Gordon Hall: the Greek temple on the hill above Dexter

Drive west out of downtown Dexter and look up: on the bluff above the Huron River sits what looks like a Greek temple with a farmhouse attached. That’s Gordon Hall, and the man who built it is the same man the town is named for. Samuel William Dexter — Boston-born, Harvard-educated, chief justice of Washtenaw County in the 1820s and early 1830s — laid out the village, then put up this house on the hill above it between 1841 and 1843.

The shape has a nickname architects use for it: “hen and chicks.” The “hen” is the tall front block with its columned temple front; the “chicks” are the lower one-story wings flanking it. It’s one of the grandest wooden Greek Revival houses in Michigan, and the layout is said to be almost a southeast-Michigan specialty. Dexter named the place Gordon Hall after his mother’s family.

There’s a heavier story under the floorboards. Samuel Dexter was a committed abolitionist, and the house is believed to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. It once held a secret basement room reached through a trap door on a porch, with concealed crawl-space openings under the others — the kind of architecture that doesn’t show up on the original plans.

The house stayed in the family for generations. In 1950 Dexter’s granddaughter, Katharine Dexter McCormick — a suffragist who later helped fund the research behind the birth-control pill — gave Gordon Hall and seventy acres to the University of Michigan. The university held it for decades, and in 2006 the Dexter Area Historical Society bought it back to keep it a community place. It still presides over the steepled village below, columns facing east, exactly where the judge put it.