Fenton's museum lives in a 1900 sash-factory office that became the town library

Andrew Jackson Phillips was a Fenton manufacturer, and the office he worked from still stands downtown, put up in 1900. His heirs handed the building to the city in 1906, and for the next several decades it did the unglamorous, essential work of being the town library — until the books moved out to the old post office (now the Jack R. Winegarden Library) and the Phillips building got a second act as a museum bearing his name.

Step inside and the first room is Phillips himself: a recreation of his Victorian-era office, his own furniture and all. From there it spreads into a period kitchen, racks of old clothing and tools, and bound runs of Fenton newspapers reaching back to the 1840s. Tucked among the displays is a sword that belonged to Colonel William Fenton, the man the town is named for — given to him by the city of Flint.

The reason researchers drive in from across the county sits in two quieter rooms. One is a genealogy library; the other holds cemetery records that stretch well past Fenton’s borders to communities all over Genesee County. If your great-grandparents are buried somewhere in the county and you don’t know where, this is one of the few places that can point you to the headstone — a free afternoon of digging in a building that has spent its whole life being useful to the town one way or another. The Fenton Historical Society keeps it open Sunday afternoons, or by arrangement for group tours.