Ella Sharp gave Jackson her farm — all 530 acres of it

The big farmhouse on the hill started as a working model farm. Abraham Wing bought the land just outside Jackson in 1855, and his daughter Mary and her husband Dwight Merriman turned “Hillside” into a showplace — orchards and cultivated fields running to hundreds of acres. Ella came into it by marriage, ran it herself as a widow after her husband John died, and worked the place until her own death in November 1912.

What she did with it is the reason her name is all over the south side of Jackson. Ella Sharp had no children to leave the farm to, so she willed it to the city — house, land, and a trust fund to pay for turning it into a public park. The Jackson Common Council accepted the gift in January 1913. A landscape designer named Winiford Trout began laying out roads, gardens, ball fields, and a golf course in 1915, using forty thousand dollars from her trust, and he stuck around as park supervisor for two decades, living in Ella’s own farmhouse while he did it.

The park grew to roughly 560 acres along the Grand River and never stopped being used — golf, tennis, ball games, gardens, the works. The farmhouse took longer to find its second life. Not until 1965 did it open as the Ella Sharp Museum, and today the museum runs a cluster of historic buildings on the grounds, telling the story of the farm and the county around it.

It’s a tidy piece of civic luck. One woman with no heirs decided her hilltop should belong to everybody, stamped it into a trust so the city couldn’t sell it off, and more than a century later half of Jackson still spends its summers on land that used to be her orchard.