In 1910, an 82-year-old woman named Mary Bush made a last-ditch effort to save Detroit's oldest house.

In a letter to Parks Commissioner M.P. Hurlbut, Mary proposed that the 124-year-old house — expected to be demolished to make way for a gas reservoir — be “placed in some park or on some piece of land owned by the City ... the same to be known as ‘Pioneer Park.’”

Bush was not a battle-hardened preservationist, but she was one of the only people who tried to save this old home, known as the Labadie House. Local chapters of both the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution (among the Sons was Detroit historian extraordinaire Clarence M. Burton) passed resolutions and organized committees to support the preservation of the Labadie House.

Built by one of Detroit’s old French families in the 1780s, the Labadie House told a story that stretched back before European settlement at Detroit. It bore literal battle scars from the War of 1812. Its fate was turned and turned again by the cholera epidemic of 1834 and the wildcat financial panic of 1837. It was noted in the obituaries of several people who lived there, the house named as if it were a bereaved survivor.

As time passed, the shadows (and noises and odors) of lumber yards, tanneries, soap works, and an epochally controversial garbage factory fell upon the Labadie House. It didn’t look like much. But that was part of its story: The Labadie House was built in a time before anyone expected a house to look like much.

Bush doesn’t seem to have had any special interest in architectural history. Rather, she had a personal interest in the Labadie House: She had lived there and was a trustee of the estate of its last owner. She may have even made a little money from its sale to the gas company that planned to tear it down. But her connection to the house made her a natural champion of the effort to stop its destruction.

Hurlbut referred Bush’s appeal to the Common Council Committee on Parks & Boulevards in December 1910. The committee responded in February: “The house has been so altered, changed and remodeled, that it would not be recognized today. ... We recommend that no action be taken seeking to its location upon public ground.”

The Labadie House was doomed, but at least Bush tried. She died a few years later. Today, where the city’s oldest house used to be, there now is, in fact, a park — though it does not preserve any elements of the Labadie House or its history as Bush had hoped.

The Labadies

In 1781, Pierre Descomptes Labadie Jr. purchased two adjacent parcels of land, one from the Robert Navarre farm and one from Isadore Chene, for about $670, or about $14,000 in 2025 money, give or take.

A Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) village once stood on the site before the French land claims. You can see it on Jacques-Nicolas Bellin’s 1764 map of Detroit, southwest of the fort on the bank of the strait, between two long-lost streams: village de Pouteouatamis.

But after Odawa leader Chief Pontiac’s failed 1763 rebellion against British control of Fort Detroit, the Potawatomi sought the safety of distance. They sold their land on the Detroit River to Robert Navarre and moved south to a village on the River Raisin. In their deed to Navarre, ratified in 1772, the Potawatomi gave their ancient village to Navarre “forever … that he may cultivate the same, light a fire thereon, and take care of our dead.” (Remember this for later.)

Around 1786, Labadie built a log house on his new farm. The house, once described as “rakish-looking,” was built with a huge stone chimney at its heart, so that every room would offer a fireplace. It had a steeply sloped roof, a rustic dormer window, and a big front porch whereupon one might sit and gaze out pre-industrially at the swiftly running strait. It sat on a jaunty angle along the old River Road. At some point, the home’s logs were covered in clapboard.

There the house stood, under the title of Pierre Labadie and his family, for decades — hosting travelers, fireside gatherings, and the joint wedding of Labadie’s twin daughters, Josette and Marguerite, to Whitmore Knaggs and Col. James May, respectively. A creek nearby, since filled in and built over, would eventually be named for May.

The Labadie House stood there in 1812 during the inglorious surrender of Fort Detroit to the British. A year later, the home bore witness as Detroit was recaptured after Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory in the Battle of Lake Erie on Sept. 10, 1813, which allowed the United States to retake Detroit.

On Sept. 29, 1813, a fleet of ships led by Gen. William Henry Harrison - yes, the future U.S. president - sailed up the Detroit River to raise the American flag back over the fort. As the fleet passed the Labadie House, they saw a large group of Native Americans standing on the riverbank, watching the British retreat. They had been allied with the British during the conflict, so the American sailors would later justify this as a potential encounter with the enemy. But their actions were rash and wildly violent: Someone on one of the ships opened fire into the crowd, which included women and children. One of those children, James Knaggs, a grandson of Pierre Labadie, recalled this to historian Silas Farmer some 80 years later:

“Grandfather Labadie and my mother and the rest of the children were standing out in front among the Indians, when my grandfather noticed a movement on the foremost vessel. He called out in French (he could not speak English): ‘Here, you all get to the back of the house.’ He drove us all back, my mother included, and commanded that everybody should lie flat on their stomachs. We all obeyed him and waited. Suddenly a puff of smoke came out of the leading vessel’s side, then a loud report, and simultaneously the scream of iron grapeshot. Another gun was discharged two or three seconds later, and another scream of grapeshot. The (Labadie) House was struck at the west end, facing the river, and two balls were embedded in the logs.

