Carpenter
The carpenter employed for the WCTS was Charles H. Widmaier. Adapted from a July 27, 1977 article in the Northville Record: Widmaier was a carpenter by trade and one of his first jobs was helping to construct the old Maybury Sanatorium buildings. Did he ever meet William Maybury? “Did I! I’ll say I did. He was a real worker. I remember him having his driver drop him off and he spent one whole day just watching us to see that we did the work proper.” Widmaier became a carpenter at the Wayne County Training School and helped build and repair some of the later buildings. “I was there when Dr. Robert Haskell became the (first) superintendent.” He retired from the WCTS in 1951, continuing to work as a carpenter “on odd jobs around” until recent years. “I guess you could say I'm officially retired now.” Widmaier lived at 119 Randolph, Northville. He remembered fishing as a boy by the old Phoenix Mill, in the small pond that became Phoenix Lake when Henry Ford built his mill there. He also remembered the morning that the old Phoenix Mill burned down. Widmaier said his brother-in-law hauled in the rocks in to build Ford’s new Phoenix Mill, which employed only widowed women, and later became the Wayne County Road Commission’s sign plant. Though Widmaier never met him, he saw Ford several times. Once, long before Ford built the plant, Widmaier visited a nearby cider mill with his father: "They were fixing the motor for the cider place, and this man was down in the hole with it. I remember asking my father, ‘Who was that man down there?’ and he told me, ‘Oh, he was that Ford fellow.’ That was before Ford built his car and made his first million...back when he made a living fixing engines wherever he could find a job." Widmaier was born in Plymouth, June 26, 1891, and died on July 16, 1985, at age 94. He is buried in Oakland Hill Memorial Gardens, Novi.
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