In 1961, when Detroit’s beautiful City Hall was demolished, the city kept a few elements of the old building – including the cornerstone and other foundation pieces – and hastily left them in an outdoor pile at Historic Fort Wayne for safekeeping until it could be figured out what to do with them.

Nearly half a century later, they’re still sitting there.

Originally, the enormous blocks — made of cream-colored sandstone now stained with grime — were left there along with eight large, stone statues and a massive bell from City Hall’s clock tower, all dumped unceremoniously in the woods, which grew to swallow them over the years.

Four of the statues – portraying Father Gabriel Richard, Antoine Cadillac, Father Jacques Marquette and Sieur de LaSalle, created by renowned Detroit sculptor Julius Melchers — were rescued a few years after the demolition and transplanted to the campus of Wayne State University in 1974.

The other four sandstone statues – female figures representing the civic virtues of justice, liberty, art and commerce, which had stood atop the clock tower’s lowest cornice – were scattered in pieces among the trees at the 19th-century fort until very recently, when they too were removed, finally, and reportedly put into storage by the Detroit Historical Museum. In their place were left large, distinctly square-shaped craters, indicating the former presence of longstanding, heavy, man-made objects that sank into the earth over the years.

The clock tower’s massive bell was dragged out from the woods recently, but was simply set at the edge of the fort’s parking lot, with no marker and even less fanfare. But the cornerstone and other foundation pieces still remain where they’ve been all these years, stacked in a small pile, surrounded by scattered pieces of City Hall half-buried within a grove, with weeds and trees overtaking them.

One slab features the name of City Hall’s architect, James Anderson. Another has the chiseled name of the builder. The cornerstone itself features the year the project began — 1868 — locked in thick, stone letters. A number of huge, rectangular slabs that had formed the entrance’s arches lay stacked, their ends carved in a distinctive spongy pattern visible in old photos.

A tree, now a couple stories high, grew right atop one of the slabs. Another circular slab lay hidden, with only a dulled edge poking outward. Tiny fractured pieces of statues – an elbow here, a rounded corner there — chipped off by the years or by rough handling, poked out from the grass.

Innumerable sandstone shavings and chips left behind when the statues were hauled off were wedged in the grasses or hidden under dirt formed from decades of vegetation that grew, died and slowly turned to compost that became a loose blanket over the historical remains. The smaller sandstone chips were dissolving back into sand, becoming indistinguishable from the natural rocks scattered everywhere.

The blocks couldn’t have ended up in a quieter place, in a desolate stretch of Delray, deep within the grounds of a decaying historical site that few people visit, left behind in a stand of trees.

Nearby, morels sprouted from the dirt, their tender cones hidden beneath the grasses. A large foxhole led deep into a hillside. A pheasant burst out of the grass at the sight of us. Ships passed slowly by on the river. There wasn’t a person in sight.

The place where we stood on the remains of City Hall was totally secluded and silent, unexceptional but for the pieces of one of Detroit’s most amazing historical structures that lay thrown in a heap, discarded and forgotten as so much of Detroit’s history has been.