Applewood: the apple-named estate of the man who steered Flint

There’s a working orchard in the middle of Flint, and the apples on its trees go back a century. Applewood is the home Charles Stewart Mott built in 1916 — a brick Tudor-style house with an attached greenhouse, set on what he called a gentleman’s farm. Mott was one of the men who made the city what it became: he merged his axle company into General Motors, served on its board for decades, and ran for mayor of Flint three times. The fortune that built the auto town also built this quiet green place on the north side of it.

The name is a small family joke that stuck. Mott’s grandfather ran a cider and vinegar business, and the orchard out front carries the idea forward — today it holds 29 heirloom apple varieties, the kind of old-fashioned names that have mostly vanished from grocery shelves. Around the house, the original landscape laid out between 1916 and 1921 included a grape arbor, a bowling green, a croquet lawn, and formal cutting and vegetable gardens. Mott kept the place as a real farm until 1949, chickens and all.

After his death the estate passed to his widow, Ruth, who in 1989 created the Ruth Mott Foundation. The foundation took over Applewood when she died in 1999 and now opens the 34-acre grounds to visitors for free during the warm months. It’s a Michigan Historic Landmark and on the National Register, but the thing that makes it stick is smaller than any of that: a barn, a chicken coop, a gatehouse, and rows of apple trees pruned the same shapes they were a hundred years ago, all of it tucked behind a wall a few minutes from downtown.