Old hall shaping up for Santa’s arrival

MACOMB TOWNSHIP — Over a year after being moved, the 1920s-era Macomb Township Hall is starting to take shape.

Moved from the intersection of Romeo Plank Road and Maple Vila Drive in June 2023, the 104-year-old building has been the subject of renovation efforts at its new location along Plattsburg Street in the township municipal complex. After a year of work, it is beginning to approach a semi-functional state.

“The building itself is about 85-90% renovated,” Macomb Township Treasurer Leon Drolet said. “The building has been repainted. Some boards have been replaced. There are brand-new replica windows. The previous owner had torn out a section of the back of the building to put in a garage door for storage. That has been replaced with a regular wall like the building originally had, so the structure itself has been restored to its original form.”

Drolet says the renovation has largely moved into the “odds and ends” phase with the largest changes involving repainting the interior. Along with filling in the garage door, one significant set of additions has been building a porch and a ramp. The ramp is part of the accessibility changes being made to the building.

“There is a door that the ramp goes up to that has to be 36 inches wide, so we will have to replace that door with a wider door,” Drolet said. “We’ve already ordered and are awaiting the arrival of a new door that is as close as possible to the existing original door, just wider.”

As far as external renovations go, a group of volunteers dubbing themselves the “Dead Phragmites Society” are working on building up a 1920s-era garden around the old hall.

Nethanya Fonseka, a Department of Public Services volunteer and founder of the organization Plant It Forward, created an initial draft of the garden, which was then modified by MSU Extension Master Gardener Program volunteer Kathi Pipenbrock. The objective of the garden is to utilize plants native to Macomb Township, many of which have not been present in the environment for over 100 years. Cherry, sugar maple and catalpa trees along with dogwood and serviceberry bushes are some of the plants expected to go in with plans to develop a pollinator-friendly native prairie along the garden as well.

“We are trying to make this a biodiverse area and low-maintenance so that we can sustain not only the plants that were in the area in North America before we came, but also hopefully help maintain the birds and other wildlife that’s already around,” Pipenbrock said.

One of the most highly anticipated plants to be included in the garden are chestnut trees, which went extinct in the region due to the spread of chestnut blight throughout the 20th century. Fonseka was able to source the chestnut trees from a grower in Owosso.

“We got them from Nash Nurseries,” Fonseka said. “They’re part of the (Michigan) Chestnut Growers Association. They were really generous and gifted it to us for our garden, which is nice because usually they are expensive.”

In order to prevent it from succumbing to blight, the hybrid chestnut tree is a mix of Chinese, Japanese and American chestnut trees.

Along with the coming winter being an obstacle, Fonseka and other volunteers aim to prepare the surrounding soil for the first phase of tree planting in spring 2025. Fonseka herself has begun mulching leaves and, as of late November, had at least 25 bags of plant material mulched and ready.

Period decor is planned to adorn the garden with volunteers on the lookout for vintage benches, sundials, birdhouses and feeders, farm plows and water pumps. A picket fence is expected to surround the finished garden, while informational plant markers and an accessible pathway through the garden are planned to help make the garden available to all community members.

Renovations and repairs to the old hall have largely been covered by donations. Drolet estimates around $200,000 to $250,000 has been raised for the project covering both monetary donations and donated labor. Some expenses, such as creating sidewalks around and up to the old hall, have been covered by the township.

“We have a sidewalk gap program where we try to have sidewalks on major roads where there are current gaps in the sidewalks,” Drolet said. “We have a certain amount of money we put aside in the budget for main road sidewalks. We get a better deal if we put the town hall sidewalks into that bucket because somebody is bidding on a large number of sidewalks. As a budget item, it will show up as our sidewalk gap program, but in reality, it was just added to that as a way of saving some money and making it part of a larger bid.”

With the building not yet completed and Thanksgiving upon us, Drolet plans to have the building in a presentable, albeit unfinished, state for the township’s holiday tree lighting and afterglow on the evening of Wednesday, Dec. 6. Decorations are already in place around the municipal complex.

“We’re going to decorate it up for Christmas so that on Dec. 6, when kids come to visit Santa, they can visit him in the old town hall,” Drolet said. “We’ve got to get Santa’s chair in there. We have to get a tree in there and we have to get the decorations up.”

While a formal opening ceremony is not expected until sometime in 2025, how the old hall will be used when Santa is out of town remains an open question. Proposed uses are to have the old hall serve as a museum or as a meeting space, though Drolet argues the true purpose of the building is more than what functions go on inside it.

“The biggest value that building provides is a connection to the history of the land and this community,” Drolet said. “It is never going to be some amazing event space. It’s always going to be more of a memorial and monument to the people who built Macomb Township into what it is, to the original settlers, to the farming families … It’s always going to be more of a recognition, an appreciation and a celebration of the history of this community than it is going to be a heavily used event space.”

The old hall’s renovation continues, and much work is still planned to make the space lively. For more information about donations regarding the old hall and garden, contact Drolet at (586) 992-0710, ext. 7, or by emailing DroletL@macomb-mi.gov. Those interested in gardening can contact Pipenbrock at (586) 322-2268.