A son's gift glowing in the middle of Marshall

On the night of April 26, 1930, about seven thousand people crowded the center of Marshall to watch a teenager throw a switch. When Craig Brooks did, the fountain in front of him lit up in shifting colors and the crowd gasped — “exclamations of surprise,” the record says, and “wonderment.” Electric fountains were close to magic in 1930, and this one belonged to the whole town.

It was a gift from Craig’s father. Harold C. Brooks was Marshall’s mayor from 1925 to 1931, a wealthy man with a deep streak of civic generosity, and in October 1929 he announced he’d give the city an electric fountain in memory of his own late father, Charles E. Brooks. He didn’t do it cheaply. He hired an architect, a landscape engineer, and a crew of General Electric engineers to build it, and modeled the design on the Temple of Love in the gardens at Versailles — a ring of columns sheltering a domed centerpiece, scaled to a Michigan crossroads.

The spot it sits on is the town’s oldest civic ground: this is where Calhoun County’s first courthouse stood, back when Marshall fully expected to be the state capital. Now the fountain anchors the traffic circle where the main streets meet, and on summer nights it still cycles through its colors for anyone driving past. Harold Brooks left other marks on Marshall — he had a hand in the post office and saved old buildings around town — but this is the one people circle on a warm evening. A son built it for his father, and a town has been driving around it for almost a century.