The two spindly magnolia trees in the small park down the street from Margaret Armstead have names: Jake and Mary. 

Margaret planted them about a decade ago, when she helped the neighborhood development organization and a slew of other partners turn the formerly vacant lot into the green space it is today. 

Margaret got the nickname Jake while growing up in Mississippi, after Margaret’s mother saw similarities between her inquisitive daughter and a chatty man in town named Jake. Mary was a neighbor who lived on the block when Margaret first moved to Detroit-Shoreway in 1987. At the time, Margaret’s was one of only two Black families on the street. Mary, who was white, welcomed Margaret and her children to the neighborhood with open arms. 

“Mary and her family, they were just so nice to my family, and inviting,” Margaret said.

More than 35 years later, Margaret herself is now filling that role. She’s the person who cares for her neighbors and community members — from babies to elders, from animals to plants. 

Margaret says hi to the young family who recently moved in and shouts over another neighbor’s tall fence to see if they’re home. She keeps the little black cat on the street fed – the creature peeks its head out when it sees her walking out her front door. She gets up at 5 a.m. to make a fruit salad for her church’s coffee hour. She checks on the seniors she works with at the West Side Community House when they’re sick. 

Margaret recently dropped off ginger ale and Lorna Doones to Maxine Taswell, one of those seniors, when she had RSV. 

“She is the bright light in an ugly world,” Taswell said of Margaret. 

As Margaret gets older – she’s in her 60s now – it’s sometimes more difficult to do everything she wants. She had to give up the urban farm she helped build in Detroit-Shoreway, the literal apple of her eye, due to the physical strain of the work. Her neighborhood, she said, is changing. Property values are rising, so taxes are getting more expensive. The newer residents moving in don’t always say “hi” back when she walks down the street.   

Still, it seems that Margaret is one of those rare people who manage to focus on making things better without getting bogged down by complaints about the way things are now. 

“I just wanted to do what I could do to make the world a better place,” Margaret said. “And be an example for my children to let them know that no matter who we are, where we came from, how much money we have, we have a voice.” 

Her drive to do good is rooted in her Catholic faith, she said. Though raised Baptist, she converted as an adult after walking past St. Malachi Church in Ohio City. She felt God call to her, she said. 

Caring for others since the beginning 

Even as the youngest child in her family, Margaret became the go-to babysitter.  

She grew up in the Civil Rights era in Mississippi. When she was still a kid, her older siblings all moved to Cleveland as part of the Great Migration. Each summer, she’d visit the city to stay with her sisters. Margaret spent the time looking after her nieces and nephews. 

That trend continued into her young adult years. In the late 1970s, Margaret moved to Cleveland herself, living in Lakeview Terrace, a subsidized housing development in Ohio City. By then, she’d started having her own kids and was staying home to care for them. Her sisters helped drive her to doctor appointments — they were a built-in support system. But she looked out the window and saw others without one. 

She saw moms coming home carrying bags of groceries on one arm and a kid on the other. She saw moms trying to wrangle toddlers on the way to the bus stop. 

“I would holler out the window and ask them – I said, I will watch your children for you while you go shopping,” Margaret said. 

She’d gather all the kids in her apartment, reading to them and giving them blocks to play with.  

“I was a teacher before I was a teacher,” she said. 

Soon, Margaret was in classrooms. She began working as a teacher’s aide at Urban Community School, which her kids attended. And she soon found other jobs caring for children, at daycares and neighborhood centers. At one point, she was working a split shift, 12-hour day: she took a shift from 6 to 11 in the morning at a daycare, bussed to Malachi Center for lunch to care for kids whose parents were in GED classes, then went back to daycare for the afternoon shift. 

Her work caring for others – both people and plants – had only begun.  

Gardening in Detroit-Shoreway 

By the late 1980s, Margaret moved out of Lakeview Terrace into a home in Detroit-Shoreway for herself and her four children. She wanted a good school for her kids and to move them out of public housing. 

She also wanted a yard. Badly. 

Growing up in Mississippi, her mother and father cultivated a garden Margaret still dreams of – peanut plants, popcorn, potatoes, greens, blackberries, persimmons. Her mom raised chickens. 

