text:
Author: Grace Shackman
Michigan captured in its infancy
The U-M's Clements Library recently received a very rare 1825 map: one of the few remaining
copies of Orange Risdon's map of southeast Michigan. "It is the first map of Michigan that shows
serious surveying and settlement," explains Brian Leigh Dunnigan, the library's curator of maps.
Risdon, best known in this area as the founder of Saline, is also famous in Michigan history as the
chief surveyor of the Detroit-Chicago Road, now US-12.
Though Risdon's surveys were done under government contract, the map was a private venture.
Risdon drew it himself and paid to have it published, planning to sell copies to pioneers trying to
pick out places to settle. Unfortunately for him, a former employee came out with a competing map
and grabbed most of the market. But though it failed to make its creator rich, Risdon's map today
gives us a wealth of information about what our area looked like just one year after Ann Arbor was
Map of the Surveyed Part of the Territory of Michigan, 1825.
Officially called "Map of the Surveyed Part of the Territory of Michigan," it measures
forty-three by twenty-nine inches. It shows the area from Toledo north to Saginaw Bay and includes
Washtenaw County and a corner of Jackson County.
Surveyors hired by the federal government started working in southeast Michigan when it was still
a territory in 1818, since precise demarcation was a necessary prelude to selling the land. They
divided the state into counties, the counties into six-mile-square townships, and the townships into
square-mile (640-acre) sections. The grid allowed buyers, when they went to the land office to buy
land, to clearly identify their purchase.
Although a few intrepid settlers came earlier, serious settlement in Washtenaw County did not
begin until the 1820s. Ypsilanti was founded in 1823 or 1825, depending on how the city is defined.
Ann Arbor, Dexter, and Dixboro were all founded in 1824.
The Risdon map, although strictly a factual document, reveals two historic transitions, one long
past at the time it was published, the other still to come. The long, narrow lots Risdon mapped
along the rivers in Detroit and Monroe were legacies of the French who were the state's first
white inhabitants. "They all had access to the water," explains Dunnigan.
Risdon's map also shows Toledo, then called Port Lawrence, as part of Michigan. Though it was
indeed within Michigan Territory as defined by Congress, Ohio made a strong claim, and the issue was
further muddied by years of contested surveys. The conflict briefly turned violent in the "Toledo
War" of 1835 and would not finally be settled until 1836, when Michigan accepted a federal
ultimatum to cede the city to Ohio in exchange for the Upper Peninsula.
The handful of roads shown all lead from Detroit to surrounding towns: one to Saginaw (now
Woodward Avenue) and one to Port Huron (now Gratiot Avenue), as well as the road to present-day
Chicago. Tepees mark the location of Indian settlements, but there are none in Washtenaw County (the
closest ones are in Macon and Wyandotte). Near Detroit, Hamtramck has already been established;
Dearborn also is there, but not under that name—Risdon calls it "Bucklin."
The Washtenaw County shown on the map is larger than it is today, because it includes two
townships that are now part of Jackson County. Ann Arbor is spelled "Ann Arbour," which is how
founders John Allen and Elisha Rumsey spelled it when they platted their 640-acre parcel the year
before. Dixboro is also spelled the old-fashioned way, "Dixborough." All of the county's
townships, with the exception of present-day Lyndon Township, are sectioned off, but none is yet
The map contains practical information for would-be settlers, such as the location of inns and
where to register land purchases. In Washtenaw County, the only inn outside of the towns was labeled
Sutton, in today's Northfield Township. Settlers had to go to Detroit to buy property in Washtenaw
County, except for those acquiring land in the southern tier of townships—today's Manchester,
Bridgewater, Saline, York, and Augusta—who were directed to Monroe.
Only five settlements are shown in Washtenaw County: besides Ann Arbour, Dixborough, and Dexter
there are Ypsilanti and Woodruff's Grove. Showing the last two as separate places adds fuel to a
continuing debate between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti over which was settled first. It is clear that Ann
Arbor was founded in 1824 and Ypsilanti in 1825—but Woodruff's Grove was founded in 1823, and it
was later absorbed by Ypsilanti. Saline is not shown on the map; by the time Risdon drew it he had
bought the land for his own settlement, but he would not get around to laying out the town until
1832. The only marking is a salt spring nearby.
Orange Risdon was particularly well qualified to make this map, being both a trained surveyor and
an early Michigan settler. Risdon was born in 1786 in Vermont and moved with his family to Saratoga
County, in eastern New York, when he was three. He attended local schools until age thirteen.
Afterward, according to the 1881 Chapman History of Washtenaw County, Michigan, "he was
dependent on his own efforts."
Risdon studied surveying under a Mr. Rice of Ballston Spa, New York. In 1807, when he was
twenty-one, Risdon got a job assisting the noted surveyor Elisha Johnson, who had a contract to
survey 100,000 acres in the new counties of Allegany and Genesee. "His duty was to carry the
chain, for which he was to receive $16 per month, but scarcely a week had passed when his skill in
surveying was discovered, and with the consent of the land agent, the work was divided, and his
wages increased to about five times the amount of the first stipulation," says the county history.
Two years later Risdon was hired to assist in laying out the infant cities of Lockport, Brockport,
and Buffalo.
During the War of 1812 he worked for the federal government as an assistant surveyor. After the
war he met Sally Newland, and the couple married in 1816. Risdon bought land with his earnings,
eventually owning 1,000 acres on New York's Genesee River. Risdon resolved to move to Michigan
Territory after suffering losses in the 1817 commercial crisis, but he did not arrive in Michigan
until 1823, when he spent a month traveling on foot through Washtenaw and other nearby counties. He
returned the next year, this time spending four months on a 2,000-mile exploring trip on horseback
with Samuel Dexter. After their trip Dexter bought land on Mill Creek, just off the Huron River, and
began the work of establishing the village that bears his name. Risdon bought 160 acres on the
Saline River and the Indian trail that would soon become the Detroit-Chicago Road, land that would
later be the nucleus of the city of Saline.
How Risdon and Dexter met is lost to history. They could have known each other from New York,
since Risdon's parents still lived in Sarasota County and Dexter resided in Athens, two counties
south, or they may have met while traveling.
Their backgrounds were very different: Risdon was six years older and had been supporting himself
since he was thirteen, while Dexter had both a bachelor's and a master's degree from Harvard.
(Dexter's father had served in the cabinets of both Adams and Jefferson.) But both have gone down
in history as town founders who went well beyond land speculation and worked to improve their towns.
They both offered free land to any church wishing to get established, and they were both
abolitionists who were rumored to be part of the Underground Railroad. It is easy to imagine that
they discussed these issues during their long hours of travel together.
Risdon's reputation as a surveyor followed him to Michigan, and in the same year he bought his
land he was hired to direct a survey for a road connecting Detroit and Pontiac. In fall 1824, when
he must have been almost done surveying for the season, he began work on his map. From his two
exploring trips, plus his surveying work, Risdon would have known much of the area firsthand, and
for the rest he could rely on work done on earlier surveys.
Risdon advertised in the Detroit Gazette on October 1, 1824, seeking advance subscriptions to pay
for the cost of producing the map. He promised that "the work will be put into the hands of the
engraver as soon as a sufficient number of subscribers is obtained to warrant the expense of
The ad pitched the map as useful to emigrants and explorers: "The first thing necessary to an
immigrant is a general knowledge of the surveyed portion of the territory, of the course of its
streams and the relative situation of its different parts. The publisher, having spent some time in
exploring that junction of the territory embraced in his map, will be enabled to locate the most
important Indian paths, which as they were made by those who were acquainted with every part of the
country will be an important guide in the future location of our roads." Risdon promised that the
map also would include Indian reservations and villages and would "embrace the lines of counties,
townships, and sections, regularly numbered according to the surveys."
Although the mapping of Michigan had been going on for six years, settlement had been slow, both
because Michigan was off the beaten path (easterners going west overland were more likely to pass
through Ohio and Indiana) and because the territory was rumored to be all swamp. The first problem
would be solved a year later when the Erie Canal opened, making it easy for easterners to reach
Buffalo, where they could board a Lake Erie steamboat for Detroit. Risdon addressed the swamp story
head-on in his ad: "The country which was formerly believed to be uninhabitable excepting on the
river and lake shores, abounds in lands of the most fertile and healthy description." Even the
climate, he claimed, "is particularly adapted to our eastern constitution."
The maps were to be "engraved in an elegant style and published on Super Royal paper." Risdon
offered his map in three formats: in two sheets that could be stored flat in a drawer, for $2.50;
cut into twenty-four sections and pasted on linen--so that the map could be folded without losing
detail--and supplied with a leather carrying case, for $3; or varnished on rollers, perfect for land
agents and lawyers who would be consulting it in their offices, also for $3. The Clements
Library's copy is of the last type.
The next year, 1825, Risdon started the job for which he is most famous: chief surveyor for the
great military road from Detroit to Chicago, today known as Michigan Avenue or US-12. Work on the
survey no doubt showed him features to include on the map but left him little time to work on it. He
hired a helper named John Farmer, finished the map, and sent it to Rawdon, Clark, and Company in
Albany, New York. On November 13 he paid them $400 for engraving the two copper plates. Five weeks
later he paid to have 472 copies printed. After printing, each copy was hand painted. By the time
they were ready to deliver, however, winter had shut down shipping on Lake Erie. Risdon's
subscribers had to wait until May 1826 for an announcement in the Detroit Gazette that their copies
were ready.
That delay proved fatal to the map's commercial prospects. Later in the summer of 1826, Farmer
published his own rival map. It was basically the same as Risdon's but with added details that had
been learned in the interim. Farmer's map, being more up to date, overshadowed his employer's.
"It was bad luck that Orange didn't get the map in time to get it promptly to the
subscribers," says Brian Dunnigan. By examining both maps, Dunnigan can tell that Farmer had
probably done most of the hand coloring on Risdon's map. "John Farmer dominates after this--he
becomes 'the' Michigan map-maker," says Dunnigan. "He is probably the best-known Michigan
mapmaker of the nineteenth century."
Risdon moved on from the failure of his map, earning a good living as a surveyor. He surveyed at
least seventy-five townships and the city of Saginaw, and he reexamined or resurveyed forty-five
more townships. He continued working for the government until 1856, when he was seventy.
