Fenton's community center was designed by the architect of Cranbrook

The squat, geometric building near downtown Fenton has a pedigree most cities would brag about and Fenton mostly takes for granted: it was designed by Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish-born architect famous for shaping Cranbrook, the celebrated school and art campus up in Bloomfield Hills. His son Eero — who would go on to design the Gateway Arch in St. Louis — worked on it as a consultant.

How a town this size landed a Saarinen comes down to a gift. In December 1936, the fund of Horace and Mary Rackham handed the village $200,000 to put up a modern building for recreation and civic life. Horace Rackham had made a fortune as one of the original stockholders in the Ford Motor Company — he was a Detroit lawyer who took a flyer on Henry Ford’s startup and it paid off beyond imagining. After he died, his fund spread that money across Michigan, and Fenton was one of the lucky towns.

Saarinen designed it in 1937, and it was built and dedicated by 1938. You can read his hand in the clean lines and simple, blocky forms — early modernism, restrained and confident, the same vocabulary he was using at Cranbrook in those years. It was meant from the start as a gathering place, a hall for the whole community to use.

And that’s exactly what it still does, generations on. Weddings, meetings, classes, civic to-dos — the rooms keep filling for the purpose the Rackhams intended. A small Michigan town quietly holds a genuine work by one of the great architects of the twentieth century, and uses it on a Tuesday night like any other public hall.