The Pepper Sisters
Pepper sisters sorrow
“Pepper Family Landmarks Cut Down: Progress Fells 2 Trees, 2 Aged Sisters Sorrow...”
Eighty-four years ago Edward Pepper and his wife planted a garden and built a house on their newly-bought farm in Ecorse Township. Mrs. Pepper planted three poplar trees in the garden as shade for the house.
Thursday, their daughters, Mrs. Louella Long, 77, and Mrs. Clarissa Forsyth, 90, the last members of the Pepper family, sat in the front room of their home and saw the trees, their last tangible link with their parents, fall before modern progress. The trees were cut down to make way for the widening of Outer Drive, which runs close to their home, a house which they built eight years ago after the Pepper homestead was destroyed by fire.
The history of the Pepper family is the history of Ecorse Township, although the Pepper farm now is within the corporate limits of Melvindale. When Edward Pepper moved from Dearborn to Ecorse Creek, in 1827, he was 18 years old, and there were no other settlers in the district. [add: Ecorse Township was incorporated in 1827 with a number of established residents in the area.]
Pepper, with his ox-cart, broke the first trail into Ecorse, and when a road was blazed from the Detroit River to Michigan Avenue, the Chicago-Detroit Trail, it was named the Pepper Road, in honor of Edward Pepper, past whose house it ran. The first school in the district was named for Pepper, and he took a prominent part in the township affairs.
NEVER LEFT FARM
The Pepper sisters never left their father's farm, even when they married, making their homes in houses on the big farm. When their husbands died they moved back to the house in which they were born, and, when this house burned they built another on the same site.
One by one, the things that bound them to the past have gone. The old school bearing their family name, and in which they were educated, was torn down; hundreds of families with names sounding queer and harsh to the English ear and who never heard of the Peppers, moved into the neighborhood; and, finally, the Pepper Road was transformed to Outer Drive, paved and made into a wide boulevard over which automobiles raced where once the ox teams of the farmers logged through the mud.
To the Pepper sisters, nothing in recent years has been a greater tragedy than the loss of the trees. One died several seasons ago, but the others they have cherished with the same affection which their mother lavished on them so many years ago. Both sisters played under the trees and watched their growth and looked on them as a part of the homestead.
BOTH INVALIDS
And now neither can get away from this destruction of a part of their youth. They have few friends, for they have outlived the people they knew, and both are invalids.
Mrs. Forsyth broke her hip eight years ago and has spent her life since in a reclining chair in the living room of the house. Mrs. Long had the same kind of an accident 18 months ago, and now she too is confined to a chair in the living room. All the windows in the living room look out on the road, with the trees in the center of the foreground.
So when Frank and Emil Dubke, employees of the Wayne County Road Commission, made their first cuts at the trees with a big crosscut saw they had nothing to do but watch. One of the trees crashed, and Mrs. Long's adopted daughter—turned the two women so they could not see out of the windows. Neither of the sisters commented on the loss of the trees, even when they beard the swishing fall of the last one, and when Mrs. Long has spoken of the things which have erased the Pepper name from the records of Ecorse Township it has been with appreciation of the movement of progress. But the necessity for the cutting of the trees, according to Mrs. Long's daughter, has so affected the sisters that they will not talk of them at all—and that, she said, is an indication of the depth of their sorrow.
(Donor of Article: Vita DuBois Perry)
