Valley Railroad line through Hastings to Grand Rapids. Despite alterations since its conversion to a private home in the early twentieth century, the hotel, with its side-gable form and eight-bay wide façade, retains much of the characteristic appearance of a southern Michigan stagecoach inn dating from the mid-nineteenth century.
Cascade Township was created from Ada Township, Michigan in 1848. Settlement began in 1836 but proceeded slowly for the first few years. Development beginning in 1838 of a state road between Battle Creek and Grand Rapids that passed through the township along what are now Whitneyville Avenue and Cascade Road served as a major impetus to settlement. The Battle Creek-Grand Rapids road was one of many routes in southern Michigan laid out and built at the direction of the legislature of the newly established state of Michigan in the late 1830s and early 1840s. It followed what seems today a not very direct route between the two places, passing through the early settlement of Gull Prairie – what is now Richland – well west and only a bit north of Battle Creek, before turning directly north through Prairieville, Middleville, Whitneyville, and Cascade to Grand Rapids.
By the early 1840s stages over this road were carrying passengers between Battle Creek and Grand Rapids. By the late 1840s Patterson & Ward (W. G. Patterson of Kalamazoo and John K. Ward of Battle Creek) provided stagecoach service. By late 1854 the Good Intent Line (C. W. Lewis, proprietor) was providing stagecoach service between Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, at one end, and Grand Rapids, with the Battle Creek and Kalamazoo routes merging at Richland. Beginning in the 1840s, stagecoaches also operated from Battle Creek north to Hastings, west to Middleville, and on to Grand Rapids along the same route. All of this traffic passed through Whitneyville, and most or all of it presumably stopped at Whitney's tavern.
The Whitneys were among the early settlers in Cascade Township. The families of Zerah Whitney (1784-1873), a Connecticut native, and his sons Ezra (1815–99) and Peter arrived in the 1841-42 period and took up land at the site of what soon became known as Whitneyville. The hamlet acquired the township's first post office in 1849 and eventually contained a sawmill, grist mill, store, blacksmith shop, church, and a few scattered houses. But the significance of Whitneyville declined after 1888 when the Grand Rapids, Lansing and Detroit Railroad, the only railroad line built through the area, established its station a mile away at McCords.
Ezra Whitney built a small log hotel in 1842 on a site across the road and a short distance to the south from the present house. He replaced this original hotel with the present frame Whitney Tavern Stand – so identified in an 1870 history – in 1852 or 53. The new tavern and hostelry as built was an L-shaped building with a two-story portico across the front, a ballroom occupying the second story of the entire street-facing front section, and a large wing, containing the kitchen and presumably lodging quarters, extending to the rear from the hotel's north end. The hotel served travelers’ needs as a stagecoach stop and inn providing meals and overnight accommodations and also served as a local watering hole and, with its second-story ballroom, presumably social and cultural center as well. Information about specific events held in the Whitney's ballroom is lacking, but typically these country inn ballrooms hosted a broad range of functions, from dances and entertainments to religious services, church socials, and political meetings.
Whitney was not to enjoy his prosperity for long. In 1855 a plank road turnpike that provided a far more direct connection between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids than the older stagecoach routes through Richland and Whitneyville was completed. The plank road, permitting a six-hour trip from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids as opposed to the old two-day time frame, took over the traffic between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids that formerly passed through Whitneyville. It may also have absorbed much of the traffic between Battle Creek and Grand Rapids as well, since passengers could ride the Michigan Central Railroad between Battle Creek and Kalamazoo and then ride the stage up to Grand Rapids in far less time – and far greater comfort – than by taking the stage on the old state road. Whitney, who must have seen the handwriting on the wall, built a new hotel at Bradley on the Kalamazoo-Grand Rapids plank road when the road opened and sold his Whitneyville hotel to Abner C. Bruen.
Nevertheless, stagecoaches continued to run through Whitneyville on the Battle Creek-to-Grand Rapids route via Hastings until around 1870 when the Grand River Valley Railroad, from Jackson to Grand Rapids through Hastings, was completed. In addition, the state business gazetteers indicate that stage service, presumably operating from the hotel, connected Whitneyville with Caledonia Station (now Caledonia) on the Grand River Valley line during much of the 1880s – perhaps from the time the Valley line was completed until 1888 when the much closer GR, L & D line and its McCords depot opened.