By then his own village was well established. In 1829 Risdon had returned to his property south
of Ann Arbor and built a twelve-room house on a hill overlooking his Detroit-Chicago Road. He
brought his family out from New York and began building up his new town. His house was used as
Saline's first inn, post office, general store, and polling place. Risdon himself served as
postmaster and magistrate, officiating at the first marriage in the township. After Michigan became
a state in 1837, he was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives.
Risdon's "advice was often sought in the selection of lands," the county history records.
"Very many miles were traveled by him to point out desirable locations, yet [he was] ever
unwilling to receive a reward." Although there is no evidence that he made any other maps, his
contemporaries knew of his pioneering effort. L. D. Norris, in an address to the Washtenaw County
Historical Society in 1874, said, "The first general map of the surveyed part of this territory of
which I have any knowledge was published in 1825 by Orange Risdon, then and now a pioneer of
Risdon died in 1876 at age ninety, a well-regarded member of the community. "He was genial in
his disposition, unselfish, benevolent, and liberal almost to a fault," said the county history.
At his funeral, "great numbers of people from neighboring towns and cities were in attendance."
His home passed to his daughter after his death. In 1948 the house was moved to Henry Street to make
room for expansion of Oakwood Cemetery. Still standing, it has been divided into apartments.
The Clements copy of Risdon's map was a gift from the Michigan Map Society, purchased to honor
Frank Kerwin, a founding member of the society who recently died. The Michigan Map Society meets at
the Clements and works closely with the library, so members knew that although the Clements had a
large collection of Great Lakes maps, it was missing this very important one. Since Kerwin, a Grosse
Pointe resident and sailor, was himself a collector of Great Lakes maps, the Risdon map, a copy of
which had gone on the market, seemed a logical choice. Of the 472 copies originally printed, only
thirteen are known to have survived. Kerwin lived long enough to learn of the purchase but died
before the formal presentation last May.
The map society has about seventy members; most are from the Ann Arbor and Detroit areas, but
some come from more distant places, such as Lansing and Grand Rapids. Although mostly amateurs, they
are a very knowledgeable group; many are serious map collectors. Several of them volunteer their
expertise to help the Clements staff. They meet four times a year to hear map-related lectures;
including a talk by Dunnigan on his book, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit,
1701–1838, before it was published.
Since the Clements is a research library, people cannot just come in and casually look at
Risdon's map. "Serious researchers may study the map once they have completed our reader
registration process, which is relatively simple," explains Dunnigan. The map itself will also be
exhibited from time to time, but at the moment, no public exhibition is scheduled.
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The U-M's elegant retreat was built with a fortune based on factory fans
At one time or another early in this century, all six children of Detroit physician Richard
Inglis lived in Ann Arbor. An interesting bunch, they included Agnes, the first curator of the U-M's
Labadie collection of social protest literature; Frank, a Detroit pharmacist; David, a pioneer
neurologist; Will, a Detroit businessman; and Kate, who owned a fruit and chicken farm that
stretched all the way from Geddes Avenue to the Huron River.
But the sibling who left the most imposing legacy was James, a wealthy industrialist. He and his
wife, Elizabeth, built Inglis House, an elegant English-style mansion that since 1951 has been owned
by the U-M. The university uses it to house and entertain its many visiting dignitaries in suitable
style. During her fourteen-year tenure, former facilities coordinator Sandra Simms amassed a
collection of thank-you notes extending from former president Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, to
the exiled Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama. (An aide wrote to say that "His Holiness very
much enjoyed His stay.")
The Inglises built the secluded mansion, which occupies an 8.5-acre plot at 2301 Highland Road,
as a retirement home. Its formal, traditional style belies the mundane business that paid for
The Inglis' stately home, designed by local architect Woody Woodburn to resemble a French
Chateau, has hosted visitors ranging from Gerald and Betty Ford to the Dalai Lama.
James Inglis was ten when his father died. The family was left a legacy of $3,000 a year from
real estate holdings, enough to live comfortably at that time, but James left school at age
fourteen. According to family legend, it was because his mother wouldn't give him enough money to
get his hair cut as often as he liked. Starting out as an office boy at $2.50 a week, Inglis
advanced to become owner of American Blower Co., where he developed fans for cooling Detroit's
burgeoning auto factories. The company was immensely successful and respected — so much so that
during the Depression, the National Bank of Detroit asked Inglis to serve on its board to help raise
public confidence in the institution.
In 1903, when he was thirty-nine, Inglis married Elizabeth Hughes, a Presbyterian minister's
daughter fourteen years his junior. They moved to Ann Arbor about 1918, living originally on Baldwin
They had become familiar with the town during frequent visits to Inglis's sister Kate, who had
moved to the farm on Geddes with her husband, Frank Smith, in 1901. The Smiths' big white farmhouse
still stands, looking much the same, at 2105 Geddes, near Concord. During the city's building boom
in the 1920's, the Smiths started subdividing the farm into residential lots on what are now
Highland, Concord, Lenawee, and Lafayette streets. James Inglis saved his sister the job of platting
the bottom of her farm by buying the land that ran down to the river as a site for his dream
Architect Lilburn "Woody" Woodworth designed an English-style house of stones and irregular
bricks, with a slate roof and elegant accoutrements. Though large (twelve rooms on four levels), it
worked well as a family home. Inglis's niece, travel writer Carol Spicer (daughter of brother Will),
remembers the house as the natural gathering place for the extended family. She recalls "lots of
jokes and laughter in the house."
The gardens, designed by Elizabeth Inglis, were also quintessentially English, with a formal
garden, a cutting garden, a meadow, an orchard, and wildflower areas. The grounds also included a
tennis court and a three-hole golf course and even, at one time, peacocks. (They eventually had to
be banished because of their noise.)
James Inglis died in 1950, leaving the house to his wife for her lifetime and then to the
university. But Elizabeth Inglis did not wait that long. She gave the house to the U-M less than a
year later when she moved to Kalamazoo to be with her daughter.
Elizabeth and James Inglis (top center) with their children and grandchildren sit under the
wisteria covered arches at the back of their house in 1945.
The new U-M president, Harlan Hatcher — like all incoming university presidents since — was
given the choice of living in Inglis House or in the president's house on South University. In a
1982 seminar on the evolving role of the president's wife (published by the Bentley Library),
Hatcher's wife, Anne, recalled thinking that "in many ways, it would have been nice, for the
children particularly, to be in a neighborhood rather than in the middle of a campus with no little
kids around to play with. But we really felt that it was important to maintain the central
Inglis House stood empty until 1964, when the university decided to use it as a guest home for
important visitors and out-of-town regents. They refurbished it, filling it with a mixture of
modern, traditional, and French Provincial furniture and hanging some original paintings by Courbet
and Turner borrowed from the U-M art museum.
It took horticulturist Chuck Jenkins five years to restore the gardens to their former glory
after fourteen years of neglect. He says he "got a good sense for the major elements" by looking at
pictures and talking to Walter Stampflei, the Inglis's gardener, who still lived in the gatehouse;
he also corresponded through a third party with Elizabeth Inglis, who lived until 1974.
Inglis House can accommodate forty people at a formal dinner and more for a reception or meeting.
The Inglis family's unusual combination living room/dining room now serves well as a big dining
room. Guests easily make do without a living room by beginning their evenings in the paneled
downstairs library with hors d'oeuvre and cocktails. Carol Spicer, speaking of the house's present
use, says, "If my aunt and uncle came back, they would be pleased."
Primroses, Chinese chestnuts, and pinochle in the boiler room
Since 1960, the U-M Botanical Gardens have been on Dixboro Road straddling Superior and Ann Arbor
townships. But for forty-five years before that, they were in the heart of what is now Ann Arbor's
south side. The fifty-two-acre gardens off Iroquois, now Woodbury Gardens apartments, played an
important part in university life from 1916 to 1961.
"It was not landscaped for beauty but for [growing] specific plants," recalls Chuck Cares,
who later landscaped the present gardens. "There were pretty plants, of course, but no aesthetic
principle was involved."
"Plants were grown for research, university classes, and decorations for university
functions," explains Dorothy Blanchard, whose mother, Frieda Blanchard, was assistant director
from 1919 to 1956. Though "it was not a place for the general public," Blanchard says,
"visitors did occasionally come out and were shown around by Mother."
The original botanical gardens were right on campus in front of the old library, about where
the Graduate Library now sits.
The university's first botanical garden was planted on the Diag in 1897, near what is today the
Graduate Library. In 1906 it moved to the newly acquired Arboretum. In 1913, finding the Arb's
hilly terrain not conducive to growing plants in controlled conditions, the university bought the
Iroquois site.
Harry Gleason, the new garden's first director, wrote that it was "located immediately beyond
the city limits south of Ann Arbor, near the Packard street road, and comprises twenty acres of
level fertile land." As surrounding parcels were purchased, the gardens grew to 51.72 acres.
Harley H. Bartlett replaced Gleason in 1919. "The chief thing that attracted me to the
University of Michigan before I knew what a generally delightful place Ann Arbor was, was the new
botanical gardens, which would provide perhaps the best facility in the country for work in genetics
and plant breeding," Bartlett wrote in his 1923 Harvard alumni report.
Bartlett was born in Montana in 1886, graduated from Harvard with a chemistry degree, and then
worked as a chemical biologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While in Washington he became
interested in the work of Dutch botanist Hugo DeVries on evolution and began to research the
genetics of genus Oenothera, an evening primrose. He accepted an assistant professorship at the U-M
in 1915 and, as soon as he could, planted rows of Oenothera at the new botanical gardens to continue
his research.
"The development of the garden has been my chief interest since coming to Michigan," Bartlett
claimed in the alumni report--an impressive claim, considering his many competing interests. "A
Renaissance man, he [Bartlett] knew a little about everything," recalls Ed Voss, emeritus
professor of botany. "If you asked a question, he'd give you a reference off the top of his
head." In addition to directing the gardens, Bartlett chaired the botany department, taught
classes, frequently traveled to Asia and Latin America to collect rare plants, published
prolifically, and was much in demand as a consultant to federal agencies.
Bartlett's secret was that he had accepted the gardens' directorship on the condition that
graduate student Frieda Cobb be appointed the assistant director. While Bartlett dealt with the
public and with the university administration, Cobb managed the gardens' day-to-day operations,
taking over completely during Bartlett's frequent absences. "She kept things at an even keel,"
recalls Voss.
