Toner Ave. at Bunker Hill

It’s still the lake water... By John Wm. Houghton
July 23, 2009 Culver Citizen

I wrote in the "April" version of this column (which actually appeared in June, an accident that may perhaps have made it that much funnier) about the various names the town has had.

At a couple of points in the year, I've also mentioned in passing some street names that have changed over the years: Morris Street, which is now just "the sidewalk west of the Eppley Quadrangle"; Indiana Avenue, which, along with Houghton Avenue, was absorbed into Academy Road; and Scott Street and Toner Avenue, which were merged to become Lake Shore Drive.

There are, as you might imagine, more examples. When I was in college, for instance, having been frustrated for some years by the deletion of Houghton Avenue, on the north side of our house, I had the idea of petitioning the town board to change the name of Carl Street, east of us, to Houghton Street — which they kindly agreed to do.

Fifty years or so before that, back in 1926, the residents of Helen Street requested that the Board change the name of that thoroughfare to Forest Place. The news reports don't indicate what the homeowners had against Helen, a name which was, after all, good enough for Homer and Edgar Allen Poe: nor do a couple of nice rows of trees along the sidewalk actually constitute a "forest." But who am I quibble?

The renaming habit isn't restricted to the city limits. Back issues of the Citizen report at least two plans to standardize the names of county roads, the second of which actually caught on in most counties, resulting in road names like "East 575 North."

Marshall, notoriously, is one of the non-conformists, with roads named for plants in alphabetical order east to west (well, mostly for plants, anyway; and the alphabetization, admittedly, only applies to first letters: Pear is on the wrong side of Peach, for example) and numbered by miles, from north to south.

But some people I know still talk about the Behmer Road, instead of 14B, running north of Burr Oak, past the Behmer homestead farm. Similarly, when the 1836 commemorative rock was placed east of the Academy in 1936, people thought of the north-south road at that corner as Vonnegut Road, rather than Queen: after all, it ran down to the Vonnegut orchard.

Even some geographical features around the lake have had their names changed. E. R. Corwin reports in "One Township's Yesterdays" that when a map of the lake came out in 1903, people were surprised to find that "Rochester Point" or "Chadwick Point" had become "Long Point."

While the area had been the site of both the Chadwick and Arlington Hotels, most of the original cottagers there had been from Fulton County, giving the place its pre-1903 designation.

An unofficial version of the same thing happened on the north shore, where the grounds of the old Lake View Hotel (which burned in 1929, a few months after the Culver brothers bought it) somehow became known as the "Indian Trails."

And judging from the various names I have found in use on the internet, we apparently still haven't decided whether Lake Maxinkuckee drains into Lost Lake, Little Maxinkuckee, or Hawk Lake—the Hawk family farm being on its west side.

In at least one case, this name-changing business has created a little confusion. For a large chunk of the last century, and perhaps even before that, folks commonly talked about "Bunker Hill." From the various references to Bunker Hill in the Citizen, it's clear that the term referred to some part of the rise north of the Vandalia Railroad park. (Indeed, some people have suggested the name began as a pun on railroad coal bunkers, which seems perfectly reasonable, though I haven't seen any other references to such things).

But, since everyone knew where Bunker Hill was, the paper never had to explain. In 1917, for instance, the Citizen could refer to a signboard at the corporation limits at the top of Bunker Hill; and in 1935, it reported that the town had purchased, along with the park itself, 2.2 acres of the site of the old water tower at Bunker Hill. Which would be helpful, if we knew where the old water tower was (and, for that matter, which water tower: the town's or the railroad's?).

Some of the items, however, are a bit more helpful: another 1935 article mentions moving dirt from the town property on Bunker Hill in order to fill in the lake front—and the bank north of the town water tower does look as though dirt had been removed from it.

A short notice in the July 13, 1911, paper nails the location down. It reports that "D. A. Bradley last week sold to M. M. Stiles of Plymouth the corner lot at the foot of Bunker Hill with a frontage of 77' on the lake and 99' up the hill for $600. Mr. Stiles intends to build a pretty home on this corner."

It tells us something, I suppose, about Culver in 1911 that this was front page news. Geographically, the notice seems just impossible: even in 1911, there was no place for a 77' lake frontage between the park and Lake View Hotel grounds.

The answer, though, is that the reporter used the language a bit loosely. On a plat map of the town, it turns out that the seven variously-sized lots south of College Street and north and west of Lake Shore Drive, with Bradley Court running through the middle, are the Bradley Addition to Culver City. So the building site Mr. Bradley sold to Mr. Stiles was, presumably, the corner lot or lots in Bradley's Addition—77' parallel to the railroad, ratherthan 77' actually "on the lake."

In brief, Mr. Stile's lot now, apparently, houses the Original Root BeerStand: and that means that Bunker Hill is definitely the hill (such as it is) on then northbound stretch of LakeShore Drive.