So when she first moved to her single-family home in Detroit-Shoreway, Margaret got to work in her front yard – an “itty bitty” garden. Then, in 2005, a neighbor walked by and asked if she wanted her own plot in the neighborhood’s community garden. For the first 18 years she’d lived in the home, Margaret hadn’t even known the plots were nearby, let alone blocks from her home.  

“Every string of my hair went up on my head,” Margaret said. “And I had this rush.” 

She got to work on her two plots, along with her young grandchildren. Since she worked in schools, she had summers off, so Margaret spent long days in the community garden. They planted what her parents grew in Mississippi. They feasted on home-grown watermelon, blueberries and raspberries. She was “just so happy,” Margaret said. 

Larger gardens awaited her, though. Soon after she started working at the community garden, Margaret met two other neighbors, Barbara Strauss and John Yokie. They learned that it was possible to sell their fresh produce for profit. Together, the three began taking classes about urban farming. Through the neighborhood’s community development organization and the city’s land bank, they got a vacant lot to grow on, right next door to the existing community garden. And they formed a business: EcoVillage Produce, LLC. 

For years, the three plotted out the land and grew produce during the summer. Yokie built an irrigation system and compost bins. They received grants to fence in the farmland. They churned out produce: green tomatoes, kale, garlic scapes. They planted peach trees and apple trees. They set up at farmers markets across the city — Lincoln Park, Battery Park, East 105th Market — where Margaret took the lead.  

“I was the sales manager because I liked to talk,” Margaret said. 

While working on the farm, Margaret went back to college. For years, she’d been taking classes on and off, planning to get a degree in education. But because of her experience with the farm, Margaret’s advisor suggested she look in another direction: urban studies. She loaded up on courses about urban planning, research methods and grant writing. 

“I used to ask the question, why is it that some neighborhoods look so good? And why is it some don’t?” Margaret said. “It’s because of the neighbors – [they] want something and they got together. Just like we did when we wanted that garden.” 

She graduated in 2013 from Cleveland State University, at 55 years old. 

Margaret’s legacy 

Over time, running the garden became more difficult. One of Margaret’s business partners moved away, while the other got too sick to continue. Margaret had to care for her aging mother. And she was beginning to feel the physical strain of the manual farm work. She had to get a knee replaced and had carpal tunnel surgery in both hands. 

“I was picking up maybe 40 pounds of fresh coffee grounds and taking them to the garden,” Margaret said. “Going to different restaurants, picking that stuff up, taking it to the garden, pouring it over in the compost bin or on the row.” 

Her family begged her to let the farm go, for her health’s sake. She eventually agreed. By 2016, EcoVillage Produce stopped its summer harvest. Margaret misses it – walking back through the garden in late fall, she points out the dark bark of the apple tree, the giant weeds they cleared out that are starting to grow just outside the fence.

The farm isn’t gone, though. The lease was transferred to Other Hand Farming, another urban farming venture. It was named because “other people’s hands had built this,” Margaret said. (Signal Cleveland reached out to Other Hand Farming to confirm it is currently overseeing the farm.)

The farm, though, was far from the last thing Margaret did for her community.  

Each year, she organizes a festival at St. Malachi’s called Songs for the Soul. The free, outdoor concert opens up the church to the neighborhood. Margaret created the festival after having a dream that St. Malachi’s, which is majority-white, “was full of Black people.”     

About a year and a half ago, she started a job at the West Side Community House, a nonprofit social service agency near Detroit-Shoreway. She works with seniors as an activities coordinator, hosting Halloween parties, exercise classes and bingo. She writes letters to local businesses in hopes of collecting new bingo prizes.     

She’s a policy ambassador for the Center for Community Solutions, an Ohio research center that studies public policy such as Medicaid and food benefits. Through the program, she helps advocate for her community and relay necessary policy information back to them.

Last year, she joined others on a trip to the state capitol to learn about the state budget. While there, she asked state officials about seniors in the midst of a conversation about youth and family services, said Ronaldo Rodriguez, a fellow policy ambassador. It was a “light bulb” moment for him to wonder why there isn’t more of a focus on seniors, he said. 

Rodriguez met Margaret for the first time on the trip to Columbus. She reminded him of a character on the “Golden Girls” who describes her day simply – as going to buy a piece of fruit – when she, in fact, happened to save a life and volunteer at a hospital. 

“It reminds me so much of Margaret ’cause she does so much,” Rodriguez said. “…Everything that she does is just meant to uplift.”