Frieda Cobb had come to the U-M at Bartlett's suggestion and was working on her Ph.D., continuing
his Oenothera research. They had met through her brother, Victor Cobb, a classmate of Bartlett's
at Harvard. She arrived in Ann Arbor in 1916 and in 1920 was the first of Bartlett's students to
earn her doctorate. Two years later she married Frank Blanchard, a herpetologist whom she had met in
graduate school.
The actual work of growing the plants was done by a series of excellent gardeners, the last of
whom, from 1935 on, was Walter Kleinschmidt, who was promoted to superintendent. Part of his job was
tending the rare plants brought back from various expeditions. "He was good at growing
plants--discovering what was needed. For instance, he figured out how to grow ferns from spores,"
recalls Dorothy Blanchard. Kleinschmidt lived with his wife and daughter in a house on the grounds.
He supervised about four other gardeners, who took responsibility for specific greenhouses. "The
workers, Walter and his group, played pinochle in the boiler room every noon," recalls Peter
Kaufman, who was hired as curator of the gardens in 1956.
The gardens closest to the greenhouse were arranged in a big oval and were dubbed "the
graveyard," according to Kaufman, "because of their arrangement in horizontal beds divided by
family and genus." The land beyond the graveyard was used for specific research projects, such as
Eileen Erlanson's wild roses, Kenneth Jones's ragweed, and Stanley Cain's delphinium. Dow
Baxter, a forest pathologist from the forestry department, grew Chinese chestnuts, trying to come up
with a disease-resistant strain to replace the American chestnut.
Felix Gustafson's tomato plants loom large in everyone's memory, because he gave his extras
to staff members. "I'd take them and eat them off the vine. They were marvelous," recalls
local pediatrician Mark Hildebrandt, who worked at the gardens as a teenager. Blanchard, who rode
her bike to work before getting a car, learned to ride no-handed so she could eat tomatoes on the
way home.
The greenhouses provided a year-round source of plants for botany classes and faculty research.
Flowers were also grown there for special university occasions, such as commencements or honors
convocations or visits from dignitaries like Haile Selassie and the queen of the Netherlands.
The nucleus of the gardens' collection of cacti and other succulents was assembled by Elzada
Clover, a botany professor who had done work in the Southwest and Central America. In January 1938
Bartlett recorded in his diary that "Elzada Clover has a wild plan for a trip through the can[y]on
of the Colorado. She assures me it will be a truly scientific venture." Clover and a friend, Mary
Lois Jotter, completed their "wild plan," earning the distinction of being the first women to
make the trip by boat. In 1952 Clover added another first: being the first person to develop and
teach an entire class at the botanical gardens. It was a very popular undergraduate course, and
according to a history put out by the botanical gardens, "through it many students were led to
concentrate in botany."
In 1955 Bartlett reached retirement age and was succeeded by A. Geoffrey Norman. Five years later
the gardens moved to their present site on Dixboro. "We moved as many trees as we could,"
recalls Peter Kaufman. "Some spreading junipers didn't take, but most of what we moved did. We
took all the rare stuff that we had collected." The new gardens were named after regent Fred
Matthaei Sr., who donated the land.
The 350-acre Matthaei gardens are seven times as large as the Iroquois site and have more than
twice as much greenhouse space--44,000 square feet. The other main difference is that at the present
gardens there is much more public involvement, with hiking trails, adult education classes, meeting
space, and an active friends group.
The Iroquois site remained empty for most of the 1960s. Helen Corey, who lived on Iroquois in a
house backing up to the gardens, used to walk her dogs on the deserted site which she remembers as
"an oasis in the middle of the city." Although the gardens were in ruins and the buildings
falling apart, she recalls, there were still "nice trees, some fruit-bearing."
In 1969 the first stage of the Woodbury Gardens apartments was built. In honor of the former use,
the developers named the streets Aster and Wisteria. Residents still enjoy at least nine kinds of
trees originally planted in the botanical gardens, including Dow's Chinese chestnuts.
[Photo caption from book]: The original botanical gardens were right on campus in front of the
old library, about where the Graduate Library now sits. "Courtesy Bentley Historical
[Photo caption from book]: Dorothy Blanchard's kindergarten class looking at the giant
chrysanthemums in one of the Iroquois site greenhouses, 1930s. Although not generally open to the
public, Blanchard obviously had pull since her mother was the assistant director. "Courtesy
Dorothy Blanchard"
It launched the U-M on the path to greatness
"How can we truly be called a nation, if we cannot possess within ourselves the sources of a
literary, scientific, and artistic life?" asked Henry Philip Tappan, the first president of the
University of Michigan, at his inaugural address in 1852. Henry N. Walker, a prominent Detroit
lawyer in the audience, was inspired by Tappan's vision and asked what he could do to help. Tappan
suggested he raise money to build an astronomical observatory.
Born into a prominent New York family, Tappan had astonished his friends by agreeing, at age
forty-seven, to head what was then an obscure frontier college. The attraction for Tappan, who
previously had been a minister, professor, and writer, was the chance Michigan offered to put his
educational philosophy into practice—"to change the wilderness into fruitful fields," as he
put it in his inaugural address.
An adherent of the Prussian model of education, Tappan believed that universities should expand
their curriculum beyond the classics to teach science and encourage research. An observatory would
embody the new approach perfectly—and Walker was ideally positioned to make it a reality.
Walker was a former state attorney general who often handled railroad cases. Well connected to
both intellectuals and business people in Detroit, he attracted contributors who desired to advance
scientific knowledge, as well as those who were interested in astronomy's practical uses,
particularly in establishing accurate time.
The earliest known picture of the Observatory, circa 1858. The man is probably first
director Franz Brunnow with his father-in-law's dog, Leo.
Because Walker raised most of its $22,000 cost from Detroiters, the building was named the
"Detroit Observatory." Tappan originally planned to have just one telescope, a refractor,
suitable for research and instruction. But Walker offered to pay for a meridian-circle telescope as
well. It would be better suited for measuring the transit of the stars and thus for establishing
more accurate time—a matter of vital importance to railroads, which needed to run on schedule.
The regents sited the observatory on a four-acre lot, high on a hill outside the city limits.
Although only half a mile east of Central Campus, it was then considered way out in the country. In
the early days it could be reached only by a footpath, and astronomers complained of the long
Tappan said later that he took credit for everything about the observatory except its location,
which he would have preferred be on the main campus. "It has proved an inconvenient location, and
has caused much fatigue to the astronomer," he wrote. However, the remote site probably saved it:
nearly every building of its age on Central Campus has long since been torn down.
In 1853, Tappan and Walker traveled to New York to order the refracting telescope from Henry
Fitz, the country's leading telescope maker. With an objective lens twelve and five-eighths inches
across, it would be the largest refractor yet built in the United States, and the third largest
telescope in the world, after instruments in Pulkovo, Russia, and at Harvard.
Meridian-circle telescopes were not manufactured in the United States, so Tappan went to Europe.
On the advice of Johann Encke, director of the Prussian Royal Observatory in Berlin, he ordered a
brass meridian-circle telescope from Pistor and Martins, a Berlin firm.
Tappan asked several American astronomers to head the new observatory, but they all turned him
down. At that point he thought of Franz Brunnow, Encke's assistant, who had been very enthusiastic
about the project. Some objected to hiring a foreigner as astronomer, but Tappan prevailed. And
certainly Brunnow was eminently qualified--he was the first Ph.D. on the U-M faculty. Under his
direction, Ann Arbor soon became "the place to study astronomy," according to Patricia
Whitesell, the observatory director, curator, and author of A Creation of His Own: Tappan's
Detroit Observatory. Brunnow socialized with the Tappans and in 1857 married Tappan's
daughter Rebecca.
Tappan launched many other initiatives to turn the U-M into a first-rate university. He moved the
students out of the two classroom buildings, letting them board in town, to make more space for
academic uses--classrooms, natural history and art museums, and library. He encouraged the growth of
the medical school, started the law school, and built the first chemistry laboratory in the country
to be used exclusively for research and teaching. Under his leadership, the U-M granted its first
bachelor of science degrees in 1855, its first graduate degrees in 1859, and its first civil
engineering degrees in 1860.
But Tappan also made enemies--people who found his changes too precipitous or his manner too
haughty. In 1863, Tappan was fired in a surprise vote by a lame-duck board of regents. Tappan moved
his family to Europe, never to return; he died in Switzerland in 1881. Fortunately, his successors
continued on the course he'd set, securing the U-M's reputation as one of the nation's leading
Brunnow resigned after Tappan was fired; his star student, James Craig Watson, succeeded him.
During Watson's tenure, a director's house was built west of the observatory.
The Observatory with the director's house on the west side. While Brunnow was able to live
in the president's house, Watson, the next director, needed a home, so one was built that
connected to his office in the Observatory.
In 1908 an addition was built to the east to hold a thirty-seven-inch reflector telescope. But as
the campus grew out to the observatory, lights from the power plant (1914) and from the Ann Street
hospital and Couzens Hall (both 1925) interfered with viewing. Over the decades that followed, the
astronomy department transferred its serious research to a series of increasingly remote locations
(currently Arizona and Chile). But the old observatory continued to be used for educational purposes
until 1963, when the Dennison physics and astronomy building was completed.
In the tight-budget 1970s, there was talk of bulldozing the observatory. After World War II, the
director's house had been torn down to make room for an expansion of Couzens Hall, and the 1908
addition was razed in 1976, when the university decided it was too run down to maintain. But the
original observatory was saved—though the rescue took a three-part campaign lasting close to
thirty years.
Step one took place in the early 1970s, when a group of local preservationists led by John
Hathaway, then chair of the Historic District Commission, and Dr. Hazel Losh, legendary U-M
astronomy professor, convinced the university to give it a stay of execution.
