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parents always took the front bedroom, my grandmother the back one. In the front bedroom was a rustic home- made chest constructed of small, split local logs. The drawers were made from wooden crates once used to ship California oranges. I don’t remember which beds were in those rooms in the beginning, but they were probably like the beds up in the attic (and may have in fact been the very same beds that later went into the attic): cotton-stuffed mattresses on thin metal grid-like springs resting on sawhorses. When the Elliot Hotel closed in the early 1950’s, we salvaged for purposes of “historical preservation” two old, dented brass beds from the hotel, which were put into the first-floor bedrooms.
Each bedroom had a closet for hanging clothes and storing things. The closets separated the bedrooms and between the closets was a secret storage space that was reached by removing one or more boards from the inner wall of the closet off the back bedroom. This served primarily as a gun cabinet for the single-shot .22, and also a bolt action .22 that took a 9-bullet clip. After my grandmother died in 1968, I dismantled this compart- ment to create more closet space. We didn’t have much of any value in the cottage that needed secret storage and had no use for the guns.
Opening and closing the cottage were seasonal chores that had many steps. My grandmother, always fearful that
something would be stolen, insisted that we cover all the windows with dark shrouds, which were hung inside on nails in the window frames, so no one could see in. Wooden shutters were nailed to the trim around the windows on the outside, presumably to prevent storm damage, as one might do if a hurricane were approach- ing. (This was apparently more expeditious and less expensive than putting up permanent shutters on hinges.) The rain barrels had to be turned over. They were never put away but were left outside, upside down, to rust all winter. Finally, someone had to climb up onto the roof and put a flat rock onto the chimney to prevent small animals from going down the flue and getting into the cottage. The next season, when the cottage was opened, these steps were taken in reverse. The cottage and the outhouse were each locked with padlocks that were opened by rotating each of four tumblers with numbers on their bases into the proper numerical order. My uncle Fred could never remember the combinations and so he simply wrote them in pencil on one of the white trim boards on the side of the cottage. I don’t know how important locking the place up really was, but one year we found one of the padlocks had a deep gash in the side, as if someone had shot at it w•ith a gun. It hadn’t opened. We keep it as a souvenir.
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Volume 73 • Number 4
Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN 23
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