By DEBRA HAIGHT

Special to Leader Publications

Summer is the time for family reunions and a  special one took place last weekend in Niles. Members of the Finley family came from all over the country to reminisce and reunite as they celebrated nearly 170 years of history in the Niles area.

The Finleys are one of the area’s oldest African American families with the first Finleys settling in the Niles area in the late 1840s, more than a decade before the Civil War. Family patriarch Pasquel Finley was of French descent and moved to Michigan from Ohio with his wife, Sarah, who was of black and Indian descent.

Finley was heavily involved in the Underground Railroad and he and his four sons owned large plots of land both in Niles and nearby Howard Township. He died in 1870.

Niles resident Harold Finley, Pasquel Finley’s great-great-grandson, is spearheading this year’s reunion. He was on hand in early August to greet the dozens of family members coming in from all parts of the country and then leading people on a tour of local historic sites Saturday morning.

“My advantage is that I’ve lived here all my life and know the history,” Harold said. “Other family members live in other parts of the country and don’t know the history.”

What makes the annual Finley reunion unique is the blend of races on hand. Greg Popowich, of Minnesota, is one of the “white” Finley descendants at the reunion. He grew up in Wisconsin and is descended from Schuyler Finley, one of Pasquel Finley’s grandsons, as is Harold Finley.

Popowich noted that race isn’t and wasn’t something family members think about.

“I didn’t know much about the history of the family until I was in my teen years,” Popowich said. “We all played together when we got together at reunions and didn’t think about. We still don’t.”

The early August reunion concluded with a banquet at the Niles Senior Citizens Center and a presentation on one illustrious Finley ancestor, Charlotte “Lottie” Wilson. Wilson was born in Niles in 1854 and became a nationally renowned artist before her death in 1914. She was inducted in the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame last fall.

Wilson’s old home on North Fifth Street in Niles was one of several stops on Saturday morning’s history tour. Harold Finley showed a variety of sites to the two dozen family members going on the short bus trip, including the schools where he worked as the Niles school district’s first black administrator to homes and lands the family once owned.

Other stops along the way included Silverbrook Cemetery, where Wilson and other family members are buried, Mount Calvary Baptist and Franklin A.M.E., churches family members have attended, the historic Ferry Street School family members attended in the 1800s and the nearby Masonic Lodge that Pasquel Finley’s son, Greenville, founded as the first black lodge in the state.

Visits were also made to the near downtown and eastside neighborhoods where Finley descendants had homes. They also drove by the original land Pasquel Finley bought on Lake Street near the present-day Niles airport. As Harold Finley noted, the family home was in the middle of a cornfield and they had guns stationed all around for protection.

A highlight of the tour was a stop at the Barron Lake Cemetery on Dick Street in Howard Township. Family members didn’t know that the graves of Pasquel Finley and his son, John, were there for many years.

As family members related, Pasquel Finley made arrangements with one of his sons to be buried in a secret location as he feared that former slave owners and bounty hunters would desecrate his grave.

The location of his grave remained secret for more than 100 years and was only discovered in 1992. A marker along with restored gravestones for him and his son were dedicated in 2005.