Botsford-Graser House

This was the home during the last two years of his life of Earle W. Graser, the radio voice for eight years of the Lone Ranger. Graser made his debut as the Lone Ranger on April 16, 1933, three months after the show's debut on Detroit radio station WXYZ (several others served brief stints before him), and continued in the role until his death in a car accident on April 8, 1941. Earle Graser lived with his parents until he married and, following his marriage in October 1935, occupied an apartment in Detroit until the Grasers acquired this property; thus the Farmington Hills house they bought and occupied from about 1939 onward was the couple's only home of their own. The house as it exists today reflects the appearance it acquired as a result of renovations carried out during the time the Grasers lived there. The Grasers' house resulted from expansion and renovation of an older house built for Orville Botsford that forms the east end of the existing building. Botsford (1821-1908) was born in Wayne County, New York, and settled in Farmington with his Connecticut-born parents in 1836. He purchased this property in 1843. Both tax records and a biographical sketch of Botsford in the Portrait and Biographical Album of Oakland County, Michigan suggest a c. 1860 construction date for the house. The property was sold out of the family in 1915. Earle W. Graser and his wife Jeane and daughter Gabrielle Ann were living in the former Botsford house at the time of Earle Graser's death on April 8, 1941, in a traffic accident near his house. An article on Earle Graser's funeral in the April 10 The Farmington Enterprise stated that Graser had been "a resident of Farmington for the past two years." The Grasers apparently were purchasing the property through a land contract. No documentation for their purchase has been located. An obituary notice in the April 8 Detroit Times reported Jeane Graser as stating that "they bought the old, two-story structure and made frequent trips east, bringing back many furnishings of a century ago. . . . Much of the rebuilding of the old structure her husband did himself, Mrs. Graser said, including the erection of the stone fireplace." Structural evidence that includes a fieldstone foundation beneath the east part of the house's west section and concrete block foundation under the west suggests that the house's west wing was either built in two sections- with the eastern part dating from the nineteenth century and the westernmost part dating from the twentieth century- or that a new and longer west wing replaced a short, much older west wing in the early twentieth century. What work the Grasers carried out cannot be determined today, but it is clear that the house as it exists today reflects very much the appearance it had at the end of the Grasers' residence.

Standing on a secluded, slightly larger than two-acre wooded lot at the west edge of Farmington, the Botsford-Graser House is a two-story Greek/Colonial Revival house with clapboarded exterior. Visually the building today consists of two sections that together form a rectangular footprint. An approximately twenty-two (north-south) by fourteen-foot (east-west) section at the house's east end fronts on the private lane along the east edge of the property that provides access from Shiawassee Street to the south. The roof ridge of this gable-roof part of the house runs north and south. Attached to the west side is a larger gable-roof section having ground dimensions of about thirty-three feet, east-west, by twenty-two, north-south. Its roof ridge runs east-west, at a right angle to the eastern section. A deep two-story, gable-front sun porch extends across nearly the full length of the east front, and a small two-story wing projects to the north from the house's western section. The part of the house fronting on the lane is a c. 1860 Greek Revival dwelling, with broad antae at the corners supporting a broad frieze and classical cornices with returns. Some of the six-over-six double-hung windows retain old wavy glass. The two-story sunporch, with its street-facing gable, that projects eastward toward the lane uses antae and classical cornice with returns that mimic the design of the structure behind it. The longer west section displays broad cornerboards and frieze and return cornices that form simplified versions of the Greek Revival detailing in the east part. The west section has its front facing south toward the driveway, the Farmington Cemetery, and town of Farmington. Its facade is symmetrical. A center entrance is sheltered by a porch with single square column at each end supporting a gable canopy with underside following the roof slope -the form patterned loosely after a porch design commonly encountered in early nineteenth-century New England houses. To either side is a bank of double-hung six-over-six windows set side by side in the first story and, upstairs, above each, a double window of identical design. A broad and low eight-light window is positioned directly above the door porch. Uncoursed fieldstone chimney stacks rise above the midpoint of the west section's roof and along the outside of the west end wall. The house stands on ground that rises toward the north, overlooking the Farmington Cemetery, located immediately south at the point where Shiawassee Street merges into Grand River Avenue, the main street in this small suburban city. The property fronts on a narrow, unpaved private drive that provides access to only a few properties. A simple horizontal board fence separates the site from the drive. A gravel drive runs northwesterly across the south-facing front of the house and beyond to a small gable-roof modern wooden barn and two-car frame garage behind the house. The grounds contain numerous large deciduous trees and a few conifers as well.