1840 Van Hoosen Farmhouse

The 1840 Van Hoosen Farmhouse replaced the log cabin built by the Taylor family when they settled Stony Creek Village in 1823. In the early 1920s, the Van Hoosen family expanded the farmhouse into their long-awaited dream home, and by 1923 the house had been moved back two hundred feet from the road while the horse barn and several outbuildings and additions were removed. Large timbers from the horse barn were used throughout the renovated interior, and brick from the smokehouse was reused in the house's three fireplaces. The farmhouse holds furnishings from five generations of the Taylor and Van Hoosen families, including furniture that traveled on the Erie Canal with the original settlers and a Medici tapestry brought back from Italy in the 1920s. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each generation carefully preserved the house and its contents for the next. After the death of Dr. Sarah Van Hoosen Jones in 1972, her land holdings went to Michigan State University, which in 1979 donated the house and three acres to Avon Township, now the City of Rochester Hills, for use as a museum. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the farmhouse preserves the history of the Taylor and Van Hoosen families across generations.

Rochester Hills, Michigan · United States