Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 94

OTA at. 0 tf End MiMol Ms Boo osooQ (f BEds nuMto sOotssouQ Feuds and rum-running have given way to peaceful isolationism on this tiny outpost in our metropolis. by PATRICIA MONTEMURRIphotos by PATRICIA BECK plant also doubled' as a handy turnaround for the rum runners of Prohibition, where inhabitants have fired bullets at each other in the finest tradition of neighborhood feuds there is Fordson Island. It lies right where Detroit and Dearborn meet over the steely, slimy course of the Rouge River, just south of the Rouge Plant. And, like most things in Dearborn, it is the creation of Henry Ford, who gave Fordson Island to the city.

Whether Dearborn really wanted it isn't readily known. It was part of a package deal. The 8.4 acres that comprise Fordson Island were set afloat about 1918 when Ford decided to cut a new channel in the Rouge River to make it follow a straighter and easier-to-navigate path to his new automobile plant. The shal-ISLAXD ITlhe island man loves cats, and A maybe likes people. He doesn't like reporters.

So when one called out to him from one side of a wire fence, William J. Hardy slammed the door of the baby blue trailer he calls home and called Free Press." I expected such isolationist tendencies. William J. Hardy lives on an island, and assumptions about island people require reference to an island mentality. Such assumptions, however, don't presume that the island and its inhabitants are in Dearborn.

Where once the Rouge River caught fire, where the channel Henry Ford created in 1918 to allow ore boats up to the Rouge Patricia Montemurri is a Free Press staff writer; Patricia Beck is a Free Press staff photographer. 4 i 1 :1 i ti Hull nlliT" The rum runners are gone. Among the faces of Fordson Island today are Willie Smith, left, who lives there, and the Rev. Leslie Lamb, who owns a swatch of land where he repairs old boats..