Imagine for a moment you are three year old Margie Hallett in 1942. Imagine you had made the long trip from Detroit with your five brothers and sisters crammed into an old car with your parents. You finally arrive to find when you arrived at the Villa Marquette where your father was to be the new caretaker, that things were not as you had expected.
It is the middle of the night you are feeling very tired and cranky, and the cottage you were to call home for the rest of your childhood had at that point no indoor plumbing or electricity. The upper floor that had been used as a chicken coop but hadn’t yet been cleaned, and a distillery in the basement. Your mother is saying if it had been light out she would have walked back to Detroit!
The young seminarians who came every summer after 1937, worked hard completing the structures. They replaced the deceased orchard with a grove of pine trees, built a boat dock, and helped in the construction of the chapel. Somehow the caregivers cottage did not receive their attention yet.
Spring brings visitors
Still, as time went on, Margie looked forward to the buses arrival each spring bringing the Jesuits in their black cassocks who would open their windows to wave at them and toss out candy. She remembers the baseball games with the locals versus the Jesuit clergy and the picnics that followed. She loved hearing the Jesuits out on the bay in the old fishing boat donated by John Bauer singing hymns.
One of the visitors, after strolling down to the beach to join the group around the fire, the crisp expanse of the Milky Way and the rise of the orange moon casting a moons shadow on the water, wrote, “This is a place where God comes straight down to you, like a meteorite, and whispers in your ear under the blanket of a summer night.”
Credit Mary Hallett Stanton, Leelanau Historical Society and Omena, A Place In Time