American Ghosts

Memorial Day in Memphis, Michigan.

by

Editor’s Note: This is the latest in an occasional series of articles by Alex Greene exploring other towns across the United States that share the same name as our hometown. In addition to Memphis, Michigan, Greene has traveled to Memphis, Nebraska (June 2019); Memphis, Missouri (September 2019); Memphis, New York (November 2019); and the area around now-vanished Memphis, Mississippi (June/July 2020).

The Memphis Library book return kiosk is rather ornate as such things go, adorned with a florid landscape painting you could almost dive into. A steamboat from days gone by wends its way past blossom-laden boughs, up a lazy river, invoking a Dixieland dream with which Memphians are all too familiar. It’s a drop box that seems to cry, as Keats himself once did, “O for a beakerful of the warm South.” Except: wait. This isn’t the warm South. This particular “Memphis” is 800 miles north of Beale Street, in the shadow of the Motor City.

And yet in Memphis, Michigan, steam-powered boats are not quite the anachronism that you might imagine. Such vessels played a key role in the occupation of this area in the nineteenth century, back when Michigan was considered the Wild West. By 1825, settlers from the east could make their way down the newly completed Erie Canal (perhaps stopping in Memphis, New York, along the way — see our November 2019 issue), then book a packet steamer across Lake Erie from Buffalo to Detroit, and thence north, south, and west into the occupied lands of the Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo nations.

And so it was that white settlers staked their claims between Detroit and Port Huron. In the 1830s, “a small settlement grew up, a dam was built across Belle River, and a saw mill and grist mill erected,” as St. Clair County historian William Lee Jenks wrote in 1912. “In 1848 it was felt that a post office was needed and it was necessary to select a name. Considerable discussion arose ... Finally the name of Memphis, from the Egyptian city, was suggested and adopted.”

A generation later, only a stone’s throw from the Belle River, an Englishman and his family set up shop. And what he accomplished there, apparently out of sheer love of tinkering, marked Memphis, Michigan forever as a harbinger of the automobile age. While his invention was never photographed, it was documented in Arthur Pound’s 1934 history, The Turning Wheel: The Story of General Motors Through Twenty-Five Years, 1908-1933. Pound, setting the stage for the first breakthroughs in self-propelled vehicle design, notes that “the American vehicles which took the road were chiefly propelled by steam, and down to the late ’eighties they showed little if any advance over English ‘steamers’ of a much earlier day.” Then he describes what lurched to life one fateful winter beside the Belle River, to this day known only as “The Thing”:

A direct result of English influence would seem to be the four-wheeled steam car produced by John Clegg, an excellent mechanic, English born and trained, and his son, Thomas J., in the village machine shop at Memphis, Michigan, which the younger Clegg still operates. Thomas Clegg describes this vehicle as driven by a single cylinder, steam being produced in a tubular boiler carried in the rear of the car. It had seating capacity for four persons, including driver and stoker. Cannel coal was the fuel. Leather belts were used to transmit power, and spring adjustments on them provided enough play to let the car negotiate corners.

As Pound notes, “This machine is significant as the first self-propelled vehicle on record [to be] built in Michigan.” By some estimations, it may have been the first car made in North America. And yet this monumental achievement ended not with a bang, but a whimper. Again, quoting from Pound’s history:

The Clegg ‘steamer’ nevertheless created hardly a ripple of excitement beyond a twenty-mile circle of rural countryside which it disturbed with its journeys through its short life of six months. Built in the winter of 1884-85, it ran perhaps five hundred miles in some thirty tests during the succeeding summer, its longest trip being to Emmet and return, a distance of fourteen miles.

The Cleggs’ prototype engine was soon dismantled and sold. But lest we dismiss Memphis’ contribution to transportation history too quickly, it should be noted that only two years later, in nearby Lansing, one R.E. Olds created a similar and more viable steam-powered car that ultimately evolved into the Oldsmobile. The Cleggs were clearly onto something.