Next, enter history professors Nick and Peg Steneck, who were called in by Al Hiltner, then chair
of the astronomy department, and Orren Mohler, the former chair. Peg Steneck remembers that on her
first tour of the building, "squatters were gaining access by climbing the chestnut tree out front
and entering through the trapdoor in the roof. Evidence of occupancy, such as mattresses and
Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes, littered the dome room, and a mural was painted around the wall of the
Nick Steneck tried to keep the building in use, setting up his office there, teaching classes,
and using the upper level for the Collegiate Institute for Values in Science. Peg Steneck started
research on the observatory's history, which grew into a course she still teaches on the history
of the university. Under the Stenecks' prodding, the university took steps to stop the
deterioration, fixing the roof, masonry foundation, and stucco.
Step three took place in 1994, when the university history and traditions committee asked vice
president for research Homer Neal to restore the observatory. Neal assigned Whitesell, who was
working in his office, to write a proposal, which she happily did, starting with Peg Steneck's
Whitesell had a Ph.D. in higher education, was interested in both historic preservation and the
history of science, and had long admired the observatory. Her new assignment, she says, "was a
dream come true." Neal agreed to the restoration and appointed Whitesell project manager.
Like the original construction, the million-dollar project, spearheaded enthusiastically by Anne
and Jim Duderstadt, was paid for by gifts from private donors. The work began in June 1997 and was
completed a year and a half later.
The university's first total restoration project, the observatory has a lot of "first" and
"only" distinctions. It is the oldest unaltered observatory in America that has its original
instruments intact, in their original mounts, and operational. The meridian-circle telescope is the
oldest in its original mount in the entire world. The building is the second oldest on campus (next
to the president's house) and the oldest unaltered one.
Restored, the observatory serves both as a museum of astronomical history and as a location for
many academic events.
Jailbreaks were a constant danger
Even in the good old days there were criminals. Ann Arbor was smaller and more neighborly in the
nineteenth century, but there were still very serious crimes, including robbery and murder. Thus,
there was a need for jails. For half the century, from 1838 to 1887, local wrongdoers were
imprisoned in a Greek Revival building on North Main, where the Ann Arbor Community Center now
When John Allen and Elisha Rumsey founded Ann Arbor in 1824, Rumsey gave the land bounded by
Fourth and Fifth avenues and Liberty and William streets (now containing the downtown post office,
the Blake Transit Center, and the YMCA) to the community as a site for a jail. Allen contributed the
block at Main and Huron still used for the county courthouse.
The county's first jail was built on Rumsey's square in 1829. The project was organized in a
socialist fashion. "The citizens of Ann Arbor and vicinity contributed, each according to his
ability, some timber, lumber, work or other materials necessary for the construction of a building
that would answer for a county prison," wrote a local historian in the Charles C. Chapman 1881
History of Washtenaw County. The wooden building included quarters for the jailer's family as
well as one room for prisoners.
The first jail was notoriously insecure. According to O. W. Stevenson's Ann Arbor: The
First Hundred Years, "No one could be sure that a prisoner who had been placed within its
confines on any particular night would be found there the next morning." Less than seven years
after it was built, a grand jury concluded that a new jail was needed. The county bought the land on
North Main, four blocks from the courthouse, and the next year the Davison brothers began
construction of a two-and-a-half-story red brick building.
The work evidently took several years to finish; local newspapers published numerous letters
asking why it wasn't done yet, and explanations for the slowness of getting the necessary funds.
Meanwhile, large numbers of prisoners continued to escape from the old jail--five when the door was
opened for delivery of some dishes, and seven others who managed to cut a hole through the
After the jail moved to downtown Ann Arbor, the old jail building on North Main was converted
first to a private home and then to a gas station.
"When erected [the Main Street jail] was considered a handsome building, in which the citizens
felt a just pride," Chapman's historian wrote. William Spaulding, son of sheriff Ephraim
Spaulding (who served from 1847 to 1852), had a less cheerful description in his memoirs, written in
the 1920s. Spaulding remembered how "the family lived in a wing of the big gloomy jail, with its
barred windows, in the lower part of town. 'When we lived in the jail' was a very common
reference in our family, and there was no stigma attached."
Spaulding's entire family was involved in keeping the jail. "My brother James was old enough
to act as 'turnkey,' which involved locking and unlocking cells at stated times," Spaulding
recalled. "Imagine a boy serving in such capacity in one of our modern prisons."
The sheriff's wife, Jane McCormick Spaulding, cooked for the prisoners in her own kitchen.
"Father and mother made due allowance for the fact that the jail was a place of enforced
restraint. But, when these stern requirements were satisfied, every effort was made to treat the
prisoners with consideration and kindness. . . . This policy not only contributed to the discipline
and good order of the institution, but it actually gained the confidence and good will of many of
the prisoners," Spaulding wrote. He went on to say that his parents often helped the families of
prisoners, and that after they were released, they often came by to "give good account of
themselves and testify their appreciation. In testimony of this Mother treasured various keep-sakes
of hand-craft which had been presented to her on such occasions."
Ann Arbor's citizens had reason to worry about their safety even after the new jail opened.
Criminals held there included horse thieves and bank robbers. Murderers were sent to the state
penitentiary (as they still are today), but even they stayed in the county jail while they awaited
trial. And despite the new jail's brick construction, jailbreaks in Ann Arbor were still rife. On
June 1, 1842, the State Journal recorded that "Henry Andrews, indicted for larceny, made
his escape from our jail on Sunday last by digging through the outer wall. He was not confined in a
cell. He has acquitted himself without the assistance of judge or jury, and avoided his trial which
was to have taken place today."
Chapman's history tells of two men convicted in 1857 for the murder of Simon Holden and
sentenced to the state penitentiary for life. About a year after the sentence, the court ordered a
new trial. "They were returned to Ann Arbor jail, but before court next convened they escaped from
jail and were never re-captured."
Allen K. Donahue, who lived across the street from the jail, reminisced about it toward the end
of his life in a 1943 Ann Arbor News interview. Many of his stories concerned escapees such
as Charles Chorr, who was sentenced to hang for murder in 1843 but escaped and was never caught.
Donahue recalled a pair of prisoners who got out through the jail's chimney in the middle of
winter but were glad to be caught again because they were so cold. Two other prisoners tried to
escape through the underground drainage pipe but couldn't get beyond a heavy grate and were dead
by the time they were found. Another escapee, a horse thief, was shot and killed while trying to get
to the stables.
There were escape attempts even during Spaulding's benign reign. "One story which my father
told was of pursuing and capturing a number of prisoners who had escaped. There was a
rough-and-tumble bout between the officers and the fugitives. Revolvers hadn't been invented, and
shooting was not such a ready resort. Father grabbed one of the escapees, wrestled him down, and was
sitting astride him, when he chanced to glimpse something out of one corner of his eye which caused
him to dodge with the free part of his body. It was just in time to avoid a large rock which the
fellow hurled at him: the missile whizzed by and split open the head of the prisoner beneath."
If Spaulding couldn't stop all escapes, his methods allowed him to stop one. "Once, when a
gang of tough customers had just been incarcerated, they managed to secure from outside
confederates, tools to saw their way out, and arms. They had nearly brought matters to a climax, and
were prepared to murder the guard or anyone who opposed them, when a warning word was passed by one
of the inmates to the sheriff. At least that was a substantial return for the humanitarian policy
toward prisoners."
There were also quiet times in the jail. Donahue recalled that he had seen the jail "swamped
with inmates and devoid of any life at all." An 1843 newspaper article noted little activity.
"There is but one person in our jail and he is committed for want of bail to keep the peace. It is
supposed that the man is partially deranged or he never should have been there." Unfortunately,
the incarceration of mentally ill people is still an issue.
As the county grew, especially in the years after the Civil War, the Main Street jail became too
small. After a new courthouse was finished in 1878, civic leaders began discussing building a new
jail. They lost a ballot issue in 1884, but by selling the old jail they managed to raise enough
money to buy land at Ashley and Ann. The jail stayed on that site, in two different buildings, until
1970, when it moved to its present location at Hogback and Washtenaw in Pittsfield Township.
John J. Robison, who had served as state senator, county clerk, and mayor of Ann Arbor, bought the
Main Street jail in 1887 and made it into his family home. He took off the cell block in back and
used the bricks to build two houses to the south, one of which was turned into a store.
In 1917 Morris Kraizman bought the old jail and used it for a tire company, gas station, and
scrap metal and junk store. Later it became the Pentecostal Church of God, then apartments. In 1951
it was severely damaged by fire. In 1958 what was left of the building was torn down. The Ann Arbor
Community Center was built on the site two years later.
The city-owned market turns eighty next year. Its future looked bleak a decade ago, but
today the biggest problem is competition for space.
"I have been to markets all over the world," says Al Kierczak, a farmer who's been coming
to the Farmers' Market since 1927, "and Ann Arbor is the nicest. It has the most variety." His
wife, Florence, confirms that wherever they travel, Kierczak spends part of their vacation taking a
busman's holiday, checking out the local markets in Europe, South America, and Japan.
Kierczak started coming to the Ann Arbor market with his parents when he was eight years old,
riding in from their farm near Milan in an open Model T pickup. In those days the market was held
around the old courthouse at Main and Huron, which had sweeping lawns on all four sides.
Kierczak's dad and the other farmers would back their trucks up to the sidewalk and set up tables
to display their produce. If it was a hot day, they'd put up umbrellas.
The curb market, as it was originally called, was started in May 1919 by the Community
Federation, composed of representatives from several women's organizations. The group believed it
could cut food costs by eliminating the middleman. In fact, several grocers, fearing the
competition, went to the common council to object to the plan. They were overruled, and the council
and the board of public works approved the federation's request to let the farmers sell from the
streets adjacent to the courthouse.
The Curb Market on North Fourth Ave.
The original market began with ten farmers on the Main Street side of the courthouse. According
to Rudy Weiner, each farmer sold something different: Adolph Weiner, Rudy's father, sold flowers
(he had emigrated from Austria where he was head gardener for Emperor Franz Joseph); Flora Osborne
sold celery, Chinese cabbage, and onions; and the Riecherts of Chelsea sold fruit. Many of the
farmers came in horse-drawn wagons. They'd leave their wagons at the curb and stable the horses in
the dairy barn on the corner of Miller Avenue and First Street. If they had any produce left at the
end of the day, they'd hitch up the horses and peddle it around town.
