Likely Michigan's oldest house sits on the River Raisin near Monroe

The little house on North Custer Road went up in 1789 — the same year George Washington took office, when this was French and British country far from any United States. François “Utreau” Navarre built it of squared oak timbers laid one atop the next, French-Canadian style, on the bank of the River Raisin. He used it first as a depot for the fur trade, then moved his family in. Two and a half centuries later it’s still standing, which makes it, by Monroe County’s reckoning, likely the oldest wooden residence left in Michigan.

The way it’s built is the rare part. The walls are stacked horizontal timbers notched together — a method called piece-sur-piece — and Monroe County calls this the most complete surviving example of that French-Canadian construction anywhere in the old Northwest. There’s no nail-and-stud frame here; the building is essentially a giant set of squared logs fitted at the corners, the kind of thing French settlers along the Raisin and the Detroit River were putting up before Michigan was a thought.

It didn’t always sit where it sits now. A local family moved the structure off Elm Avenue in Monroe in the 1890s, and in 1972 the Monroe County Historical Society moved it again to its present home and restored it to look the way it did around 1797. They set it up as a French homestead, with an 1810-style cookhouse and a reproduction barn alongside, in what’s now called Territorial Park.

Stand inside and you’re inside Michigan before statehood, before the territory, before the country reached this far west — a few rooms of stacked oak that have outlasted nearly everything built since.