[imagesource: Courtesy Meadow Brook Hall]

We’re about to uncover the juicy secrets, crises, and controversies that surround the family who lived in that house in the picture above.

The Dodge family has been referred to as the “Midwest’s Downtown Abbey”, but that might be referring less to the architectural similarities and more to the drama that surrounds the family.

The 110-room Tudor Revival palace that was built during Detroit’s glory years as the Motor City is remarkably the eighth largest home ever built in America, referred to as Meadow Brook Hall.

The Daily Beast has unpacked the “trove of secrets”, where hidden stairways and disturbing Greek mythological murals point to some devastating facts about the Dodge’s past:

Image: Courtesy Meadow Brook Hall

We’ll get started with some foreshadowing:

Meadow Brook Hall’s deception starts from the very beginning. Standing in front of the mansion, it’s hard to imagine it’s 88 000 square feet. It’s only as you twist and see the house continue endlessly, wing unsheathed from wing, enveloping the front circle, that you realize how big it is.

The classic early 20th century Tudor Revival style and decorative rooms inside, including a pink Rococo-style bedroom, can only be described as lovely:

Image: Courtesy Meadow Brook Hall

(Side note: Miley Cyrus performed parts of her music video for ‘Who Owns My Heart’ in that pink bedroom and attached bathroom.)

It is altogether “a fascinating window into the best that money could buy at the time–and what that new money wanted to buy”.

Except, “the tragedy of being human isn’t something you can build [or buy] your way out of”.

The main character of this story is Matilda Dodge Wilson, who completed Meadow Brook Hall in 1929:

Image: Michigan State University

She was the secretary to John Dodge, the co-founder of the American automobile manufacturing company, the Dodge Brothers Company.

She married the automotive aristocrat but quickly became one of the richest women in the world after John contracted the flu and died, aged just 55.

Sadly, his co-founder and brother, Horace, also got the flu less than a year later and died.

Five years later, she remarried, this time to Alfred Wilson, who ran a successful lumber company – hence Matilda’s double surname.

Matilda got to keep all the company’s houses (including Harbour House, the other massive 110-room, 24-bathroom Tudor Revival stone house down the way from Meadow Brook Hall) and boats, along with all the crises that would follow from John’s will:

His will had left nothing to the children from his first marriage and his disgruntled son contested being cut out. Matilda, who later in life served as lieutenant governor of Michigan, was also now a major shareholder of a rapidly growing company. And, there was this massive house on the water into which a couple million dollars had already been sunk.

Well, Harbour House, the multi-million dollar lookalike palace, was left to rot until it was demolished in 1940 for development into a subdivision.

Image: Courtesy of the Higbie Maxon Agney archives

But the lack of a predecessor for Harbour House wasn’t the only thing that haunted the “Midwest’s Downtown Abbey”:

Matilda’s daughter died at 4 from measles and her son drowned accidentally at 21. She apparently was estranged from her sister for 30 years. While her fortune was astonishing, there were periods where the mansion was either closed or partially shut off to economize.

In 1952, a mere 23 years after Meadow Brook Hall was completed, Matilda and Alfred commissioned a smaller, more modern residence nearby, the circular Prairie-style house Sunset Terrace.

When Matilda died in 1967, leaving the mansion and grounds to the university, one of the family’s great secrets also remained buried: John Dodge had been secretly married when his relationship with Matilda started.

The covered-up marriage was to a housekeeper he had hired after his first wife died in 1903 after a bad spell of tuberculosis. Strangely, even after marrying her, John still referred to her as the housekeeper.

With that secret out in the open, the real drama started happening with allegations of an abandoned Siamese twin.

A woman named Frances Mealbach propped up to file a motion to put a halt to the division of the estate, claiming that she was the abandoned daughter of John Dodge:

Even more shocking, Mealbach’s team theorized that she was the conjoined twin of Frances Dodge, the famed horsewoman who died in 1971 and was born around the same time as Frances Mealbach.

Mealbach pointed to scars on her back and neck whose origins she had no recollections of and theorized that Matilda had given her up because the family thought she’d turn out deformed.

She spent a lot of time trying to get the Dodge’s recognition but never officially became a Dodge, even though there was enough evidence to suggest she should.

It appears as though the series Downton Abbey has run its course. Netflix could do a lot worse than look into this family history for a series of its own.

[source:dailybeast]