The city's growth has long since overrun some of the early growers' farms. The Weiners'
farm was on Packard, near where the Darlington Lutheran Church is now. The Osborne place was near
today's city airport, and the Dickinsons, another early market family, had a farm on Broadway. The
market organizers talked of limiting the market to only Washtenaw County farmers, but since one of
the early participants was from outside the county, they decided against it. But another rule they
made at the time is still rigorously enforced: everything sold at the market must be produced by the
vendors themselves.
The early vendors sold everything their farms produced--not just vegetables, fruit, and flowers,
but also honey, eggs, dairy products, baked goods, and poultry--chickens were the most common, but
turkeys, ducks, and geese also could be found at the market. Esther Kapp remembers that her family
sold beef and pork that her father butchered. Several people even remember seeing dressed muskrat
for sale.
With so many things for sale, it's obvious why some of the local merchants were worried about
the competition. But, bowing to the inevitable, some began buying market produce--such as seasonal
strawberries, or Flora Osborne's onions--by the crate or bushel to resell in their stores. Not
wanting to sell out and disappoint their regular clientele, some of the farmers set aside a certain
amount for wholesale or brought in an extra buggy-load for the stores.
As the number of farmers increased, people objected to clogging up Main Street, so the market
moved to the Fourth Avenue side of the courthouse, then eventually wrapped around onto Ann Street.
The market never used the Huron Street side, since it was too busy a street to block off. (Before
expressways, Huron/Washtenaw was the main highway through town.) During the peak of the growing
season, there were so many farmers that the market expanded to the far side of Fourth Avenue, in
front of what was then the YMCA and is now the county annex. To limit traffic congestion, the
farmers who used that space had to move their trucks out of the way after they unloaded. The market
was such a success that in 1921 the common council decided to take it over. It has been a city
market managed by a council-appointed commission ever since.
Anna Biederman was the city's first market master. Born in Germany, she moved to Ann Arbor with
her husband, John, and raised nine children. "She knew all about growing," says Warren Staebler,
who remembers her as the director of the victory garden he was involved in as a child during World
War I, on land between Seventh and Eighth streets. Biederman did the same in World War II, and
between the wars directed the children at Bach Elementary School in gardening on their own plots on
what is today the school's playground.
Biederman traveled to other markets around the state and became an authority on how to organize a
community market. "Throughout the trying early years and the development into the present large
market Mrs. Biederman has been the ruling spirit," claimed a 1934 Ann Arbor News article.
Her grandson, John Biederman, remembers her as "a little, short, chubby woman, very outspoken.
When she ran the market, she ran the market."
John remembers that his family benefited from one of the perks of Biederman's position. "On
market days we would get a call from grandma saying, 'I've got a whole bunch of cabbages, or
carrots, or beets. Come get them.' The farmers would give them to her, and there would be too much
for two people to eat."
As the amount of traffic and the number of sellers increased in the 1920s, the courthouse square
became a less satisfactory location for the market. In 1931, Gottlob Luick, a former mayor
(1899–1901), solved the problem by donating land for a permanent site between Fourth Avenue and
Detroit Street, which had been used by his lumber company. Adolph Weiner worked with Luick to design
the market.
It was the midst of the Depression, so the city didn't have money to develop the site, but the
farmers made do, selling their produce from the sidewalk that fronted Detroit Street. They used
wooden sheds from the old lumberyard for protection in rain and to keep warm in the winter. They
created more space by adding a boardwalk along the northern edge of the property, creating an
L-shaped layout. The wooden walkway protected people from the mud and also helped level a sloping
piece of land. "It was three feet at the highest and then tapered down," recalls fruit grower
Alex Nemeth, who, like Al Kierczak, started coming to the market with his parents when he was a
child. "I'd crawl under it with the other kids, looking for coins that dropped through."
WPA Construction of the Farmers' Market in Kerrytown.
From 1938 to 1940, the present 124-stall market was built by the federal Works Progress
Administration, a Depression-era jobs program. WPA workers roofed and paved the market and added
another short wing extending west from Detroit Street. A market headquarters, a small tan brick
building, was built in the middle, where the parking dynameter is today. Market managers used the
back room for an office, while farmers used the lounge in front to get warm and to eat sack
Shortly after the market was finished, Charles McCalla built a cinder-block building just north
of the market for his Washtenaw Farm Bureau store. He used the new building as a store and feed
mill, and the old lumber warehouse on the corner of Fifth and Kingsley for storage and parts. (Both
buildings are now part of Kerrytown.)
McCalla ground grain into livestock feed and sold prepared feeds, seeds, pet supplies, and penny
candy. With such a convenient location, many market farmers bought supplies there. In 1962,
McCalla's son and daughter-in-law, Ray and Shirley McCalla, took over the business and renamed it
Washtenaw Farm and Garden Center. In 1969, they sold the buildings to Kerrytown's developers and
moved their operation to Dexter.
Another nearby business that catered to the farmers was a small eatery run by Bill Biederman,
Anna's son. At the time the WPA market was built, there were still four houses along Fourth Avenue
west of the market. Bill Biederman lived in one of the houses and ran a modest restaurant in his
kitchen, serving breakfasts and light lunches--hamburgers, chili, soup. John Biederman worked as a
dishwasher and cook for his uncle when he was a teenager. He remembers there were about nine stools
and some little armchairs. When Anna Biederman retired, Bill took over as market manager.
During the food shortages of World War II, the market was busier than ever. Mildred Parker
remembers customers lining up five or six stalls back to buy her chickens. "Finally," she
remembers, "I counted how many were left and then came out and said I'd sell one to each and the
rest should go home."
From its inception through the 1960s, market stalls were in great demand. "Quite a few
[growers] would stay all night the night before to get a preferred spot," Alex Nemeth remembers.
Bob Dieterle, who still works the family farm near Saline, remembers that his mother used to go at 2
a.m. and park across from the armory to make sure she'd get a stall.
Once they had secured a spot, many stayed up all night, or close to it, getting ready for the
market. Dieterle's wife, Luella, used to spend the night picking flowers, a flashlight under her
arm. Esther Kapp remembers harvesting until 1:30 a.m. and then rising again at 4 a.m. for the trip
to town. Her three brothers stayed behind on the farm on Northfield Church Road to continue picking;
while Kapp and her mother sold, her dad would drive back and forth all day to pick up fresh
Winter was an even more trying time. Bob Dieterle didn't miss a Saturday for fifty-seven years.
"People depended on us to bring eggs," he says. "Once when there was a big snowstorm, when we
still had horses, I knew my dad's '34 Ford couldn't reach the corner [to the main road], so I
had the horses pull it there. I met him there with the horses when he returned at three." Mildred
Parker remembers selling eggs on a day when it was nineteen degrees below zero. "I had just the
empty containers on the table. When I made a sale, I'd go to the truck, but every carton had at
least one cracked egg. I could see they were frozen, so I just went home." The farmers dressed
warmly and rigged up homemade stoves, called "salamanders," to keep warm.
Over the years, fewer and fewer people were willing to endure such hardships. For one thing,
health regulations kept limiting what the farmers could bring to the market. In the 1950s, stricter
standards stopped the sale of unrefrigerated dairy products: butter, milk, cottage cheese,
buttermilk. Next, the state barred the farmers from selling meat. Kapp recalls, "We always had the
meat in ice. It was a Lansing problem, not the meat inspector's. We went up to Lansing to
complain, but they had made up their mind." In 1977 baked goods were banned unless they were
prepared in a separate, licensed commercial kitchen.
The market went through a low point in the 1970s and 1980s. With farmers finding it harder to
stay in business and local retailers luring shoppers away with more and better produce, the number
of vendors plunged 40 percent between 1976 and 1988. That year, the Observer published an article
asking, "Will the market survive to the year 2000?"
To keep the market going, the commission implemented two important changes. Some veteran growers
were allowed to spread out, renting three or even four stalls. And for the first time, a dozen
booths were permanently rented to craftspeople--woodworker Coleman Jewett's Adirondack chairs, for
instance, are now a fixture at the market's north end.
Today the market is again full. According to Maxine Rosasco, market manager since 1987, there is
even a waiting list: the `54 produce vendors and 144 craftspeople, who currently rent daily as space
permits, want to be assigned permanent stalls.
While the turnaround is good news for the market, it also means that the two stopgap changes in
the 1980s have become a problem. Pointing to their numbers, the craftspeople are lobbying for more
space. "We set up Sunday for an artisans' market, but they'd rather come on Saturday," says
Rosasco. And there is also friction among the growers themselves.
The waiting list for produce vendors is surprising--after all, farming has only gotten tougher in
the last decade, and farms around the city have continued to be gobbled up by new subdivisions. But
those losses have been more than made up for by growers coming from farther afield, as far away as
Allen and Coldwater. And despite increased competition from supermarkets and produce markets,
shoppers have continued to flock to the market for specialties, like Ken King's organic produce
and George Merkle's Chinese vegetables.
"Buyers are more sophisticated," says Florence Kierczak. "Years ago we didn't sell
kohlrabi, people didn't know what it was. Now they do." The Nemeth family has expanded its
variety of fruit, offering customers different tastes, and also gaining a longer harvest. And many
growers have responded to shoppers' demands for bedding plants, especially perennials, as well as
for cut flowers and herbs. The downside of the market's resurgence is growing tension between
longtime vendors and newcomers who'd like to get into the market. Some of the growers on the
waiting list think that the vendors with four stalls should be made to give one up.
That, of course, isn't going over well with the veteran growers. Says Mildred Parker, "They
think they should get a stall right way. Some of us waited four or five years, or even ten, to get
where we wanted." The growers with multiple stalls say they need the space because they have to
sell more now to make up for rising costs--for instance, new state health rules require that farmers
making apple cider to have a separate press building with a cement floor. "One stall was adequate
for each farm in the early days," says Alex Nemeth. "Now you need two or three to make a
Physically the market's layout hasn't changed much since the WPA finished its work, except
for gradual expansions as houses on Fourth Avenue were acquired and demolished or moved. In 1980,
city voters turned down a bond proposal to rebuild and winterize the market, apparently feeling the
changes would make it too glitzy (although most of the farmers would have appreciated the warmth!).
But by saving up vendors' fees, the market commission was able to replace the roofs and gutters
and build a new office at the market's south end.
