The Hall House vanishes on old "Plank Road"

Well, it came down. What's that they say? Out with the old, and in with...what, exactly?

In the last week of 2007, one of the last original buildings on Lakewood's Detroit "Plank Road" was, itself, turned into splinters of planks. The 1848 Plank Road extended from present-day Rocky River into Cleveland. It was made of logs cut nearby, and was a toll road for commerce in those pre-concrete days of muddy trails.

The Matthew Hall house, finished by 1870, is gone. In fact, Matthew Hall was the superintendent of the Plank Road. He and his family lived there for a number of years prior to constructing a beautiful brick residence just east, where the ball field at Edwards and Detroit now exists. In fact, that particular residence later became Lakewood's original YMCA before it, too, was gone.

A number of Lakewood streets were named for Hall relatives, who owned several residences and quite a bit of land in Lakewood. One Arthur Hall, who provided the name for Arthur Avenue, loved books. Through this influence, a successful campaign began to start up the Lakewood Library.

It is so ironic to me that Lakewood residents wanting to change the least little thing on their own properties these days may have to jump through heaven-knows-how-many-hoops to do so, while in the blink of an eye, a truly historic structure like the Hall House gets crushed into kindling wood.

I've been in that house many times. The staggering history that the place witnessed along Detroit's old plank road must have been profound. Certainly, returning Civil War veterans, in the dead of night, must have passed by its doors. Its tiny rooms must have been cold and scary, as the winter winds howled across the lake, hitting the home's rear fascia boards. Dangers from highwaymen and the occasional beasts of the forest certainly existed, and the home protected its occupants well.

Now it's gone, and in the blink of an eye...

In Europe, there are many thousand-year-old structures giving perspective to time, place, and heritage. Not so in our hemisphere. America's oldest buildings seldom surpass a couple hundred years of age. We did not have serfs to build great castles for those of power and privilege; only the raw materials of the fields and forests existed to build the "little castles" of free men and women in a free land. When we were truly free, that is (or should I write "that was"?).

The Hall House, to me, represented a classic early American Ohio country home that we will not see again. Some felt that it could have been moved to another spot. To have moved it from old "Detroit Road" would have been a travesty anyway, at least in my opinion; for "Detroit's Plank Road" was where its history transpired. Perhaps better it be gone in a crunch of timber on the land where it began than to sit on some plot of remanufactured history. Like the pioneer cemetery formerly in downtown Lakewood, the site will remain only in our memories. Maybe someone will put up a bronze marker for it someday.

Yeah, right. Even if they did put one up, markers only "say," anyway. They don't "show."

The last time I was in the Hall House, it was an antique shop. Ironically, while there, I purchased a really old framed shadowbox painting of James Earl Fraser's "End of the Trail," depicting a Native American on horseback... exhausted and bending over... spear thrust towards Mother Earth...

End of the trail, yeah...

With our present-day hydrocarbon-fed "horses," and our here-today, gone-tomorrow regard for heritage (again, in my opinion), I think it a good possibility that we may be getting there faster than we realize.

In-depth details of Lakewood's history may be found in Dan Chabek's Lakewood Lore, along with Jim and Susan Borchert's Lakewood, The First Hundred Years and Margaret Manor Butler's several books about Lakewood, including Romance in Lakewood Streets. Butler was founder of the Lakewood Historical Society.