Jan & Dave Esch Preserve

‘A stable constant’: Caretakers step aside after 73 years serving a village near Ann Arbor

• Published: Jul. 09, 2023, 10:30 a.m.

https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2023/07/a-stable-constant-caretakers-step-aside-after-73-years-serving-a-village-near-ann-arbor.html

“They have been a stable constant,” said Carla Smith, a Barton Hills resident and treasurer on the village board. “We can always rely on Jan and Dave.”

And so the community did, for its roads to be plowed of snow, its water system maintained, its flower beds planted and its records kept.

Since 1979, the couple has lived in one of a row of homes built more than century ago for Detroit Edison Co. employees overseeing the nearby Barton Dam, completed in 1913.

The project birthed what would become Barton Hills, imagined by company president Alex Dow as a spot for exclusive country estates for its executives, and designed by landscape architecture firm Olmstead Brothers, led by the sons of renowned New York Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted.

But it would be another man who would oversee the paving of the community’s roads, contend with its growth and shepherd Barton Hills into the 21st century.

As the story goes, Walter Esch, Dave’s father, was cutting trees in a muddy woodlot near Dexter when a group of men in suits slogged up to him. They were looking for an able-bodied farmer to care for Barton Hills, then still a private community.

Walter took the job, and Dave and his nine siblings grew up on the shore of Barton Pond, in the employee housing. As a teenager, Dave said he and his brothers would paddle canoes from near Hudson Mills down the Huron River to the pond, leaving after church and getting back for supper.

From a young age, Dave worked with his father, helping salt the roads or clean up after a storm.

He left to attend Olivet College, where he met Jan, a Saugatuck native. They married in June 1974 and moved to Barton Hills, where Dave worked driving the community’s bus, ferrying children to school and maids from downtown Ann Arbor to the Barton Hills households.

But he lost that job as regional public busing became available. Dave was then twice passed over for maintenance jobs with Barton Hills, by then incorporated as a village, amid fears of annexation into Ann Arbor, Jan said.

Village board members were wary of a father-son team working for the community, she said, but her husband was ultimately brought on in 1978.

The couple moved into the home next to Dave’s parents.

Dave’s routine every morning would involve patrolling the village before turning to tasks like trash pickup, brush clearing or monitoring the community’s water system, he said, even overseeing projects like the addition of a water tower.

For 14 years, Jan taught preschool in the mornings before turning to clerical tasks for the village or the Barton Hills Maintenance Corp. The organization is a holdover from the Detroit Edison days that oversees original deed restrictions, like the requirement that at least $150,000 be spend on new homes, a pretty penny in its time, and that all homes be designed by registered architect, she said.

Eventually, she would become the village’s full-time deputy clerk.

Before the completion of the village hall in 2007, Jan often worked from her home.

“People would say, ‘I don’t want to come visit you in your home!’ But that’s where my office was, before home offices were a thing,” she said.

In the role, Jan provided a “wealth of knowledge” to Barton Hills homeowners, said Howard Holmes II, now president of the village board.

Residents of the community, where many homes are now valued upwards of $1 million, have included prominent University of Michigan surgeons, attorneys, automotive executives and businesspeople. Among them is former Toys “R” US and Domino’s CEO Dave Brandon, who also served as UM’s athletic director.

Holmes himself grew up in Barton Hills, where he and his parents still live.

“What’s unique about it is over the past 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, there hasn’t been an incredible amount of change, which in the case of a neighborhood is a good thing because preserving the uniqueness of the landscape is tough to do over time without making substantially dramatic changes that people may be uncomfortable with,” he said.

Dave and Jan Esch were a big part of that consistency, Holmes said.

“You really need to be invested in the community, you need to care about it,” Jan said of the jobs she and her husband filled.

They’re now set to move to a home near Dexter, close to the family farm where his father, who died in 2017, grew up. A nature preserve in the village, previously referred to as the “north 40″ has been named in their honor.

“They have been probably, in my opinion, the most valuable asset to Barton Hills since they joined. They have defined Barton Hills,” Holmes said.