Sources
Willow Village, February 1965; Photo Ann Arbor District Library
At first Henry Ford balked at building housing for Willow Run workers, but under federal pressure he finally relented. Guy Larcom, later Ann Arbor's city manager, came to Willow Run to work for the Public Housing Administration. The PHA erected an entire town—Willow Village—almost overnight, with dormitories for single workers and small houses for families. The first set of fifteen buildings, accommodating 3,000 people, opened early in 1943. A mobile home park that followed was promptly jammed with 1,000 trailer homes.
Thank you so much for the pictures/captions about housing the GIs after WWII. My younger sister and I were residents of the family housing at Willow Village...the stove in one of the pics is as I remember it, ditto the back stairs leading to the kitchen and the fuel storage shed (I don't remember if it was coal or wood for the stove). There was a wall-mounted kerosene heater for the rest of the house. We had a real ICE BOX, and I was big enough to pull out the drip pan from underneath and empty the run-off daily. The kitchen sink was also a bathtub for the baby sister. The landscape with the drab one-story buildings in the background is also familiar...at that complex of buildings there were large pads and sidewalks of concrete which were perfect for roller-skating. Susan Cook
Like Brigadoon, Willow Run Village exists now only in memory, but after World War II, it was the University of Michigan's answer to the housing problem for married student veterans. During the War it provided apartments for workers at the Willow Run bomber plant, which later became the Kaiser-Frazer automobile plant, five miles away.
Dusty D is contributing another Ypsi-themed book to the "Ypsilanti" collection of books, this one from my own "local history" bookshelf. It is "Willow Run: A Study of Industrialization and Cultural Inadequacy," by U-M sociology professor Lowell Julliard Carr and Detroit Institute of Technology sociology professor James Edson Stermer.
