Whaley House, Flint's Victorian Showcase
Near Flint, Michigan
On East Kearsley Street in Flint stands a Victorian mansion that chronicles the fortunes of the lumber era that preceded Michigan's automotive age. The core of the house predates his ownership. Robert Jeremiah Whaley, a banker and lumber investor who had settled in Flint after his eighteen sixty-seven marriage, purchased it in eighteen eighty-four and expanded it into the stylish Victorian home that stands today.
Whaley served as president of Flint's Citizens Bank for forty-one years, woven into the city's commercial life through the boom years of pine logging. After his wife endowed the property in nineteen twenty-five as a home for elderly women, it eventually became a public museum in the mid nineteen seventies. The house stands as a portrait of Flint before the assembly line changed everything.