“The Indians immediately broke and ran across the farm to the woods, but they were evidently not much scared, for that very band managed to cross the river and join the British troops, and were participators in the Battle of the Thames, where Proctor was defeated and Tecumseh slain. ... The American troops recaptured Detroit on the same day that the Labadie House was fired at. Next day, the commander of the vessel which had fired the shots came down from Detroit to the house and spoke to my grandfather. He said he had fired at the Indians, whom he knew to be hostile to the Americans, but had afterward discovered that there were white people living there. He appeared to be much gratified that no white people had been hurt by the grapeshot.”

Josiah Dorr’s Labadie House

Twenty years after Harrison’s fleet fired on the Labadie House, the Labadies sold it for $3,150 - or about $106,000 in 2025, when adjusted for inflation - to Maj. Robert A. Forsyth, a paymaster in the U.S. Army who served under Gen. Lewis Cass as a teenager during the War of 1812. Forsyth then sold it at cost to his friend and mentor George Bryan Porter, the third governor of the Michigan Territory.

Gov. Porter set to work on a dreamy manse north of the Labadie House, constructing most of a two-story brick villa with lovely balustrades, balconies and arcades. But he had not even moved in when he caught a “violent bilious fever” and died in 1834, one of an estimated 350 victims of that summer’s deadly cholera outbreak.

Porter’s death was also fateful for the Labadie House, which his widow sold with Porter’s mansion and the rest of his land to an entrepreneur named Josiah Dorr in 1835. Dorr was a handsome, sociable and enterprising early Detroiter who founded an iron company, established the city’s first sawmill, and directed a wildcat bank. Dorr rowed at the Detroit Boat Club and hosted his well-heeled friends at the Labadie House, to which he added a pair of inelegant half-moon wings.

In 1845, Dorr’s wildcat bank failed. Broke and embarrassed, he left Detroit for Attica, Ind., and in 1848, he sold the Labadie House and Porter Farm to Mary Armstrong, also of Attica. The property passed hands for a decade and at some point was subdivided, separating Porter’s mansion and lot from the Labadie House.

In 1860, Sylvester Larned bought the Porter House at an auction held by order of a Circuit Court judge to settle a debt between Jeremy Coughlan et. al. and a person who was, believe it or not, named Bridget McUgh.

The Labadie House, meanwhile, was owned for a time by Stephen Moore, who also had a lumberyard across the street. In 1868, Moore sold it to John Newell for $2,500, or about $61,500 in 2025 valuation.

The Labadie House and the Porter Mansion were now in the hands of the last people to own them before the gas company. Larned lived in the Porter house for 25 years, until the industrialization of the neighborhood — and specifically the noxious fumes from a sanitation plant built across the street — drove him away. He died believing that the garbage factory had killed him.

John Newell’s Labadie House

John Newell was born in Stow, Mass., in 1817. He went to Harvard University, married a daughter of the old Bissell family of Vermont, and was a lifetime member in good standing of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Shortly after his wife’s death, his energetic friend John Brooks came knocking with an offer to join a big team of Bostonian businessmen and bankrollers to breathe some life into the newly privatized Michigan Central Railroad. Newell moved to Michigan to work as the railroad’s auditor, a job he did “with unvarying integrity and ceaseless energy” for the rest of his life, the Detroit Free Press wrote Sept. 26, 1885 — a life he mostly lived in the Labadie House. Maybe the rustic and ragged old home held some antique intrigue for the history-loving Newell.

Also living in the Labadie House were Newell’s boarders, Ira Bush, who worked at a nearby bronze foundry, and Ira’s wife, Mary, who would later try to save the house from demolition. Newell died there on Sept. 16, 1885, his occupation described in Michigan’s death rolls as simply “a gentleman.”

He had no direct heirs, and in his will he said that the value of his estate should be divided among five legatees. In addition to family members, one of them was Mary Bush, who got a third of the estate and also inherited his furniture, tableware and china. Ira Bush had his debts to Newell forgiven, and Ira’s son, Bertie, was allowed to keep a boat that had been loaned to him. The value of the Labadie House was appraised at $2,920, or about $106,000 in 2025. (He also gave an “old French cuirass” to the Audubon Club of Detroit.)

Whether anyone liked it or not, Newell’s last wishes were clear: Sell the property, invest the money and let life go on.

Seven years after Newell’s death, historian Silas Farmer complained to the Detroit News² about the city’s cavalier attitude toward its own history and its failure to save places like the Labadie House. A strategic approach to preservation, Silas argued — with talking points that feel at least a half-century ahead of their time — could have economic benefits for Detroit, as it did for the emerging tourist towns of the Eastern seaboard, where summer travelers spent small fortunes to wander among the old buildings of Newport, Nantucket and Kittery, Maine.

Instead, the Labadie House was one of just a handful of “landmarks of Detroit” still standing.

“They are now few indeed,” Farmer said. “Twenty-five years ago, they were comparatively numerous, but since that time they have disappeared, one by one, in obedience to what is called ‘modern progress.’”

