Carol Egbo, Oakland County’s Historian, Stays Committed to Honoring the Past
(Lilly Crossley, Dec. 4, 2024)
Oakland County, MI – Profile on Carl Egbo Carol Egbo has been the historian for Oakland County Parks and Recreation for 10 years. She first started working with the parks through volunteer work, and has now made her way up to the title of historian, as well as archaeology consultant for the county.
One major focus Carol has in her work is learning more about the indigenous history of each park owned by the Parks and Recreation.
She is currently working on 15 different parks, for all of them were once a farm, and Carol wants to discover more about the people that lived there and those that had interacted with it. In addition, the County continues to build partnerships with local communities, such as Pontiac, to bring more parks into the mix. That means new places and stories for the historian to explore.
Even if she has spent a lot of time researching a place, Carol says that “the work is never done.”
Addison Oaks is the first park she worked on back in her volunteer days, and she’s still discovering new things about its history today.
One wonderful discovery Carol has made is the graves of six children in Seymour Lake Cemetery. These children were in the same family, and she learned that they had all died of Diptheria. This led her to explore more about this infectious disease, as well as the other people that are buried in the cemetery. Seymour Lake Cemetery is located just north of Independence Oaks County Park, and Carol has discovered that many people who once lived on that land are now buried in that cemetery.
Egbo also gets called in to local historian societies for help. One example of the work she may do with these societies is identifying the correct time in which a house was built. She was asked to look at a house that was labeled from the 1890’s, for the current resident was skeptical about that being accurate. Carol was able to identify that the house was actually from the 1880’s, one big giveaway being its floor beams. Although this may seem small, it’s still important because it gives the house the accurate information it deserves, as well as properly acknowledging the work that was done by the people that had built it.
Along with all of her historical work, Carol is also doing some independent research that is still related to Oakland County. Her work involves the Underground Railroad, for she is trying to find and identify the Freedom Seekers that now have unmarked graves in the county.
Egbo is working with the Network to Freedom, which is a program that honors and promotes the history of resistance to enslavement. Carol’s goal is to get markers for each and every one of those unmarked graves.
Carol grew up in Pontiac, giving her a close connection to Oakland County and its parks. She has also had a love for history from a very young age. She lived in a neighborhood with a house that her friends would call haunted, and Carol became fascinated with learning the history about the house, curious about the families that had lived there through the years.
She had also found pieces of broken plates in her backyard, leading her to discover that people once used to bury their trash in their backyards. Carol learned then that she not only had a love for history, but for archaeology as well.
Although Carol loved history for the majority of her life, she first took a different route when she went to college. She began pre-med at the University of Michigan, but discovered that it wasn’t her calling. Every summer throughout high school and college, Carol worked with children, so she thought about becoming a teacher. She did teach for a while, and then she became a social studies consultant, which meant she helped guide other teachers to give more efficient lessons.
When the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 hit, it became hard for Carol to teach because she loved being more interactive and hands on in her lessons, and it was hard to do that through Zoom meetings. She left that kind of teaching behind, but she still uses some of those skills through the lessons she hosts about history.
Some of these lessons included a series of fireside chats held virtually on the Oakland County Parks Facebook Page. Topics included “Civil War Connections to Oakland County Parks,” “Waterways, Trails, Artifacts and Wild Rice: Indigenous Connections to Our Oakland County Parks,” and “John Anderson, Mary Parker, and Andrew Winters: Stories of Freedom Seekers Buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.”
History is important to Carol because “you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been,” she says. There are so many neglected groups in history that need attention, such as women, African Americans, and Indigenous people. Carol is passionate about focusing on these groups because “if we’re not inclusive, we’re not telling the whole story,” she explains.
Although these histories may not get as much attention, they can’t be erased because all history is a part of us.
Carol loves being a historian because she enjoys “learning about people, and sharing it with people.” In her words, “history is no good if you keep it to yourself.” Carol also believes that “the essence of land is people, ” and she enjoys what she does because she is learning the history of those people.
For anyone interested in meeting Carol and listening to one of her historical lessons, her monthly fireside chats are welcome to all. The lessons are held over Zoom, and there is no pre-registration required. The schedule can be found at https://www.oakgov.com/Home/Components/Calendar/Event/5408/
Link to Oakland County Parks and Recreation: https://www.oakgov.com/community/oakland-county-parks
Link to Network to Freedom: https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1205/index.htm
Note: This story originally stated that Egbo lived in a house that was thought to be haunted. We have corrected the story to say that it was a home in the neighborhood, not hers.
