ROSE CITY- Growing up on Long Lake included occasional trips to the IGA (now Family Fare) in Rose City. They had such delicious doughnuts!
One such trip around 1967, my mom spotted something way back off the road, a steeple with a carved wooden spire on top. She drove back into the field to find this most unusual house.
The main part looked normal; it was made of wood but attached was a most unusual turret of fieldstone with a sloped shingled roof. Sitting in a field of weeds, it was clearly abandoned, and the inside charred by fire. We asked about it in town but got little information.
A few days later Mom took me back with my sketchbook and brownie camera in hand. A couple weeks later, we went back to get more photos and were shocked to find it completely gone! Where the mysterious building once was, it was now nothing but bare ground.
My junior year of high school, I shared my story and sketches with my Art teacher who assigned a series of projects. First, a copper plate dry point etching, then colored ball point pen sketches. He then said “now you’re going to paint it” handing me a 4′ x 4′ stretched canvas. I started it that year and finished it at home that summer. We called it, “The Castle”.
It hung in our Flint family home until my parents retired and moved to Arizona in 2000 where it hung in the spare bedroom.
In 2018 I moved back to Michigan and had it shipped there. It now hangs on the wall of my Long Lake cabin, directly across the lake from our old family cabin!
Just recently, with the help of the Rose City Library and Grace Dooley, I contacted the Rose City Historical Society. I put a post on their fb page and got tons of responses! Comments and history from numerous people including Heidi Sammons Goulette, whose father Keith Sammons and his brothers completed it for the owner Mr. Ferguson, in the ’40s. It was located at the south end of Grant Street. So now, 50+ years after I painted it, it has come full circle.
My mom passed away just weeks before I moved into the cabin, and she never got to see “The Castle” hung there. I wish she could have shared this final chapter with me, but our memories of “The Castle” will always remain close to my heart.
