Haven Hill: the woodland retreat Edsel Ford built to escape the family business

Edsel Ford was the only son of Henry Ford, which meant the whole weight of the car company was someday going to land on him. So in 1923 he started quietly buying up hilly, wooded land in Highland Township — one of the few corners of Oakland County with a real ridge to it — to build himself somewhere to get away from all that. He called it Haven Hill, and the name was the point: a haven.

By 1931 he and his wife, Eleanor, had finished a lodge on the high ground and surrounded it with the trappings of a self-sufficient retreat — a swimming pool and cabana, a tennis court, riding stables and an arena, a working farm, a fishing lake, and a long tow-return toboggan run for the winters. The Fords raised their four children spending time out here, trading Detroit for the woods whenever they could, and used the place until Edsel died in 1943.

Three years later Eleanor sold the estate to the State of Michigan, and over time it was folded into what is now the thousands of acres of the Highland State Recreation Area. The big lodge and the riding stables were later lost to fire, but the gatehouse, the carriage house, and Edsel Ford’s barn still stand, and a local friends group has been working to bring them back.

The land turned out to be the real treasure. The core of the old estate stayed so undisturbed, holding nearly every kind of forest you find in southern Michigan — beech-maple, oak-hickory, even cedar and tamarack swamp — that the National Park Service named it a National Natural Landmark in 1976, one of only a handful in the state. Edsel went looking for a place to hide from the family business. He ended up preserving a slice of old Michigan instead.