McCoy, Kittie C., Home

The house was the home of Thomas H. and Catherine Jane ("Kittie") McCoy. It meets national register criterion B as the home from 1879 until 1910 of Kittie C. McCoy. The "poetess of Orchard Lake," Kittie McCoy is important for the recognition given her during her lifetime in the Orchard Lake-Pontiac area for the poetry she produced in the years from the 1870s and 80s until her death in 1917. Poems she wrote commemorated numerous events, celebrations, and other occasions. A number were published in local newspapers including the Pontiac Gazette. A book of her poems, Buds and Blossoms, was published in 1886. Among the copies that survive is one at the Library of Michigan in Lansing. Thomas Henry McCoy was born April 23, 1848, in Commerce Township. He was one of ten children of Matthew McCoy, one of the early settlers of Commerce Township in 1831. June 27, 1873, Thomas purchased from Harmon Courter 79% acres of land in the township that included the house's site. The township map in the 1872 Oakland county atlas shows a house already standing at what appears to be the current site. The house was likely built in the late 1850s or 1860s. On November 18, 1879, Thomas McCoy and Catherine Jane ("Kittie") Cuthbertson were married. Kittie Cuthbertson was the daughter of Hugh Cuthbertson, a pioneer of Orchard Lake. She was born November 18, 1854, on the farm taken up by her father from the government. She became known as the poetess of Orchard Lake as she early developed poetic talent. As documented in the book Orchard Lake and Its Island, Thomas brought Kittie to his farm home, where they spent the thirty-one years of their married life. According to daughter Bessie M. McCoy's reminiscences, "In her youth Mother [i.e. Kittie] had developed her gift of verse making, which served as an outlet for her own emotions and as a means of delight to her friends. Frequent demands came for occasional poems,- the Pioneer Association, the W. C. T. U., the State Grange and Farmers Club, various dedications- so many demands that sometimes we children wished they might diminish. Each poem meant a period of abstraction, when Mother went about her work, actually sweeping the floor and kneading her bread to the rhythm of verse in the making" (Ward, p. 34). Kittie wrote and recited poems for various social occasions, such as a donation party for the benefit of the Rev. Mitchell and his wife of the local Methodist church and for the golden wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. William Borland of West Bloomfield. She also wrote poems in memoriam to loved ones- for example, "A Beautiful Tribute" to Mr. and Mrs. Long on the loss of their daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Stevens, and "A Prayer" to Mrs. W. C. Mcintosh of Walled Lake on the death of her child - and numerous other poems that were also published in the Pontiac Gazette. In 1886 Kittie McCoy's Buds and Blossoms, a collection of her poems, appeared. Bessie McCoy states the facts about its publication as follows: "In 1884, after the birth of her first two girls, she gathered together poems for a volume of verse, which was published by her friend, C. F. Kimball of the Pontiac Gazette. She called it 'Buds and Blossoms.' It was a private enterprise, for which she took the risk of only 300 copies, the type being broken up as the pages progressed. All copies were sold among friends, after which no more were available, a cause for regret when later came requests for extras" (Ward, p. 34). Thomas McCoy died February 21, 1910. Later that year Kittie moved to Milford, where she readjusted her life as best she could. One of her last poems was "Our Debt to the Pioneers," written for the 1916 meeting of the Oakland County Pioneer and Historical Society. She had been invited to present the poem at the Oakland County Centennial Celebration in August 1916, but sickness prevented her from attending. Kittie McCoy died February 21, 1917, at the age of sixty-two. As noted in her obituary, she was a member of the Monday Literary Club in Milford' and served as its president for two years. Thomas and Kittie McCoy are buried in the Walled Lake Cemetery along with three of their daughters.

Standing on an approximately three-quarter-acre lot that was once part of an eighty-acre farm, the McCoy House is a simply detailed two-story gabled-ell farmhouse with a one-story, gabled rear ell. Standing on a fieldstone foundation, the clapboarded building displays plain corner boards and projecting eaves with raking cornices without returns atop a broad architrave/frieze band extending entirely around the house below the eaves. The windows, except for one broader one in the wing's first floor next to the entry, are narrow one-over-ones framed in architrave trim. A hip-roof porch fronts the house's wing. A battered-front parapet faced in weatherboard fronts the porch, broken by an entry, with several steps leading up to it, opposite the main front entrance. Turned columns, recent replacements for square-plan posts, support the porch roof. The house faces east on Benstein Road in a developing suburban area located about two miles northeast of Wixom and three miles south-southwest of Commerce. Modern subdivisions surround the property on all sides. The house stands well back from the road shaded by large deciduous trees on either side. A concrete driveway south of the house extends back to a gabled two-car garage that, finished in double lap siding, appears to date from the 1930s-50s era. Directly behind it, and only a few feet away, stands a small vertical-board-sheathed, gable-roof barn or shed. A modern landscaped patio with adjoining small pool feature are located directly behind the house's rear wing.