Crowds at the market remain strong, especially in midsummer when foot traffic gets so thick
shoppers sometimes find it hard to move. The farmers for their part have warm feelings for the
market beyond just making a living. Many have been involved for several generations and have become
close friends, almost family, with their fellow farmers. Parker first brought her daughter in a
playpen. In later years, her daughter became such good friends with the Kapps' daughter that
people didn't know which kid belonged with which stall. The farmers have also made friends with
their customers over the years. Says Olive Conant, "They'd talk to you, tell you things they
wouldn't tell others—they think farmers have a more down-to-earth life."
Tough and outgoing, he embodied the AAPD for forty years
Sam Schlecht still remembers a run-in he had with Ann Arbor policeman Red Howard in the 1920s. On
a Halloween night, when Schlecht was about ten, he and a buddy played a prank on a neighbor. "We
took a couple of big garbage cans and dumped them on the porch," Schlecht recalls. This act was
evidently witnessed, because they had run only a couple of blocks before they were overtaken by
Howard, driving the Police Department's red Buick touring car.
The boys confessed to the crime. "I wasn't going to lie, because if it got back to my
grandmother I would really be up a creek," Schlecht recalls. Howard told them he was taking them
in. After driving toward the police station long enough to make them thoroughly frightened, Howard
turned back to the scene of the crime, where he set them to work cleaning up the porch. Schlecht, of
course, never performed that act of vandalism again.
When Red Howard joined the police in 1907, Ann Arbor was a town of about 14,000 people. Though
the city grew several fold during his forty years on the force, he always remained a small-town cop.
He handled wrongdoers more like a strict parent than a legal functionary. "The word was that Red
never arrested anyone, but he did more good than anyone else," recalls Warren Staebler. "A good
licking down did more good than fining."
A big man, six feet two inches and of impressive girth, Howard kept order more by his commanding
presence than by his billy club or gun. Although he never advanced beyond the rank of sergeant, he
embodied the department to Ann Arborites of his era. People still remember him vividly fifty years
after his death.
To Howard, what we now call "community policing" was second nature. He "would walk up and
talk to anyone," recalls Bob Kuhn, who lived on Catherine Street. "He was super to kids,"
remembers Mary Schlecht. "Everyone liked him," agrees Jim Crawford, former head of the Black
Elks. On good terms with the Main Street merchants, he was equally comfortable in the rougher bar
areas. "No one scared him," says his daughter, Roseanna Ingram.
As Sam Schlecht found, Howard often acted as judge and jury as well as policeman. When Dick Tasch
was a U-M freshman, he and some classmates printed up broadsides taunting the sophomore class and
pasted them surreptitiously on State Street buildings. "One night, about one a.m., we put a whole
bunch at Goldman Cleaners and Quarry Drugs," Tasch remembers, "and were going around the corner
when there was Red Howard standing. We took off running."
A local boy, Tasch was able to duck out of sight and escape, but the others were caught. Tasch
drove by later and found his classmates carrying pails and scrub brushes, cleaning up. "You
didn't go to court," Tasch recalls. "He'd punish you on the job."
Though overweight and a heavy smoker, Howard could outrun most criminals. He kept his strength up
his whole career. Duane Bauer, who joined the force the year before Howard retired, remembers an
incident at Michigan Stadium when two drunks were creating a disturbance down by the field. "Red
took both by the neck and took them up seventy-two steps. He was a powerful man."
Before and after football games, Howard also directed traffic at the corner of State and Packard.
When people asked if he wasn't scared of being run over, he'd reply, "If they hit me,
they'll get a big grease spot." Not surprisingly, he made a big impression on out-of-towners.
Bauer, who took over that intersection after Howard retired, recalls, "More people wanted to know
what happened to big old Red."
Howard's real first name was Marland; he got the nickname Red as a schoolboy because of the
color of his hair. He was born in 1878 in Saline, the son of an Irish produce merchant, and grew up
on Hiscock Street in Ann Arbor.
At the time, half the town was of German descent. Howard learned to speak the language from other
kids in the neighborhood. ("He could rattle off German like anything," his daughter remembers.)
He was often called the German-Irish cop, because he always lived in German neighborhoods and
enjoyed German beer and German food.
Howard quit school when he was eleven and worked at a grocery store and then at Godfrey Moving
(he was a relative of owner Dana Creal) before joining the police. He married Rose Galligan of
Northfield Township in 1903, and they lived at 410 West Washington, where the Y now stands. Along
with their own four children, the Howards usually had other relatives living with them.
Howard's personal life mirrored his police style. He was warm and loving, but also strict. He
told his sons, "If you get arrested and go to jail, don't call me." He kept a careful eye on
his girls. "I couldn't do anything that wouldn't get back to him," recalls Ingram. His
granddaughter Joan Dwyer Hume, who also lived in the house, recalls that Howard checked out all her
boyfriends to make sure they didn't have police records. But Hume also has wonderful memories of
walking home from St. Thomas School when Howard was walking his beat on Huron Street. He'd watch
for her so that he could take Hume and her friends to Candy Land for ice cream.
In 1937, after thirty years of service and completion of a training course on new police methods,
Howard was promoted to sergeant. "Even after he was a sergeant, he'd still go out on the beat
because he loved it," recalls Ingram. "He went down to Main Street, where everyone knew him and
thought he was the greatest. He didn't give two hoots for an office."
Howard's personality and seniority won the respect of his fellow officers (there were eight
when he started, more than forty by the time he retired). "He was the only policeman who could
bring a bottle of beer with his lunch," Bauer remembers. John Walter, who joined the police the
same year as Bauer, recalls that they called Howard "Pappy" because he was the oldest man on the
force. "He was a joyful guy," says Walter. "We kidded him an awful lot. He took it and gave it
Howard didn't retire until he was sixty-nine. "All I ever wanted to do was police work," he
told Ingram. "I loved every minute." His family held a huge retirement party in his honor.
Afterward, Howard spent more time at his cottage on Crooked Lake. He loved to fish, and had a boat
that was specially built to hold his weight.
In declining health, he also spent time in the hospital. Ingram and Hume remember coming to visit
him and finding three clergymen sitting at his bedside: the ministers from Zion and Bethlehem, and
Father Carey from St. Thomas. They were discussing fishing.
Howard died of lung cancer in 1948, just a year after he retired. His funeral was held at St.
Thomas with police chief Casper Enkemann and judge Jay Paine among the pallbearers. "When he
passed, we learned a lot," his daughter recalls. "It was such a big funeral. Police came from
out of town, firemen, and people he helped. He made an impression. He had more friends than he ever
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The steel magnate's gift was grafted onto the public high school
Look closely at the north side of the U-M's Frieze Building on Huron opposite North Thayer, and
you'll see that part of it is actually a distinct structure, set closer to Huron Street and built of
stone blocks rather than brick. The main brick building was built in 1907 as Ann Arbor High School.
The smaller stone one was built the same year, as one of America's 1,679 Carnegie libraries.
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was a Scottish immigrant who made his fortune in steel (he replaced
many wooden bridges with steel ones) and railroads (he introduced the first sleeping cars). After he
sold Carnegie Steel to financier J. P. Morgan in 1901, he devoted his energies to giving away his
vast fortune for social and educational advancement.
Carnegie believed that great wealth was a public trust that should be shared. But he did not
believe in straight alms-giving. (This was, after all, the Carnegie who broke the 1886 strike at his
steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, with 200 Pinkerton detectives. It took the state militia to
put down the riots that resulted.) Building libraries to encourage self-improvement was consistent
with Carnegie's philosophy of helping people help themselves. He paid for the buildings but required
the community to provide the site and to pay for books and maintenance in perpetuity.
At the time it was built, Ann Arbor's Carnegie Library was believed to be the only one in the
country attached to another building. But it was a natural pairing in a town where the library and
the high school had already been associated for nearly fifty years. The contents of the high
school's library, which started operating in 1858, were the city's first publicly owned books. In
1883, the collection was given its own quarters on the second floor of the school, and Nellie Loving
was hired to be the first librarian. At this time, or soon after, the general public also was
allowed to use the library, thus setting the precedent, continued to this day, of the school board
taking responsibility for the public library.
Post card view of Ann Arbor's Carnegie Library. It was said to be the only one in the
country attached to another building.
Another source of books for nineteenth-century readers was the Ladies Library Association. It was
organized in 1866 by thirty-five women as a subscription library, based on a model started by
Benjamin Franklin. By 1885, members had raised enough money — through Easter and Christmas fairs,
lectures, cantatas, and strawberry festivals — to build their own library on Huron Street between
Division and Fifth, in a building since torn down to make room for Michigan Bell.
In 1902, Anna Botsford Bach, then president of the Ladies Library Association, suggested applying
for a Carnegie grant to build a city library. The city's application was supported by the school
board, the city council, and the Ladies Library Association. But after Carnegie granted $20,000 for
the project in 1903, the applicants could not agree among themselves on a site. (The school board
wanted the new library to be near the high school so the students could continue using it. The
Ladies Library Association thought an entirely separate location would better serve the general
public.) The deadlock was resolved only after the application was resubmitted in 1904 without the
participation of the Ladies Library Association. This time, the city and school board were awarded
The Carnegie grant came just in time: on the night of December 31, 1904, the high school burned
down. Luckily, school officials and students who rushed to the scene were able to save most of the
library's 8,000 books before the building was destroyed.
A few months later, voters approved a bond issue to build a new school. The school and the
library went up simultaneously; both were designed by architects Malcomson and Higginbottom of
Detroit, and built by M. Campbell of Findlay, Ohio. (The interior finishing work was done by the
Lewis Company of Bay City, which later began building kit homes.) Despite its unusual connection to
the high school, the library looked much like other Carnegie libraries: large pillars on the front,
big windows, high ceilings, and a massive center staircase. The board of education, pleased with the
result, called the new building "beautiful and commodious."
In 1932, the high school library moved into separate quarters on the library's third floor, but
students continued to use the lower floors after school. Gene Wilson, retired director of the public
library, remembers that when he began working there in 1951, the busiest time of day was right after
school, when the students would flock over to do their homework. By the time Wilson came to the
library, the once spacious building was, in his words, "obscured by shelving on top of shelving. It
was a rabbit warren of a building, typical of libraries at the end of their life, with six times as
many books as planned for with stacks all over."
