COTC - 9 Jan 2026 - Village of Blackwood (Grawn)

Speaker 0: Good morning, Northern Michigan. This is Cup of Traverse City for the 12/09/2026. I'm Mike, and as usual, let's get to the weather. By the way, happy Friday, and I hope you have your coffee handy or have had your coffee or whatever the case may be. So let's get to the weather.

Today rain showers mixing with snow after 11AM and gradually ending, patchy fog before 10AM, temperature falling to around 36 by eleven. It It was like 50 something overnight. It was crazy. And a lot of the snow is gone and the slush is mostly gone, at least where everything was plowed. But anyway, it could be breezy with a west wind of fifteen, twenty miles an hour becoming northwest this morning.

Winds could gust as high as 40 miles an hour. We are under a wind advisory, and a chance of precipitation is 80% with little or no snow accumulation expected. And tonight, mostly cloudy with a low around 26. Northwest winds five to 10 miles per hour becoming light and variable this evening. And tomorrow, snow showers mainly after 1PM.

High near 33. Southwest wind around five miles an hour. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New snow accumulation of around two inches. I don't know.

Maybe. We go through the weekend here, Saturday night. Snow showers low around twenty four, about three inches of new snow, they say. Sunday, a little bit of snow in the morning before 1PM, mostly cloudy with a high near 29. North wind around, what is it, around 10 miles an hour.

Not too bad with some gusts up to 30. And, Sunday night, mostly cloudy with a low around 23. So, today, I got a little, I guess, we'll do an update on Blair Township. I don't know if anybody's, knows where that is. If you live around here, of course, you do.

That's, I guess the the most of it is Chum's Corners, but, Grand is kind of the township seat, the little village there. Mainly just a wide spot in the road with a couple of city streets there or village c streets, off of 31, kinda where the railroad goes, goes by. And I didn't know this, but, back in the eighteen seventies, Grand was was founded by James Blackwood, and so the town was named Blackwood. And about, I don't know, ten ten years later or so, the railroad came through, and it got renamed Grand after the grandfather of of the former governor, William Milliken. So interesting how Grand got its name.

Anyway, the little town of Grand is, you know, it's, you know, old, I guess, would be the right way to put it. It's not, you know, not run down too badly. I mean, they do have some house trailers in there and and, you know, a lot of rentals, in in the actual little village. Well, there's a, a couple that are wanting to bring back the Blackwood name, and they wanna redevelop. I don't know how big of a lot, but they wanna build, looks like, 38 units.

Most of them are gonna be, you know, duplex type units. So, you know, 38 individual units and, you know, whatever half that is is in in buildings, but with the intent of making them starter houses, you know, for one and two bedroom houses. The one bedrooms would be little two story, almost call them tiny houses, 500 square feet, which, you know, I'm sitting at a 100 square feet here in my office, and I could I could see, you know, a one bedroom place, you know, for a little starter home and people would have the pride of ownership. That would be actually pretty cool and, you know, revitalize at least that little part of Grod. You know, Grod's always been kind of an interesting place.

When I grew up, you know, I had friends, at a pig farm over there, and I was friends with the people that owned Apple Fence. And Apple Fence is still going. And, you know, you know, what's considered grand is, like, you know, most of the way to Interlochen all the way to Chum's Corners, but, the actual little village there, like County Road 633 and and also Silver Lake Road and all that. There's, you know, a few businesses there. There's in the summer, there's that little, hand cart thing, you know, where you can rent a hand cart and run up and down the railroad with it.

That's kinda interesting. And or maybe they're pedal carts. I don't know. They put stuff on the tracks and you can run it because they don't run trains through there anymore or at least they haven't in many years. Of course, you know, the other day, I talked about the, rail system they wanna go.

I don't know if the train would go out that way. I think the train would run down to Cadillac through the, through the other corridor. But, anyway, yeah, check it out. I'll have the story linked in the show notes over at cupoftraverscity.com. Sounds like a ambitious project.

It's gonna be a, like, a condo association. And, there's a nice picture of one of the, one bedroom units, and it looks rather cozy. I think it'd be pretty cool. It'd be neat to see the old name Blackwood come back and, you know, maybe maybe they'll consider changing the village name back to, Blackwood. That'd be interesting.

But, oh, and and and one other thing is there's an old barn there from the original, the original town. It's, I guess, a barn. I don't know. It looks like a clapboard shack of some sort, but, they wanna make that into a little coffee shop. So that'd be interesting if they preserve that building and and, you know, on the property and yeah.

I think it'd be a neat little place. Two story, duplex, one bed, one and a half bath, that are back to back. Oh, I see how that works. So there'd be be one duplex, but you'd you'd live in the front half or the back half. And then they have a little, you know, garage hooked to it and everything.

So yeah. Neat. Neat. I wish them luck. Anyway, we'll catch you next week.

Everybody have a great weekend.