October 27, 1999
Barnes recalls road's two-track history
Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Barnes Road in Garfield Township is just a short stretch of road that in recent years has become so heavily traveled it required a traffic light at both ends. As drivers zip along the road's curves and hills on their way to or from town, the road's namesake, Bill Barnes, remembers the days of his youth when this road was a rutted two-track.
Now surrounded by subdivisions that sprouted on land he farmed for decades, Barnes still looks at the rolling hills and thinks of the years he and his family scratched out a living from the soil. From his house perched on a hill, the mile-long stretch of road takes Barnes on a trip back in time to when there were fewer than three houses on the road and the area was considered way out in the country.
"Times were hard then, I started out hoeing around trees for a nickel a piece at farms along Silver Lake Road, which was a lot of money then," Barnes said. "Later I worked a tractor for a dollar a day. Out here was the country, the city stopped at Division St. and didn't go beyond 13th or 14th streets."
Born in 1911, his family owned a fruit farm on Silver Lake Road near the base of Barnes Road, just east of Wyatt Road. His parents, Benjamin and Flora Barnes, had come to Traverse City from Detroit near the turn of the century and bought a place in the country to carve out their livelihood and raise a family.
His father was very successful and with the help of Barnes' seven siblings the farm flourished. The senior Barnes also opened a warehouse on Front Street and the family lived in town for a number of years in a house on Sixth Street. Barnes attended Central Grade School for his first few years of school. Barnes remembers the success of his father's warehouse, which stored and distributed produce from around the region.
"The farmers from Leelanau County would be lined up along Front Street clear past Division in the mornings, their wagons full of potatoes or fruit," said Barnes, who had Jerry Oleson as a boy scout leader. "We used sawdust for insulation in the warehouse and had automatic graders to sort potatoes."
Later, when Barnes was a young man, his father lost everything at the beginning of the Great Depression. The bank foreclosed on the fruit farm and the warehouses in 1931. The family would have been homeless except that the president of the bank allowed them to move into the house on Barnes Road, which was then vacant.
"A lot of people here lost everything in the 30s," Barnes said. "But the bank was real good to them. Vilo Anderson, the president of the State Bank, he was nice to us and although he had to take the farm and warehouse, he set us up in this house."
Ironically, Barnes moved into a house that he and his boyhood friends had decided was haunted, although he does not recall why. They avoided the place when they walked by it on their way to the Lone Tree School, a one-room schoolhouse on Lone Tree Road.
Barnes has lived in the house for the past 68 years, marrying the former Eva Schmuckal and raising a family there. He started his own farm and grew mostly cherries, but also peaches, plums and apples on his farm. He also had an apple farm on Silver Lake Road next to the Buffalo Farm.
Barnes retired from farming in the early 1970s, deciding to sell off some of his land instead of spending money to upgrade his operation to meet new regulations. The subdivisions of Meadow View and Foxcraft Estates sit on former Barnes family property.
His daughter, Kathy Belovich of Long Lake Township, recalled growing up there a generation after her father, when the contrast between city and country was still sharp. It was not until the 1970s that the land became more valuable for housing than farming and subdivisions replaced the many orchards in the area.
"The area has changed quite a bit, it used to be just fruit farms and fields," Belovich said. "I used to think I lived so far out of town when I was in school. We used to ride our sleds from our house down the road to Silver Lake Road to catch the bus. There's too much traffic to even think of doing that now."