The 1800s village hiding inside Corunna's McCurdy Park

Step off the boardwalk in Hugh McCurdy Park and you’re standing in another century. A one-room schoolhouse, a log cabin, a chapel, an old depot and a scatter of other period buildings sit clustered along the Shiawassee River — the Corunna Historical Village, a stitched-together small town that shows how people lived here before electricity reached the back roads, before running water, before cars.

The village took shape in 1990, built by the Corunna Historical Commission and the Shiawassee County Historical Society on ground bought from the county’s old agricultural society with the help of a state grant. That farm-fair lineage is fitting, because McCurdy Park was the home of the Shiawassee County Fair for decades — the midway, the livestock barns, the harness racing — until the fair outgrew the riverbank and moved to roomier ground. Some of the buildings the volunteers rescued and hauled in came from townships and crossroads that have all but vanished from the map otherwise.

The park itself carries the name of Hugh McCurdy, a Corunna lawyer and judge who gave the land to the city. Corunna is the county seat — a small one, the kind of town where the courthouse, the river, and the park all sit within a short walk of each other — and the village fits that scale. It isn’t a sprawling open-air museum so much as a quiet pocket where the past is set out building by building for you to wander through.

The structures are unlocked and the docents on hand mainly during the warm months, when volunteers run tours and the gardens around the buildings are in. Off-season it’s still a pretty loop to walk: a boardwalk, a river, and a row of weathered roofs that have seen a lot more winters than they were ever built to.