The archives are opening for Southfield History Day

SOUTHFIELD — The archives will open at the Southfield Public Library, 26300 Evergreen Road, for Southfield History Day 1-3 p.m. July 13, with a tour of the Southfield History Room.

Darla Van Hoey, the president of the Southfield Historical Society, will give a presentation on the history of Southfield, followed by an introduction to the room’s contents and an explanation of how the community may use them.

“We’d like to just make people aware about what’s there. We’ll have a few handouts. We’ll talk a bit about the history. Part of the history will involve a sort of a question sheet. We did a display board where it has the map of Southfield Township from 1872 and then the Samuel Durant history of Oakland County,” Van Hoey explained.

Durant wrote an illustrative history book on Oakland County in 1877.

She shared that the Southfield Historical Society made a display board with images of farmers, their wives and their farms’ history taken from the Pictorial History of Oakland County. Van Hoey added that there will be questions on handouts for the public to connect with the history, such as, “If you know that Southfield Township is founded by these four roads, where’s your house? And can you find it, and who used to live there?”

Dan Kelly, the adult services librarian, explained that visitors to the library are welcome to use the resources in the Southfield History Room to conduct historical research, genealogy research or the history of their homes for submission to the National Register of Historic Places.

“Recently, architectural historian Cassandra Talley completed work on an ‘Images of America’ book on the history of Southfield,” Kelly said. “Cassandra will present on her research at the library on Thursday, Aug. 15.”

Talley is an architectural historian who moved to Southfield in 2022. As she was driving through the city, she became fascinated by the buildings throughout the city. Talley went to find a Southfield “Images of America” book from Arcadia Publishing and was surprised to find that there wasn’t one, so a year into her residency in Southfield, she decided to take the archives and write a book on the city.

“I was really surprised, too, because in starting to do the work, it was clear that the Southfield Historical Society had a really great collection. So it was just a matter of finding all the photos and doing the research,” Talley said.

Despite this being her first book, Talley explained that researching the history of Southfield and writing about it was similar to what she does in her full-time job as an architectural historian; it was just formatting the content into a book that was new to her. She added that one of her challenges was finding photographs that could be used in her book.

“A lot of the archival repositories and collections have restrictions on use. So that was hurdle No. 1, was to find a collection of photographs that didn’t have that issue. And the Southfield Historical Society definitely checked that box. They have a massive amount of material and photographs that they very, very kindly and generously let me use,” she said.

Talley mentioned that her second challenge was proving people who think that Southfield doesn’t have a lot of history wrong. She said that she was pleasantly surprised to uncover some of the city’s rich history.

“Southfield has this reputation, maybe because there isn’t a historic downtown, but that is absolutely not the case. In researching this book, Southfield did have a historic downtown. It’s just not really there anymore. It was centered along Civic Center Drive. Most of the buildings that made up that little cluster of commerce are gone, but at the end of the day, it was the center of the farming community in Southfield.”

When researching the city’s origins, Talley was also impressed by the “integral mark” that women left on Southfield’s history and founding. She named historical figures such as Mary Thompson, who gave much of her family’s farmland over to the city to build a municipal center; Jean McDonell, a beloved councilwoman famous for her hats; and Vicki Goldbaum, a councilwoman who Talley described as the “unofficial historian” of Southfield.

“There were so many notes in the archives from her and so many collections of photographs. There are all these women just doing great things and running and supporting the archives because Vicki Goldbaum was involved with the archives as well, and Darla, who’s the president of the Southfield Historical Society, has just been indispensable to me. I couldn’t have done this book without her.”

Talley added that the early newspapers in Southfield were also founded by women.

Betty Lewis and Marion White founded the Four Corners Press, and Frances Borowski founded the Southfield Newsette, which eventually became the Southfield News. She shared that in 1950, the two newspapers merged to become the Four Corners Press/Southfield News.

Talley’s nine-chapter book will be out on Jan. 21, 2025, and it can be ordered through arcadiapublishing.com. Talley will do a presentation at the Southfield Public Library 6-8 p.m. Aug. 15 on some of the history and images from the archives that she used in her book. Her presentation will have a special emphasis on the architectural history of Southfield.

For more information on the library’s upcoming events, visit southfieldlibrary.org.