A cheese magnate's mansion, and the Michigan governor who grew up there

Fred Warner arrived in Farmington as an orphan. His mother died when he was three months old, and an English couple, the Warners, took the baby in and raised him as their own. That foundling grew up to run a chain of cheese factories, win the governor’s office three times, and end up with his boyhood home turned into a museum on the main street of his hometown.

The house was built in 1867 by P. D. Warner, Fred’s adoptive father. It’s an elegant Italianate Victorian, with bracketed eaves and tall windows, and it still anchors downtown Farmington. Fred inherited his father’s head for business and then dwarfed it. He opened his first cheese factory in 1889 and in time ran thirteen of them across the region — the kind of empire that made a man’s name long before politics did.

Then he went into politics anyway. Warner was elected governor of Michigan in 1904 and served from 1905 to 1911, three two-year terms. He was a Republican from a small Oakland County town, steering the whole state through the early automobile age. For a place the size of Farmington, sending one of its own to the governor’s office was the local story of the century.

His grandchildren gave the house to the city of Farmington in 1980 on one condition — that it be kept as a historical museum. Today it’s furnished in late-Victorian style, the porch hosts weddings and summer lunches, and volunteers keep the gardens going behind it.

It’s a satisfying arc for a small town to own: a baby left without a family, raised by neighbors, who came back as governor and left them his house. Not bad for thirteen cheese factories and a lucky adoption.