Now, only a small historical marker on the edge of town keeps memories of The Thing alive. Beyond that, Memphis seems to have maintained a pleasant if unremarkable existence. But history walks its streets in other ways, as do echoes of its cousin city in the South.

As fate would have it, I was pondering the pros and cons of motorized travel when I drove into Memphis, Michigan, on Memorial Day, 2021. While traveling from Tennessee to a family wedding in Ann Arbor the previous day, my car had sputtered to a halt in a cloud of steam — and not the propulsive kind. With a new radiator being installed and time to kill, I rented another Thing and drove north of Detroit. And as I entered the city limits of Michigan’s Memphis, who should greet me but Elvis Presley?

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Like a Dixieland steamboat, the once and future King chugs inexorably through the entirety of the American mythic landscape. On this Memorial Day, I eased down a Main Street where century-old buildings mingled with gas stations and cinder-block convenience stores, and passed a sign in a park that read: “AMERICAN LEGION: Jun 5 Elvis Tribute.” Without a doubt, I had arrived in Memphis, U.S.A.

But the local Merrick-Potter American Legion Post #566 had other business to attend to before any Elvis sightings might occur. It was a day of remembrance, after all. A sizable crowd had assembled at the Memphis Cemetery, under blue skies, where the post commander spoke and the chaplain led a prayer. The high school band, more accustomed to rallying fans of the Memphis Yellow Jackets, blared out “The Star Spangled Banner.” The riflemen fired a 21-gun salute, and the crowd fell silent as a lone bugler from the band played “Taps.”

Later, those plaintive notes still seemed to echo through the empty streets as I strolled past the shuttered stores. The Memphis House B&B was closed, though the flowers in the adjacent Memphis Millennium Memorial Park were budding. The Donut Girls were also closed for the holiday, even as painted bald eagles were frozen on their wall, forever soaring. The childlike mural on the community center was mute, the library locked, but the big Memphis clock on Main Street kept ticking. Still shell-shocked from a year of pandemic living, America was enjoying a day off. That spring, folks were gingerly stepping back into normalcy. And in just a few days, Elvis would arrive.

The one person I found working on Memorial Day was a veteran. I was ogling a well-preserved brick building likely dating back to the time of The Thing, with a plaque on its cornerstone that read “Memphis Lodge No. 142.” Once upon a time, the Masons had been here. Now, a wooden sign above the door advertised the latest occupant: Sage Creek Winery. And suddenly Jeff Dausey, one of its co-owners, stepped out with a friendly query and invited me onto the patio for a chat.

Having seen my share of American small towns on the skids, the freshly renovated spaces of this clearly thriving business were refreshing. Memphis was doing something right, and here was Exhibit A. Dausey, for his part, was clearly proud of the latest improvement: a spacious deck, complete with antique truck and well-tended flowers, that spread into the back of an adjoining business, the Doghouse Tavern.

“We’re always up here cleaning or doing projects,” he explained. “This is all brand-new from last year. We cooperated with Tammy across the alley to make a kind of social district. So people from the Doghouse Tavern can sit out here with their food and drink their beers, and people from here can have their wine.”

As I imagined cool evenings of wine, beer, and vittles, a wet nose bumped my arm with a tail wagging behind — Dausey’s canine companion. “He’s a working dog,” Dausey chuckled. “I also work for a company called Vapor Wake. We do bomb detection for the Detroit Tigers, Pistons, and the Redwings. It’s fun. This guy searches crowds for explosives.” He reached down and tousled the pup’s fur.

Okay, I thought. Just another day in the U.S.A. In a way, it was in keeping with the melody of “Taps,” still hanging in the air, or the general mood of 2020 and its long aftermath. In the face of these shadows stood the proud proclamation at the bottom of the winery’s sign: “Veteran Owned.” That, it turned out, was also a part of Dausey’s story.

