The first brick house in southern Michigan, with a room you weren't meant to find

The Munro House in downtown Jonesville was the first brick house in southern Michigan, and behind its proper Greek Revival front it kept a secret worth hiding people in.

George C. Munro built it in 1840 — a striking thing to do in a county still mostly made of log cabins and timber. Munro was one of the wealthiest men around, with a gristmill and a general store, and as his family grew (fourteen children across two marriages) he kept adding rooms onto the back until the house topped twenty of them. It sits right on the old Sauk Trail, the Native footpath that became US-12, the main road west.

That location put it on another road too. Before the Civil War, the Munro House was a station on the Underground Railroad — one of the safe houses where people escaping slavery rested on the long route toward Detroit and the river crossing to Canada. The house still holds a hidden room built for that purpose, the kind of cramped, quiet space you’d never notice unless someone showed you the door.

Jonesville sat in good company for this work. Quaker and abolitionist settlers across southern Michigan turned the corridor along the Chicago Road into a chain of these stations, and Hillsdale County was thick with them.

The Munro House is a bed-and-breakfast now, which means you can sleep in the oldest house in the county and, if you ask, stand in the small dark room where strangers once waited out the daylight before slipping north under cover of the next night.