America's Polish seminary, on a Michigan military academy's old campus

Drive the wooded shore of Orchard Lake and you pass a cluster of old stone and brick buildings that look like they belong on a New England college quad. They almost belonged to something else entirely. The campus was built in the 1870s for the Michigan Military Academy, a private school for boys founded in 1877 that drilled cadets on the lakeshore until it went bankrupt and closed in 1908.

What moved in is one of the more remarkable institutions in Michigan. Back in 1885, a Polish priest named Józef Dąbrowski had founded a seminary on St. Aubin Street in Detroit to train priests who could serve the flood of Polish immigrants pouring into the industrial Midwest — people who needed a church, and confession, in their own language. The seminary outgrew its Detroit quarters fast, and in 1909 its rector bought the shuttered military academy’s roughly hundred-acre campus on Orchard Lake and moved everyone out to the suburbs.

It’s been there ever since. In 1927 it split into three linked institutions — a seminary, a college, and a prep school — known collectively as the Orchard Lake Schools, the unofficial “Polish seminary” of America. For generations it ordained priests who fanned out to Polish parishes across the country and kept Polish-American language and culture alive when it might otherwise have thinned out.

The seminary that started it all, SS. Cyril and Methodius, has since ceased operations. But St. Mary’s Preparatory still fills the lakeside campus with students, and the place keeps its Polish identity front and center. The cadets are long gone; the grounds they marched on ended up serving a very different kind of mission.