Since the late 1940's, citizens' groups had been talking about the need for a new library. The
school board took action in 1953, selling the high school and library building to the U-M for $1.4
million. (By then the new Ann Arbor High — now Pioneer — was under construction at the corner of
West Stadium and South Main.) The board used the proceeds of the sale to buy the Beal property at
the corner of Fifth and William as the site for a new library, ending nearly a century of close
association between the high school and the public library.
The library remained in the old Carnegie building for a few years after the high school moved
out. It left in 1957, when the new public library on Fifth Avenue was ready for occupancy.
The university remodeled and enlarged the old library and high school building and renamed it the
Henry S. Frieze Building, after a professor of classics who also had served as acting president. In
2004 the university announced plans to build a dormitory on the site.
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Between 1875 and 1945, the city was home to seventeen proprietary hospitals. Ann
Arborites could go to Dr. Cowie for a difficult diagnosis, study nursing with Dr. Peterson, get cuts
stitched by Dr. Gates, and have their babies in Nurse Grove's home.
When Dr. Carl Malcolm Jr. started practicing in Ann Arbor in the 1930's, many patients still
expected him to treat them at home. When he urged them to go to the hospital, Malcolm recalls, "they
thought it was the end of things."
Malcolm's older patients had been born in a time when anything a doctor could do to help he could
do in their homes. As recently as the mid-1800s, hospitals were charity institutions for those who
had no home to be sick in—"refuges mainly for the homeless poor and insane," according to Paul
Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine.
Dr. David Cowie is best remembered today as the instigator of adding iodine to salt to
prevent goiters.
Starr's fascinating medical history explains how, "in a matter of decades, roughly between 1870
and 1910, hospitals moved from the periphery to the center of medical education and medical
practice." A string of breakthroughs, including antisepsis, anesthesia, and X-rays, transformed
surgery from a desperate last resort into a routine medical tool. At first, doctors performed
surgery in people's homes--Elsa Goetz Ordway remembers the family physician operating on her mother
on the dining room table in 1914. But as medical standards rose, more and more doctors preferred to
work in hospitals, which gradually evolved from shelters for the poor and the dying into, in Starr's
words, "doctors' workshops for all types and classes of patients."
Today, Ann Arbor's three huge hospitals--the U-M, St. Joe's, and the VA--together handle more
than a million patient visits every year. But it took a long time to get there. Both the University
of Michigan Hospital (1869) and St. Joseph Mercy Hospital (1911) started out serving mere handfuls
of patients in converted homes. For two generations, they shared the town with numerous small
hospitals owned by individual practitioners.
Between 1875 and 1945, Ann Arbor had at least seventeen "proprietary" hospitals. All were located
in converted houses. Otherwise, they were as different as the personalities and medical specialties
of their owners.
The hospitals' owners included some of the most distinguished physicians in the city. Dr. David
Murray Cowie founded the U-M pediatrics department, cared for patients at the U-M Hospital, and
engaged in extensive research while also running his own hospital in a former mansion on South
Division Street. His colleague Dr. Reuben Peterson, U-M professor of "women's and children's
diseases," established a private medical complex that eventually filled ten buildings on Forest,
Church, and South University. At the other end of the spectrum, nurse Josephine Grove took patients
into her own home on Huron near Revena, caring for them around the clock. And Neil Gates, a
down-to-earth general practitioner, attempted to treat almost every kind of medical ailment, whether
in a patient's home, in his downtown office, or in his hospital on South Fifth Avenue.
Dr. Cowie's exclusive clientele
Dr. David Cowie's sprawling brick mansion at 320 South Division is by far the most impressive
surviving former hospital. In its day, it was also the most prestigious.
Cowie was born in Canada in 1872 to Scottish parents (his obituary called him "as Scotch as
MacGregor"). He came to Michigan in 1892 to attend Battle Creek College but soon transferred to the
U-M, where he graduated from the medical school and was hired as an assistant in internal medicine
in 1896. He earned a second medical degree at the University of Heidelberg in 1908, the year he
married Anna Marion Cook, who was also a doctor, although there is no evidence that she ever
practiced medicine.
When Cowie returned from Germany, he was asked by medical dean George Dock to start a pediatrics
department at the U-M Hospital. He opened his private diagnostic hospital a few years later,
starting out with four rooms on the second floor at 122 North Fourth Avenue.
In 1918, Cowie tripled the number of patients he could serve by buying the home at 320 South
Division built in the mid-1880s for Adelbert Noble, proprietor of the Star Clothing House. Cowie
added on an institutional dining room and kitchen to the back of the house and built a third floor
for additional patient rooms. Set up to provide complete medical and surgical services, the hospital
boasted an automatic elevator, and every room had running water. The nurses wore pink uniforms.
Edith Staebler Kempf, whose in-laws lived next door in what is now the Kempf House Center for
Local History, remembered Cowie Private Hospital as "a hospital for rich women." But according to
the Medical History of Michigan, published in 1930 by the Michigan State Medical Society,
some exceptions were made. The authors wrote of Cowie's "ministration to semi-indigent gentlefolk"
as "a pleasant feature" of the hospital.
Retired surgeon Thurston Thieme sometimes assisted with operations at Cowie's as a U-M intern. He
agrees with Kempf about the high-toned clientele. He remembers setting out the sterilized
instruments for Dr. Frederick Coller, the distinguished chairman of surgery at the U-M, while Coller
complained that the patient should have come to the U-M Hospital for the operation. But according to
Thieme,"Cowie had the best families as patients. He got the necessary doctors to come in."
Cowie attracted patients from all around the state. Dr. Allen Saunders, a local pediatrician who
grew up in Coldwater, remembers that a number of relatives and family friends chose to come to
Cowie's in Ann Arbor rather than be treated locally.
Cowie's prominent patients included Francis Kelsey, U-M professor of Latin and director of Near
East research. Kelsey, for whom the Kelsey Museum was named, was a friend and admirer of Cowie's. In
a 1924 letter to philanthropist Horace Rackham, who underwrote his archaeological work, Kelsey wrote
that his wife, Isabelle was sick but was receiving expert care from Cowie: "I have a friend who is a
scientific physician in charge of a private hospital where obscure cases of her sort are
investigated. She is there now and her case is being studied with the help of the X-ray and other
means of diagnosis." It is not known what Cowie found, but Isabelle Kelsey lived another twenty
years, to the age of eighty-two.
Francis Kelsey was not so lucky. In 1927, he returned from a dig in Egypt in failing health and
immediately checked into Cowie's hospital. Too weak to give the paper on his findings that he had
come home expressly to deliver, he got out of his sick bed to go to the meeting and hear someone
else read it for him. He came back to the hospital and died a few weeks later.
Dr. David Cowie took care of patients in his private hospital at 320 S. Division, now an
apartment building.
Though his hospital was exclusive, Cowie's research ended up benefiting children throughout the
state and the nation. At the time, many children in the Great Lakes region suffered from
goiters--swollen thyroid glands in the neck—due to a lack of iodine in the soil. At Cowie's
suggestion, a state commission was appointed in 1922 to study the problem. Cowie chaired the group,
which first considered adding the iodine to drinking water. When that proved too expensive, they
switched to the idea of adding it to table salt. At their urging, iodized salt was marketed in
Michigan starting in 1924. Before Cowie began his crusade, 35 percent of Detroit school¬children
suffered from goiters. With the introduction of iodized salt, the incidence was reduced to 1.4
percent. The use of iodized salt spread throughout the country and is commonplace today.
Cowie died on January 27, 1940. He became sick while on the way to his cottage in the Irish
Hills, returned to Ann Arbor, and entered his own hospital, where he died of a coronary thrombosis.
"Dr. Cowie's interests extended far beyond the limits of his profession," the Ann Arbor
News wrote. "He was widely read, of broad human sympathies, quiet in demeanor, yet forceful.
Literally hundreds of children owed their lives to his professional knowledge and unusual
sympathetic insight." After Cowie's death, his hospital was divided into apartments, a use it still
Dr. Peterson's medical empire
Like Cowie, Reuben Peterson served people who were willing to pay for better service than was
available in the public hospitals of the time. Thurston Thieme remembers Dr. Peterson's Private
Hospital as "a fine hospital, greatly respected and well known." His patients were all women and
children, some of whom came from other towns and even other states.
For most of its early years, Peterson's hospital was located in a former fraternity house at 620
South Forest. He was so successful that he expanded into surrounding buildings, until he had the
capacity to treat forty patients and train sixteen nurses. His private medical empire eventually
included an annex at 614 Forest; a maternity hospital at 610 Forest; five residences for employees
and nursing students on Forest, Church, and South University; and two hospitals, run for him by
other doctors, at 1216 and 1218 South University.
Peterson was born in Boston in 1862; he received both undergraduate and medical degrees from
Harvard, graduating in 1889. He set up the nurse's training program at St. Mark's Hospital in Grand
Rapids and taught gynecology at Rush Medical School in Chicago before accepting an appointment to
the U-M medical school in 1901. He started his hospital the next year. "The University of Michigan
Hospital contains 225 beds," he wrote to explain the move. "It is full to overflowing the year
around and many patients are compelled to board outside and wait for beds."
Peterson's hospital opened in June 1902 in an old house at 1215 South University. Peterson's
partners, Fantine Pemberton, an early graduate of the new U-M nursing school, and her widowed
mother, Laura Pemberton, rented and furnished the hospital building. Besides serving for many years
as Peterson's superintendent of nursing and matron respectively, the two women also provided
household goods, equipment, and tableware of their own for use in the hospital. A few months later,
the hospital moved to the larger house at 620 Forest.
Peterson ran his own nurse's training program at his hospital. He awarded the first degrees in
1907, the same year he incorporated the school and bought out the Pembertons' interest. (Both women
continued to work for him.) By 1909, he had six nurses in training. In 1912 Peterson set up the
hospital annex and the next year the maternity hospital.
Peterson did not strictly separate his private life from the hospital. In 1910, he installed a
"laundry appliance and mangle" in the basement of the hospital and hired Mary Simons and her husband
for laundry work, with the understanding that they also would do his wife's laundry. (He had
married the former Josephine Davis of Elk Rapids in 1890.) When he used 614 Forest as a home for
nurses, he and Mrs. Peterson furnished it with a piano from their home.
