My sister, Marta (Martha) Haley Fields, myself Dennis Haley and Dido Baca co-members of a facebook page were talking about our youth time on Grosse Ile, with my sister and I residing there from 1949 until 1966 when we moved to Dayton Ohio. We were members of St. James Episcopal Church, the one built by the slave woman Elizabeth Forth and conceivably in some co-interest with the slave railroad which passed through our island. I thought it ended on the island but Dido said it continued across the river (the train tracks). I got on Google Earth and looked at the visual evidence. There are submerged pilings that continue from the island to Stony Island where Dunbar and Sullivan were continually working on the river keeping the channels dredged I think. At any rate, they kept a dock with a couple of tug boats that went back and forth into the river to a place on the other side of Stony Island. There are traces of a train line across that island but I am doubtful of the timing. I went across the river into Canada by means of Google Earth and followed a line that looked like former train track to Essex where there is a rebuilt train station with a wall showing a statement of when the track was put in and Essex found its beginning.
Our elegant Essex train station brought our town into existence at the point where the Canada Southern Railway was laid across the Talbut Trail in 1873, As the centre in the county for shipping lumber products from the dense forest and as a transportation depot, it pushed the busy Essex center to town status in 1890.
On a hot August morning in 1907, a nitro-glycerine explosion in a box car shattered the station, killed 2 men and left the town in shambles. The mural shows the repaired station, a shipping point for the farm industry that grew as the land was cleared and cultivated.
That is the mural shown on Google Earth as being in the Canadian town of Essex with a historical museum surrounding the GLCT train line. The train line may have turned south as shown by a curve in the line where track would have gone. It seems the line wasn't placed in Canada until 1973 according to the Essex records but I don't have an extensive access or understanding of the full implications of the history or the Canadian purposes behind the tracks. There are undoubtedly connections between efforts in the United States and sympathies in Canada to facilitate movement of slaves to safety in Canada. Others can explore this further and see some of the evidence from Google Earth. Pilings exist under water as left from a previous time but again the purposes and times need to be researched. Good hunting. The train on the Parkway of Grosse Ile is another part of our heritage.
Our posterity are Aric Haley, Sabrina Haley Lively, children of our brother Frederick and Sonia Haley, of Anderson, CA Jessica Haley Fields and her brother Bryn Fields, children of Zane and Marta Fields, of Seattle, WA. and Heather (Haley) Van Buskirk, Bethany Haley_____, Alicia Haley____ , daughters of Dennis and Marcia Haley, mostly...
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