About Well House

 

Well House has offered temporary emergency shelter to women and families since 1978 and is now in the process of transitioning to permanent community living.  Its namesake in 10th century Scotland was run by a religious order providing "protection and refuge" for pilgrims to the holy lands. Still today, our resident's stay is a time to rest and to set directions. Over 5,000 people have been assisted over the last 27 years.

The original Well House "house" was built in 1879 and stands in the inner city at the South-East corner of Cass and Pleasant. Since our humble beginnings, we have added two more houses to our Well House "Home". One of these houses is across the street on the South-West corner of Cass and Pleasant while the other house is just south and next door to the original house. The third house was purchased from the City of Grand Rapids who donated the money they would have spent demolishing the house at it's old location, toward helping us move it to it's present location. This third home was then renovated with the generous donations of our friends. The maximum capacity of Well House is 17 guests. We also have a new 20 x 20 multi-use facility where our pottery facility is located.

“Hurray for Marian Clements! What this woman has done truly shows what the Statue of Liberty is all about. The housing code change has little effect on the majority of us, but Marian’s determination, drive and perseverance in what she believes, does. We must take Marian’s ambition and use it ourselves. Do we have to be governed by corporate chains-or even support local dime stores for that matter? Prove to yourself, as Marian did, that you have a choice: freedom.” A quote from Julie Swanson, ‘Homesteader’ sets good example.

It began in a time of depression and the inability to hold a job led some Quakers to take in Marian Clements who was inspired through their constant positive attitudes. To quote Marian, “I didn’t want to be at the end of my life and say I’d done nothing with it. I lived in Grand Rapids all my life and I knew there was a kind of caste system. If you are a certain race you can’t move north of Leonard and there were some real walls here, kind of like Berlin.” Marian could see the good in people and through what one owned, where one came from or what one looked like.

Marian purchased her home in 1977 for three hundred and fifty dollars due to back taxes. The original Well House, previously known as Wallhouse the Gaelic term, was located in Torpichen, Scotland and belonged to Marian’s grandmother’s grandmother and belonged to her family, the Gillons, for over three hundred years. Some time after Marian’s great grandmother moved on Wallhouse continued with the help of some monks with the motto ‘protection and refuge’ for pilgrims to the Holy Lands. Now, Wallhouse has crossed borders and the motto of ‘protection and refuge’ continues at the Well House Emergency Shelter in downtown Grand Rapids.

Marian’s style of living emphasized living gently on the earth and with each other so she built her home around this concept. One would assume that Marian was a ‘Good Samaritan’ since she opened her house to others in need and obeyed all the laws. Well she did…for the most part. Instead of conforming to a city housing code requiring all houses to have electrical power Marian refused because Consumer Power Company used nuclear power. Wondering how she got away with this? She didn’t, her influence in the community started gaining momentum and she was able to change that city housing code so that a single-family owner living in the home could be without electrical power.

Marian Clements implemented methods of “soft living” such as not connecting to the power grid. She did this not only in protest of nuclear power being used but because as dictated in an interview between Julie Ridenour and Marian…“she also enjoyed her candle-lit home because a ‘powerless house is a quiet house.’” Marian also repaired her original house using recycled materials as much as possible. She heated the house through a wood furnace. She used a greenhouse shower and garden compost under the sink that watered the greenhouse garden. The garden supplied food at Well House along with a garden outside until the house began to grow in population. Marian also used a 55-gallon metal drum to create a sawdust commode, sawdust commode being a toilet using sawdust to organically break down waste in an environmentally friendly way which minimized interference with the land and river. To paraphrase “The Well House News”, Marian ran the house on a solution-based therapy, taught at Calvin College, in which you become your vision through a physical work based philosophy. Marian’s intentions were to empower residents by learning these self-reliance skills or more simply put, homesteading, and start their life in a new way.

   
Marian eventually ran into more problems with the court system as Well House’s housing capacity grew. Judge Donald A. Johnston the third required her in 1982 to upgrade plumbing by replacing the 55-gallon drum for the sawdust commode with cement brick containers, install a gray water system and an overflow line from the system to the city’s storm-water system. Marian had forty-five days or that same amount of time in jail. She did not comply within the forty-five days and ended up spending five days in jail. Her reasoning behind it though again went back to living gently. Quoting her lawyer, James B. Johnson, who put Marian’s philosophy into perspective, “She has demonstrated that enforcement for enforcement’s sake of rules and regulations which seek apparent conformity for conformity’s sake perhaps is an inappropriate standard.”

Well House now owns three houses the second purchased from a Mrs. Gaylor’s daughter when her mother passed away in 1991 and the third donated by the city in 1992. The third house was obtained in a peculiar way being it was a house scheduled for demolition. But Marian had the eye of an opportunist and requested the city use the demolition money to instead relocate the house to where the other two resided and the city complied with her request.         
From there Well House only grew and gained recognition. In 1994 Marian received the Jefferson Award for Public Service, a very high honor that accredited Marian national recognition for her long-term dedication to help others. Unfortunately, two years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer and a year later she entered Blodgett Memorial medical center only one day prior of her passing away. Marian Clements literally helped others up until they day she died even in a weakened state.

The employees at Well House now also live at the house as Marian did and many of them knew and worked with Marian before she passed away. What started as a service project for me to build a website and short documentary dedicated to Well House Emergency Shelter thanks to Marian and the others working there has grown into an appreciation of what I have been given in life and plan to volunteer for Well House after the completion of my project. So I encourage everyone in here to get out in the world, do something meaningful, give back to your community, and connect with people because I believe many of us are homeless with a gratifying purpose, as Marian Clements so eloquently put it, “homelessness is not a simple lack of house. It has to do with a lack of CONNECTIONS.”