The Irish Hills Towers were built out of spite

Two skinny wooden towers stand a few feet apart on US-12 in the Irish Hills, and the gap between them is the whole story. In 1924 a tourism outfit called the Michigan Observation Company wanted to put an overlook on the highest knoll in Cambridge Township. The trouble was a property line ran straight through that hilltop. Farmer Edward Kelly owned half and refused to sell, so the company struck a deal with his neighbor Thomas Brighton and built its tower right up against Kelly’s line.

Kelly took it personally. Before that first autumn was out he threw up his own tower a few feet away — and a few feet taller. People started calling it the spite tower, and the name stuck. What followed was a slow-motion duel measured in lumber. The observation company added a second deck on top to retake the lead. Kelly raised a platform of his own to match it. The company finally warned him that if he went any higher they would tear theirs down and put up a steel giant he could never beat, and that ended the climbing.

Both men turned to drawing crowds instead. The company’s side grew a little roadside empire — a pet zoo with alligators and monkeys, an arcade, a restaurant, picnic grounds, even a golf course. For decades the twin towers were the thing you stopped for on the drive between Detroit and Chicago.

They went quiet at the end of the 2000 season and the township later fenced them off as unsafe. They made the National Register of Historic Places in 2007, two stubborn wooden fingers still poking at the sky over the Irish Hills, monuments to a grudge nobody alive remembers the start of.