The gas works and the Labadie House

Pierre Labadie had built his log cabin on the edge of the wilderness in 1781; every subsequent resident over the next 130 years watched as the neighborhood developed and industry encroached. By the 1890s, lumber yards and scrap piles dotted the blocks behind Fort Street. The Wabash Railroad passed by the old log cabin’s front door. A soap works had opened around 1881, next door to a tannery owned by G.H. Parker that had been there since the 1870s. The tannery stored vats of grease on site, the soap works, tanks of tallow. What basically amounted to a garbage factory, where organic waste was broken down into fertilizer and other byproducts, opened in 1890.

And then there was the Detroit City Gas Works. In operation since the late 1860s, the gas works was one of three major suppliers of coal gas — the fuel of the city’s extensive network of gas lights — to the City of Detroit. Its complex on River Road at 21st Street had grown over decades to include three cylindrical gas holding tanks, underground oil tanks, a gas processing facility, a coke shed, a coal dock and a boat slip.

It was huge. But by the early 1900s, it wasn’t huge enough for Detroit. In fact, the gas works had been accused of failing to meet the city’s growing gas demands as early as 1865: “It has been repeatedly charged that they have in no way kept pace with the requirements of the city, or shown the least disposition to discharge the obligations they owe to our citizens, under their contract to supply the city with gas,” the Free Press reported Sept. 9, 1865. The gas works expanded again and again.

At the end of 1910, eyeing yet another expansion, the Detroit City Gas Works bought the Labadie House from the Newell estate (Mary Bush and the family members), as well as an adjacent property from the estate of Walter Buhl, who had died that March. This suggests that the company had been perhaps waiting to buy the Labadie House until Buhl agreed to sell his house, too, but he died.

“The amount involved is not made public but is understood to have been in the vicinity of $35,000,” the Detroit Free Press reported on Dec. 11, 1910. (That’s around $1.2 million in 2025 money, when adjusted for inflation.) “The two properties form an L-shaped piece, on which, at some future date, when the growth of the city requires it, the gas company will erect a mammoth containing plant, locating the structure on the Jefferson Avenue side of the property.”

Despite the ambiguous “someday”-ness of this report, it did not take long before crews rolled in to take down the Labadie House. It’s unclear when, precisely, it was demolished, but The Detroit News reported Jan. 5, 1912, that the Labadie House had “lately been razed to satisfy the march of progress.”

We also know this because of the skeletons.

The burial ground under the Labadie House

Construction came to a macabre stop when a skull rolled down the hill of the excavated site and landed at the feet of a horrified construction worker, The Detroit News reported.

In all, the crew found seven skeletons under the Labadie House. It was not unusual in this era for construction projects to accidentally exhume an old French coffin or two, but seven was a lot. The News called in Burton, the city’s go-to authority on all things Detroit history, to speak to why there were bodies buried under the house.

Burton reminded The News that the Labadie House was built on land that had once been a Potawatomi village — a village that had included a burial ground. The Potawatomi had sold their land with the understanding that its new owner would take care of its dead.

“Of course, he never kept his promise, as can be seen,” Burton told the paper.

The skeletons, The News reported, were carried off by “treasure seekers” — a shameful act of desecration and a breach of a sacred trust. Today, such grave-robbing of Indigenous burial grounds would be illegal, but in those days, Indigenous peoples were often seen and treated as less than human.

Meanwhile, with the Labadie House’s destruction, the title of “oldest house in Detroit” now belongs to the Trowbridge House at 1380 E. Jefferson Ave., built in 1826.

The gas tank and everything after

The Library of Congress holds in its collection photographs of the gas tank under construction where the Labadie House once stood, taken in the spring of 1912.

What do we know about the gas tank after it was completed? Mammoth as it was, this was not a structure that carried any Detroit folklore with it. The gas tank just did its job dutifully, storing gas, and rarely made the news. The gas tank remained in operation until 1954, when the whole plant was decommissioned and removed by what had become the Michigan Consolidated Gas Co., better known as MichCon, which is today part of DTE Energy.

Under the gas tank’s shadow, in 1922, Detroit’s Public Lighting Department worked out a land swap with the Parks Commission that led to a parcel of land becoming a playground.

“The 24th Street site is adjoining a garbage transfer station, where garbage is loaded to be hauled to the incinerator plant, but the two commissions assured the (Common) Council that there is little or no odor which would prevent the use of the designated site as a playground,” the Detroit Free Press reported Aug. 19, 1922. “The council insisted, however, that a high wall be built between the playground and the garbage station.”

Today, that playground has blossomed into the 29-acre Riverside Park, which underwent a major renovation, with the first section completed in 2018 and the remainder two years later. Located in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge, it now boasts the largest dog park in the city and a 20,000-square-foot skate park, a riverwalk, a picnic shelter, a boat launch, a baseball diamond, soccer field, basketball court, playground and a horseshoe area.