Rochester Post | Published February 10, 2026
By Samantha Lawrence
Museum archivist at the Rochester Hills Museum at Van Hoosen Farm
ROCHESTER — Just over 100 years ago, Rochester became home to a world-class ski jump.
The jump, east of downtown Rochester, attracted champion skiers, Olympic athletes and thousands of spectators.
In a quest to bring ski jumping to Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, the Hall brothers established the Detroit Ski Club and began searching for property. In 1925, the brothers, including international ski jump champion Henry Hall, purchased 11 acres of farmland from the local Frank family.
The property was located west of Bloomer Park, at the end of John R Road, and it contained Newberry Hill, one of the highest elevations in the Lower Peninsula.
Newberry Hill gets its name from Milo Prentice Newberry. It was Milo’s granddaughter, Mabell Howell Frank, and her husband, Lucius “Bert,” who sold the land to the Hall brothers. Penny Reddish, Mabell and Bert’s granddaughter, has helped pass down the story of the ski jump with her publication, “I Got My Thrill on Newberry Hill.”
The Hall brothers would spend the next year building the $40,000 ski jump on top of Newberry Hill. Dedicated on Jan. 31, 1926, the ski jump drew a reported 10,000 people to Newberry Hill. First place at the inaugural event went to Olympic medalist Anders Haugen.
Intrigued by this new sport right in their backyard, local Rochester boys formed a Detroit Ski Club affiliated group called the Red Wings. Over 100 local boys joined the group. A scrapbook believed to have been created by Red Wings member George Dunlop or his wife, Marion, was donated to the Rochester Hills Museum at Van Hoosen Farm in 2023. The pages follow the activities of local skiers from the 1920s through the 1940s with newspaper clippings, flyers, and hand-sewn competition numbers used for meets in Rochester. The scrapbook’s creator even used a unique medium: a wallpaper sampling book from 1937.
Reports from local newspapers make it clear the biggest obstacle to lasting success for the ski jump was weather. Rochester ski jumping competitions were frequently postponed or cancelled due to lack of snow. “Ski Jump is a Flop” reads a headline from 1928. Inclement weather struck again in 1934, this time in the form of severe winds. A summer storm twisted the 112-foot slide into a pile of metal. The Hall brothers continued on, erecting a new, cable-suspension slide in 1937. The first ski jump to be held on the new slide and the first held in five years required two carloads of snow to be brought down from the north. Bringing in snow wasn’t unheard of for these events. In 1940, the competition, originally scheduled for Jan. 14, was postponed due to rain washing away almost all of the 125 tons brought in by the Detroit Ski Club.
The final blow came in the 1940s, when a windstorm once again knocked down the ski jump, and it was never rebuilt. With a run of less than 20 years, the Newberry Hill ski jump succeeded in bringing the sport to the metro Detroit area and an international audience to Rochester.
To discover more local history, visit the Rochester Hills Museum at Van Hoosen Farm website at www.rochesterhills.org/museum and check out the online collection catalog at https://rochesterhillsmuseum.cata logaccess.com.