The farm the state forgot to tear down

Johannes Siebold came over from Endersbach, Germany in 1844 with a new wife and her two children, stopped briefly in Ann Arbor, then bought this Waterloo Township land in 1846 for a dollar fifty an acre. By 1854 he’d put up a house — the north half of the farmhouse you can still walk through. His descendants and the Realy family who followed them worked the place for the better part of a century, and the farm became known for its cider, pressed in a mill that once stood just across the road.

Then the state moved in around it. As the Waterloo Recreation Area took shape — eventually the biggest state park in the Lower Peninsula — the surrounding farms were bought out and emptied. When the last Realy brother died, Michigan took the property too. Most of those acquired homesteads got cleared; the land was wanted for woods and trails, not for somebody’s old barn.

This one got a reprieve. In 1962 a handful of neighbors formed the Waterloo Area Historical Society specifically to save and patch up what was left, and in 1973 the farmstead landed on the National Register of Historic Places. The house tells its own age in layers — a log core, an 1855 brick sitting room added on, then the wooden additions that filled out by the 1880s. Around it stand the working parts of a real farm: barn, granary, windmill, bake oven, blacksmith shop.

It’s a strange survival, when you think about it. The state’s hunger for parkland is the reason the Realys had to leave — and also, indirectly, the reason their farmhouse is still here for a fourth grader to wander through, instead of plowed under like the rest of the neighborhood.