One hundred and eleven people refused to go, calling it an awful wilderness.
Eloise began as the Wayne County Poor House, founded in 1832 at Gratiot and Mount Elliott Avenues in Hamtramck Township, two miles outside the Detroit city limits. By 1834 the poorhouse was in bad condition and 280 acres were bought in Nankin Township, now Westland. The Black Horse Tavern, a stagecoach stop on the Detroit to Chicago run, stood on the property, and in those days the journey between the two townships took two days by stagecoach.
The register records the move. On 11 April 1839, 35 people were transferred from Hamtramck Township to the new site. One hundred and eleven apparently refused to go to what they called the awful wilderness. Many of them were children.
Asylum Projects, which documents institutions of this kind, gives the institutional dates: established 1839, opened 1841, closed 1981, demolished between 1983 and 1991, built to the cottage plan, and known over its life as the Wayne County Poorhouse, Eloise Hospital, the Wayne County Asylum and the Wayne County Psychiatric Hospital. Wayne County paid 800 dollars for a 160-acre farm in Nankin Township in 1839, two years after Michigan joined the Union.
The complex took its name from Eloise Dickerson Davock, daughter of Detroit's postmaster.
One building from 1931 still stands, and it now runs haunted houses, escape rooms and history tours. Take the history tour. This was a poorhouse before it was a psychiatric hospital, and the people who arrived here in 1839 arrived because they had nowhere else at all.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
