This is still a beautiful area with inherited money through long standing family connections of Summer residents. The setting of the town & surrounding topography is spectacular. For anyone visiting Michigan a trip to Petoskey should be on the list. A wonderful & bustling downtown too!!
A local remembers ... For a time I was an assistant dining room manager at the Perry Hotel ( I remember being told that it was once advertised as fireproof lol during one of our turn of the century train weekends) for a season in Petoskey and also grew up in the area. So much of what you recounted I already knew and I consider it an excellent snapshot of the areas previous 200 years of history. I'm originally from Harbor Springs ( though my parents moved down to the Ann Arbor area for college after graduation where I was born and then we moved back a few years later ) and have also lived in Petoskey with relatives on both sides of my family still occupying both towns with many of us having Odawa bloodlines. I'd like to thank you for including the true but sad and misguided history of forced integration and the holy childhood school. I do remember it closing in 1983 and growing up in the 70s though I can say that by then most of the native population entered in the mainstream public schools in the area and holy childhood itself was basically I believe a thrift store / Catholicism /Catholic school/ daycare and orphanage in it's final official years. I have no idea what any of that is used for today though the church is still certainly open as is the rectory I believe. It is a complex and troubled history, one that the town is not proud of but quietly embraces warts and all. Nowadays the Little Traverse Band of Odawa Indians has come a long way including when I was young eventually its main summer pow wow moved back to its traditional grounds in what became Ottawa stadium where our high school football games were held and incidentally also where I graduated in 1988 . later the tribe acquired permanent and separate grounds just outside the city. My cousin is currently a tribal board member. Also of note is that my commencement ceremony was held at holy childhood. My great grandmother's father is William H. Lee whom I believe owned a title company, was a neighbor to Efram Shay the well known train steam engine advancer and along with him one of the men instrumental in the origins of the incorporation of the town. Our uncle Charles Caskey was the main architect/builder of our city hall and also the Grand Hotel on Mackinaw island which is where my class had its prom in part due to one of the island ferries families( who also lived in Harbor) youngest son being in my class. Another little tidbit that ernest hemingway who's spent many summers in bayview between harbor springs and petoskey had an odawa granddaughter who i graduated with. another little tidbit is that the summer that the Robson family was murdered near goodhart, my father was living with a friend in the development next to the one they were staying in just a mile or two away and likely was there that night oblivious to the horrors happening just down the road as were everyone else in the area. The entire family is buried in the cemetery across from the development my aunt and uncle lived in Beverly Hills MI. It remains to this day to be the most heinous and mysterious crime that ever happened in northern Michigan except perhaps the aforementioned forced integration and schooling of the local native children. I was told recently that they were five bodies of infants found on the grounds buried. It was probably just due to illness but those were dark days. I was also likely conceived the same week of the incident but as I am told by one of their friends that my parents took a walk up in the dunes north of cross village at sturgeon Bay which ultimately resulted in my birth the following January two months premature. A lot of TMI I know and bits of history that don't really fit your video but considering your interest I thought you wouldn't mind and perhaps even enjoy serve my raw unedited comments. I've got a pretty serious arthritis producing autoimmune condition that forces me to use a voice to text software that's not very good so I apologize for all the typos.
History doesn't get erased by taking down a statue. It just doesn't get celebrated with a statue. I don't know what those statues had to do with the statue of Chief Petoskey, that's still standing though.
