Linden Hills

In 1820 Luther Nedeed’s double great-grandfather bought the land that would become the Linden Hills neighborhood, a disputed area which had “contracted and expanded over the years to include no one, and then practically everyone in Wayne County” (1). For seven days, Nedeed’s double great-grandfather sat in watch over his “wedge of their world” (2) and, after a week’s vigil, he opened his undertaker’s business, knowing that “unlike the South, the North didn’t care if blacks and whites were buried together so long as they didn’t live together” (3).

Over the years, as the Nedeeds passed Linden Hills on to their sons, Wayne County changed as farms were replaced by townships and factories. Old Luther’s son began to rent out shacks along Tupelo Drive—the closest road to Nedeed’s clapboard at the base of Linden Hills—and to rent out the plots from First Crescent Drive down to Fifth Crescent Drive. Eventually, Nedeed, “seeing that the government and real estate developers wanted his land so badly, decided to insure that they’d never be able to get their hands on it” and so gave each resident “a thousand-year-and-a-day lease—provided only that they passed their property on to their children” or another black family (7).