The 1924-25 Brookfield girls basketball team flipped for the flapper look with their bob haircuts

The 10 members of the Brookfield High School girls basketball team from 1924-25 wore their hair in the fashionable bobs of the day, just covering their ears lengthwise.

Their uniforms were dark-colored, V-necked blouses and “leggings with a fluffy skirt over it,” said Sandy Sydlowski, who presented a team photo for show and tell at the October Brookfield Historical Society meeting.

“Back then, the hair was short and the clothes were long,” said Daniel Briceland, who hosts the society meetings in his funeral services building in Brookfield Center. “Now, the hair is long and the clothes are short.”

That’s not the only difference between girls basketball of the flapper era and today.

“They only played half-court,” said Sydlowski’s husband, Fred.

Lois Werner showed an artist’s rendering of the John Arthur Holt mill, which stood at Orangeville Custer and Yankee Run roads.

Holt built the grist mill in the 1820s and gave it to his son, Daniel, in 1831.

The mill burned down in 1898 and the mill’s dam was destroyed in 1900, said Werner, the society’s archivist.

“There isn’t much left there,” she said. “There is the race there if you know where to look for it.”

The race was the channel that led water from the creek into the mill.

A wooden gear from the mill is on display in the township administration building, and some of the stones from the dam have been salvaged and were used as the base under the bell in Brookfield Center, said Trustee Dion Magestro. The township has more of the dam stones.

“We have some pretty cool things we’re looking to use these stones (for) on the green,” he said.

Elizabeth Boozer talked about Harland Clarke, the Brookfield native who became a U.S. diplomat and traveled in that service throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Clarke lived in the home that now is Briceland’s funeral home, and the property contains a symbolic link to Clarke’s career.

“There’s a gingko tree that is native to Japan on this property,” Briceland said.