“My brother Mike and I are originally from the U.P.” (For those unfamiliar with Michigan jargon, that’s Upper Peninsula.) “Our third partner, Vince, is from Wisconsin. He and my brother served together over 20 years ago in the military. I guess they wanted a project. They didn’t want to have to buy a restaurant, but wanted something like that. They saw this was for sale, checked it out, saw the traffic coming through on the M-19 [a state highway], and were like, ‘We can make this into something!’ And when I retired from the military in August 2019, I came on board with these guys. So I do this and I do the canine job. It’s fun!”

At that point, Mike himself showed up, having just returned from vacationing with his wife. “I just came from Memphis ... Tennessee!,” he said. “I went to Graceland. Then we went to Dollywood, of course, because I needed to keep my wife happy.” For Mike, the Bluff City was the real draw. “It’s unique. I love the feel. Of course, I love Beale Street. But the best places we went were next to Graceland, in those little shady bars and restaurants.”

The brothers were clearly savoring the good life, and their winery, though closed that day, exuded conviviality. “I always wanted to be a chef,” Jeff told me. “I went to culinary school for a year. Then, when I went back overseas, I had to postpone it. So, making wine is the closest I can get to that without being a chef. It’s a craft.”

Importing their grapes from around the world, the Dausey brothers and Vince have created unique blends that now attract wine enthusiasts from Detroit and beyond. Inside, wine bottles were nestled in the building’s original, polished woodwork. Two days after our chat, Michigan would be allowing bars and restaurants to open to full capacity again. Life was looking up. And even better, as far as Jeff could tell, the former Mason Lodge wasn’t plagued with ghosts.

The Memphis Pub across the street was another story, he explained. “It’s haunted. That building’s burned down three or four times in 150 years. It used to be a jail, and there’s still a jail cell in the basement. I want to take my dog there, because a dog knows if it’s haunted or not. A dog can sense that. When I was in the military, I took my dogs to old buildings, and sometimes they’d piss on themselves and cry. Like, ‘Nope! Something’s in here! Let’s go!’ So I want to take him over there and see if there was anything like that.”

His dog looked up and wagged his tail. “The new owners are pretty cool. One of them said when they were doing renovations, a table full of tools got thrown towards her. She’s had drywall thrown at her, too.”

Dausey gave me a bottle of his favorite Sage Creek blend, “Three Italian Stallions,” and I left him to his labors. With the shadows growing long, I turned my rental car away from The Thing and the poltergeists of the pub and headed back to my own Memphis. We’re afflicted with our own ghosts here in Tennessee, old and new — too many to run from. They too might start throwing our hammers and walls back at us at any moment, as befits any place named for an ancient city of the dead. Best to confront them head on. Seeing how sister cities face their ghosts can have a salutary effect.

A few days after returning home to Tennessee, I called the American Legion post back in Michigan, where Karen Wilton picked up the phone. “What about Elvis?” I asked hopefully. “Did he ever show up?”

“Oh yes!” she said. “He is definitely a crowd pleaser. His voice is uncanny! His name is Darrin Hagel, and he can also sing like Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and a few others ...”

“No, no, no,” I stopped her. “Just tell me about the King.”

“Well, those other singers don’t bring nearly as much enthusiasm in the crowds as Elvis,” she confided. “Darrin did a two-hour set with a costume change in between. He is definitely a sight to see. The American Legion holds one or two shows a year as fundraisers, and Darrin just serenades the night away! We sell out almost every time he performs.”

“Great!” I said. “That’s good to hear.” I uncorked my Sage Creek wine and had a drink.

After my journey’s headaches and trepidations, I could rest easier. Some things can be relied on, I thought. Elvis will keep coming back. My family will thrive. The wine will flow, the shops will open. Our soldiers will come home, the flags will wave. Good dogs will find the bombs. The Thing in my driveway will run as it should. And I’ll be free to drive from Memphis to Memphis, my ghosts riding shotgun, as we remember together.