Bill Dalton: Searching for Willie

EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.

"Who are you, who who, who who?" ~ The Who

All I have is a small black-and-white photograph of me sitting in a little wagon.

I’m probably 3 years old. My parents are standing near the wagon, a scene reminiscent of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” but without the pitchfork.

In the background is a sad-looking man I have absolutely no recollection of other than from the photo — Willie Taylor Dalton — my great-grandfather.

He died not long after the photo was taken. My parents had moved from Detroit to the country a few years earlier to help him on his fruit farm. They had no idea what they were getting into.

But while working the farm, they also took care of Willie after he became bedridden. They did it — until they couldn’t.

Because they had no money, Willie wound up at the Allegan County Poor Farm, where he died a few weeks later of pneumonia, contracted a few days after breaking his hip.

According to his death certificate, he’s buried in the Poor Farm’s “potter’s field.” He was 78 when he died in 1954.

The Poor Farm, built in 1866, is also long gone. It closed in 1968. Today, there’s a complex of modern county office buildings, appearing out of place in the midst of the sprawling corn and soybean fields surrounding them.

I recently went there searching for Willie’s grave. After all these years, I felt he deserved to be in a real cemetery, buried next to my parents and — someday — me.

After all, we’d never have become what we were if not for Willie. He’d unknowingly led us down a path we never left.

Beyond that old photo, all I know about Willie is vague recollections of what my parents told me. How he’d grown up in West Michigan and somehow became involved in a religious commune called The House of David in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

At some point, he left the commune, which had fallen into disrepute, and moved to Virginia. He owned a small gas station/general store in the Blue Ridge Mountains until returning to West Michigan to live out his final years.

He bought an 80-acre fruit farm. But he knew he couldn’t work it alone. He persuaded my father — fresh out of the Navy after World War II and newly married — to leave the factory job he hated and move to the country.

My parents were what might be called 1950s hippies. They knew little about farming, and absolutely nothing about fruit farming, which is far more complicated than it looks. The first years were hard. We nearly starved.

Then Willie got sick — so sick he couldn’t get out of bed. My parents couldn’t afford to hire someone to take care of him, so they did. At the same time, they worked 12-hour days on the farm.

After a while, it became too much. So, Willie went from our poor farm to the county’s poor farm. He didn’t last long. I don’t know much more than what’s on his death certificate.

It’s unfortunate, and unforgivable, that I didn’t ask more about him or that my parents didn’t share many details of his life. Perhaps there were good reasons, but it’s too late now. Everyone’s gone, except me.

What my parents did disclose is the deal Willie made: If they took care of him and worked the farm, he’d leave it to them when he died.

My parents kept their end of the bargain, and Willie kept his. They became fruit farmers. My mother and father lived long, happy lives before dying on the farm in the small two-bedroom house we shared with Willie.

I’m writing this in the same house on all that’s left of the farm today, about 20 bucolic acres.

But it only recently occurred to me that none of us would have lived here if Willie, like some charismatic cult leader, hadn’t led us to this place. We’d all probably have lived and died in Detroit.

And so now, as I approach his age when he died, I wonder who Willie was and where the final resting place of the person who so greatly influenced the trajectories of our lives is.

As I walked the former grounds of the old Poor Farm a couple of weeks ago, all I found was a solitary gray stone monument about eight feet high bearing the date 1914. Inscribed are only a few words: “In Memory of Our Departed Friends.”

A little research discovered that 1914 is when the farm stopped operating as a debtor’s prison and asylum for “undesirables.” In addition to the poorhouse, the farm offered a 20-room hospital for the mentally ill in 1876 and a home for “insane children” in 1898.

County officials told me they’re unaware of any records of who is buried on the old Poor Farm grounds. If there were any, they likely were destroyed or lost years ago.

Potter’s fields often were mass graves. If there were individual markers, they were probably wooden “like those in the old Westerns,” one member of the county’s historical society told me.

They’ve vanished, if they ever existed.

Online there is little information and probably a lot of misinformation. Find a Grave’s website claims the Poor Farm Cemetery is also known as Brownell Cemetery and Fairfield Cemetery — although it doesn’t explain why there are three different names.

The site includes a photo of a handful of old headstones and the death certificates of 49 people supposedly buried there from 1872 to 1976 — years after the poor farm ceased operations.

Willie’s name isn’t among them.

I’m skeptical the photo depicts the Poor Farm Cemetery, because there are no visible headstones on the county grounds. I suspect it’s actually a photo of one of the 27 other little cemeteries dotting the countryside within 10 miles of the Poor Farm.

So, my quest to find my great-grandfather’s grave — and perhaps a chance to relocate him to a proper cemetery — hit a dead end, no pun intended.

For now.

If life on a farm taught me anything, it’s perseverance. Willie undoubtedly had it. So did my mother and father. None of them ever gave up. Neither will I.

Where are you, Willie? Who were you, Willie? Who who, who who?

— Bill Dalton is a former reporter and editor for The Kansas City Star and worked for several Michigan newspapers. He spends summers on the family farm near Fennville. His book “The Bank Game” is available from Amazon along with “Dalton’s Bend.”

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