The Whaley House, where a $2,000 loan helped start General Motors

The most consequential thing that ever happened in the Victorian house at 624 E. Kearsley Street in Flint was a handshake over money. The man who lived there, Robert Whaley, ran Citizens National Bank, and at a pivotal moment he handed a carriage maker named Billy Durant a $2,000 loan. Durant used money like that to take over a struggling outfit called Buick — and from Buick he built General Motors.

So the wealth that decorated this house, in a roundabout way, helped bankroll the company that would make Flint a car town for a century.

Whaley married into the right family. His wife Mary was the daughter of Alexander McFarlan, a wealthy Flint lumberman and banker. Whaley joined the family business as a bookkeeper, rose to bank director, and became president of Citizens National in 1881 when his father-in-law died. By then he and Mary were comfortable enough to remake their home. The original house dated to 1859 in the plain Italianate style; in 1885 they hired a Detroit architect to swell it into the stylish, turreted Victorian that still stands, gilded-age inside and out.

The Whaleys left more than a house. Their giving seeded a children’s center and a home for elderly women, threads of charity that long outlived them.

The house opened as a museum in the 1970s, run by the same nonprofit that grew from the Whaleys’ generosity, and earned spots on the state and national historic registers. Inside, the rooms keep their period furnishings and pieces the family actually owned. You can walk the same hallways where a Flint banker decided a young man’s car gamble was worth two thousand dollars.