The Marantette House, where a trading post met a treaty

On a bluff above the St. Joseph River near Mendon stands a white Greek Revival house with porches facing the water — built that way on purpose, because in 1835 the river was the road. Patrick Marantette, a Detroiter, put it up next to the trading post he’d taken over, where he dealt with the Potawatomi band living at Nottawaseppe.

The house sat at a hinge in two histories. Marantette married Frances Mouton the same year he started building — the first European wedding in the settlement — and kept trading and supplying the local Potawatomi. Then in 1840 the federal government decided to push the Potawatomi out of the area, and some of the negotiations to make that happen were held right there in his house. Marantette was the one instructed to outfit them for the journey west. So a home built on the profits of the fur trade also became one of the rooms where that whole way of life was ended.

The family kept the place into the 1970s, and it landed on the National Register in 1973. Greek Revival was the height of fashion when it went up, but the river-facing porches are the giveaway of an older world, when goods and people came and went by water, not road.

There’s a strange coda. A boy born in Mendon, Elliott “Pete” Estes, grew up to become the president of General Motors from 1974 to 1981 — a Marantette descendant, running the largest company in the country, generations after his ancestor traded blankets and supplies on the banks of the St. Joseph.