Hotel proprietors after Ezra Whitney include Henry Proctor, listed in the 1867-69 state business gazetteers; S. F. Sliter, according to the township history in the 1870 county directory; John McQueen, listed in the 1870-71 state business gazetteer; Calvin W. Lewis from at least 1876 until 1879; and C. D. Campbell, Henry Best, and Thomas Russell later. The 1907 Kent County atlas's Whitneyville map identifies the building as a hotel, with R. S. Adley as owner – Richard S. and Adelia Winters Adley bought the property in 1893 – and shows the rear wing, but the state business gazetteers list no hotel in Whitneyville after the 1901-02 edition.
The Adleys renovated the hotel during, it appears, the 1910s or 20s, converting it into a single-family house. Their renovations, carried out while retaining much of the simple Greek Revival interior finish, included the removal of the two-story front portico and the rear wing and the addition of an enclosed porch at the north end and of two rooms on the rear. The interior renovations included oak floors downstairs along with some floor plan changes, including the addition of bathrooms, and the addition of a simply detailed brick fireplace, with stone tile hearth, in the living room at the building's north end, with a large brick chimney stack outside against the north wall. Upstairs the former ballroom was partitioned into bedrooms opening off a central hall. The lightweight, stud-less partitions are made of wallboard panels fastened with battens. The second-story remodeling was done without disturbing the still springy ballroom floor, which remains intact. Few changes have been made since then.
The earliest exterior photograph that has been found is from a 1957 newspaper article. The article includes an interview with Mrs. L. A. Brown who lived in the house for 65 years. She recalls a two-story porch stretching across the front but no photograph showing that has been found. However, many pictures and illustrations of taverns built around the time of the Whitney Tavern Stand show a two-story front porch as Mrs. Brown describes. It is not known when the porch was removed. The 1907 Standard Atlas of Kent County shows the footprint of the house being L-shaped. Other books and documents state that the rear wing was removed when the house was converted to a private residence in the early 1900s.
Description
Standing well back from the road on a knoll overlooking the Whitneyville mill pond, the Whitney Tavern Stand is a vernacular Greek Revival former hotel building. The two-story, side-gable hotel presents an unusually broad eight-bay wide façade to the street. The exterior walls are finished in wooden clapboarding and display broad plain board corner and frieze trim below the projecting eaves with their raking cornices without returns. The dominating feature of the front is the front entry, positioned slightly to the right of center, with its side and transom lights set in a classical frame of massy antae and flat-top two-part entablature.
The tavern stands on the west side of Whitneyville Avenue facing east toward the pond in Cascade Township, a growing suburb to the southeast of Grand Rapids. The Whitneyville area in which the hotel is located retains a largely rural aspect, with woods edging the property on the north and west. All that remains of the never-very-large Whitneyville settlement is the Old Time Methodist Church founded in 1854 and the Whitneyville Cemetery, both located ½ mile south of the house. Several owners of the Whitney Tavern Stand are buried in the Whitneyville Cemetery including: the Browns; Calvin Lewis, proprietor of the stage coach line that serviced Whitneyville; and Oscar Whitney, brother of Ezra Whitney, the builder of the Whitney Tavern Stand. Large trees stand in the hotel's front yard and along the south side of the paved driveway that runs along the south edge of the property, and a large open lawn forms the property's rear portion.
The original building has ground dimensions of sixty-one feet in length, north and south, and thirty-one in width, east and west. The wood frame building stands on fieldstone foundations that are six feet thick in places. The east façade is fronted by an open verandah or terrace across the entire front, with a front staircase positioned in alignment with the front entry. The concrete-deck verandah with its wooden railing is supported on fieldstone and concrete retaining walls, concrete filling the space beneath the verandah to the north (right) of the front entrance where a 1957 newspaper article photograph shows a garage door entry to the basement level was then present. Many of the 9-over-6 windows still have the original ripple glass. Several of the hand-pegged interior doors are original, as is the front entry door.
The front entrance opens into a square-plan entry hall, from which doors lead north (right) into a large living room and south (left) into the smaller dining room. The hall may originally have extended entirely through the building. Like the rest of the downstairs, the hall floor is finished in narrow oak flooring. Part of the space directly behind the hall contains a bathroom and the rest is incorporated into a family room that extends into a 1910s or 20s-looking one-story hip-roof addition on the building's back.