In 1920 Peterson decided to discontinue the nurse's training school, "because of the difficulties
in maintaining a high standard of training under present conditions." Nursing historian Linda
Strodtman explains that "as nursing standards developed, it was not sufficient to just offer women's
care." After 1920, Peterson confined his work to one building, keeping 620 Forest as the hospital
and the house next door at 614 for a nurses' home, and selling or renting the rest of his property.
Shortly after, in 1922, he was promoted to head the ob-gyn department at the U-M medical school.
Clara Schnierle worked at Peterson's hospital from 1928 to 1932 as a cook's helper. She remembers
Peterson as a good man and a good doctor--reserved, but still someone you felt comfortable around.
"He was strict, like everyone in those days," Schnierle recalls. "You did your duties as he wanted;
if you didn't like it, you moved on." Schnierle lived on the third floor of the hospital, which also
contained the operating room. On the second floor there were eight private rooms and a nursery where
the newborns slept in little baskets.
As a boy, book manufacturer Joe Edwards had his tonsils out at Peterson's. Many women were there
for childbirth, but some came with illnesses. According to Schnierle, the patients generally chose
Peterson's so they could have a private room and avoid the medical students at University Hospital.
Maternity patients stayed two weeks, sitting up only after ten days. If they had twins, they stayed
three weeks. Some of the patients hired their own personal nurses. Schnierle remembers a preemie,
born three months early, who was tended by two nurses in twelve-hour shifts. The mother was cared
for by two other private nurses. After three months in the hospital, the baby and mother went home,
accompanied by all four nurses.
Schnierle recalls that Dr. Peterson came by every day, usually in the afternoon, after attending
to his work at the university. He spent every summer, when the university was in recess, at his
summer home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, arranging with other doctors to take care of emergencies and
putting off elective surgery until he returned in the fall.
In 1931, Peterson retired from the university. When Schnierle left to get married in 1932, she
was not replaced because Peterson's hospital was shrinking again. It closed for good the next year
and Peterson moved permanently to Duxbury, where he died on November 25, 1942, at age eighty. His
hospital became a rooming house and later was torn down to make room for the Forest Avenue parking
Nurse Grove's home hospital
Most proprietary hospitals were owned by doctors. But the Grove Cottage Hospital, 1422 West Huron
at Revena, was owned and operated by nurse Josephine Grove and her husband, Otto, who was listed in
the city directory as a traveling salesman.
The Groves turned their home into a hospital in the mid-1920s and ran it until Otto's death in 1934.
Upstairs were two bedrooms for patients (they kept the third bedroom for themselves). Downstairs
another bedroom was available for overflow patients. The upstairs bathroom served visiting doctors
as an operating room. Mrs. Grove herself cared for her patients around the clock.
Most of Grove's patients were referred by a neighbor, Dr. John Gates, who lived at 201 South
Revena. Many were women giving birth. Helen Wolf Curtis remembers that her brother was born at the
Grove Cottage Hospital in 1927. Her family lived at 110 South Revena, so when her mother, Lucy Wolf,
went into labor, she just walked down the street. After Dr. Peterson's hospital closed, his former
employee, Clara Schnierle, chose to have her first child at Grove's. She explains that in those days
people differed on whether to have their babies at home or in the hospital. Schnierle and her
husband decided they would rather have the first one in a hospital, so their physician, John Gates,
recommended the Grove Cottage Hospital. Schnierle remembers Mrs. Grove as "very pleasant, very
Sophie Walker, who lived nearby at 330 South Seventh, had her baby at Grove's hospital in 1928,
not with Dr. Gates, but with another doctor, whom she chose because he spoke German. She had come
from Germany just two years before. She liked Grove's hospital because it was like a private home,
but she has a sad memory of the patient in the other room crying after giving birth: she wasn't
married and was giving up her baby for adoption.
Maternity was not the only service offered. When Helen Wolf Curtis was a girl, she fell off the
front stoop and broke her arm, and Dr. John Gates set it. Eleven years later, in 1929, she had the
plate taken out at Grove's hospital, and while she was there she also had her tonsils and adenoids
out. She remembers the hospital as "a wonderful place, not very plush but neat and clean."
Dr. John Gates's elder brother, Neil, was also a doctor, a well-loved general practitioner. But
according to his grandson Jeff Rentschler, he struggled financially until he bought his own
Gates's hospital at 314 South Fifth Avenue (now the parking lot of the Federal Building)
exemplified a general practitioner's proprietary hospital. Neil Gates was the classic GP--he made
house calls even in the worst weather, never took vacations (another grandson, David Gates,
remembers him saying, "I'll take a vacation on the day nobody gets sick"), and was rarely allowed to
sleep through the night. He smoked cigars constantly; people said they didn't recognize him without
one. His niece Janet Ivory remembers him coming to her house when she was sick as a little girl.
"When I smelled the cigar smoke, I felt better because I knew he was there. I knew I would get
Gates was born in Ann Arbor in 1873, the son of contractor John Gates and Dora McCormick Gates.
He graduated from the U-M medical school in 1897 and started his career in Dexter. In about 1900 he
built the Gates Block there as an office and infirmary (it is now occupied by insurance and real
estate offices). Ten years later he moved to Ann Arbor and opened an office at 117 East Liberty, but
he still kept up his large rural practice.
In the early days, Gates made house calls in a horse and buggy. In later years, his daughter,
Lois Gates Rentschler, would drive him, often taking her son, Jeff, along. Jeff and his mother would
usually stay in the car or walk around outside, but he has one memory of going inside the house of
an elderly women in Dexter and eating homemade graham crackers with butter in front of her
wood-burning stove.
During the flu epidemic of 1918, Gates ministered heroically to his rural patients. The epidemic hit
Ann Arbor in the fall, but didn't get out into the country until the winter. Gates usually made
winter visits in a one-horse sleigh that he drove himself, but during the epidemic he hired a
two-horse wagon and a driver so that he could sleep between visits. During the terrible epidemic,
which claimed 548,000 lives nationwide, it was the only rest he got.
Gates made a lot of his own medicine using natural materials--plants, weeds, bark, fungus-—that
he mashed with a pestle. For refined ingredients, he dealt exclusively with Fischer's Pharmacy.
David Gates remembers that his grandfather carried three or four bags filled with all sorts of
medicines, including some sugar pills he gave to people with imagined illnesses.
The Ann Arbor Railroad tracks ran right behind Gates's house at 440 South Main. When he was at
home, his wife would put a scarf on the pole of the bird-house in the backyard, so the train crews
could stop if they had a medical problem. They would toot their whistle and Gates would come out to
take a cinder out of an eye, treat a burn, set a broken arm, or help a passenger with motion
Despite all his business, Gates for many years didn't make much money. David Gates remembers that
his grandparents had a monster icebox and a big pantry, usually filled with eggs, chickens, and
whatever produce was in season, contributed by patients who couldn't afford to pay in cash. But Jeff
Rentschler says their grandfather did much better after he started his own hospital in 1924.
The hospital Gates bought was an old Queen Anne house on South Fifth Avenue, built about 1895,
complete with tower and wraparound front porch. In 1906, U-M medical professor Cyrenus Darling had
converted it into a hospital with its own operating room and eight private patient rooms. In 1911,
Darling became one of eight founding staff doctors at St. Joe's, which started out in a former
rooming house on the corner of State and Kingsley. For a few years Darling worked at both hospitals,
but in 1916 he decided to concentrate on St. Joe's. The hospital was run by James and Muriel McLaren
as "Maplehurst" until Dr. Gates bought it 1924.
Gates modernized the hospital by adding an X-ray facility, a second operating room (used mainly
for delivering babies), and two wards, raising its capacity to twenty-eight patients. In his book
Historic Michigan, George Fuller called Gates's hospital "one of the most complete and
up-to-date of the many privately owned institutions of its kind in the United States."
As in his office and rural practice, Gates continued to treat whatever needs his patients had,
although he had a reputation for being particularly good at stitching. W. H. Priestkorn went there
as a boy to have his appendix out. Nate Weinberg's mother was operated on for pleurisy. Sam Schlect
remembers someone he knew being stitched up by Dr. Gates after a Fourth of July explosion slashed
his cheek.
Gates had a lot of maternity business. Mary Schlect, Sam's wife, gave birth to their daughter
there in 1943. Sam was in the army, so she came with her neighbor, Gladys Waters, who also was
pregnant, and stayed in a three-bed ward. She remembers that the fee was $110, reduced to $100 if
paid in cash. Election worker Bev Kirsht, who was born in Gates's hospital, reports that her father,
George Lirette, was in the delivery room both for her birth and that of her sister. Years later, the
Lamaze Association would have to fight local hospitals for this privilege, but Gates was ahead of
his time on the issue. He routinely told the men, "Go out and take off your tie and jacket and come
back in. It's your baby, too." David Gates believes there was a large influx of babies named "Neil"
from the Gates's hospital—he says that when his grandfather delivered a boy he would hold him up
and say, "If you don't know what to name him, name him 'Neil.' "
Gates never retired. During World War II he was able to continue his usual rural calls, thanks to
a special permit that enabled him to buy gasoline and hard-to-obtain tires, both rationed. He was
also issued extra ration coupons to buy food for the patients in his hospital.
Dr. Gates died July 16, 1945. By then, his was the last surviving private hospital in the city.
The rest had slowly died out, unable to compete with St. Joe's, which had built a big hospital on
Ingalls in 1913, and the U-M, which had built a large modern hospital in 1925.
Of all hospitals, Paul Starr writes, the proprietary hospitals' "rate of institutional survival
was the lowest. In this regard they were typical of small businesses; they opened and closed with
the vicissitudes of personal fortune." Ann Arbor's experience bears this out. None of the hospitals
survived their owners. After Gates's death, his hospital was converted to a rooming house. The
turreted building was torn down in 1973 to make room for the Federal Building.
Proprietary Hospitals
The following list of proprietary hospitals and the doctors who owned them was compiled from the
City Directory and from people's memories.
Ann Arbor Sanitarium and Private Hospital, Dr. James Lynds, 403 S. Fourth Ave. (now Muehlig's
Funeral Chapel)
Ann Arbor Private Hospital, Mrs. Margaret Kelly, proprietor, Huron near First, then 1129 Washtenaw
Bethel Faith Home, Mrs. Augusta Whitlark, matron, 126 Observatory
Dr. William Blair, 311 S. Division St.
Burrett-Smith, Dr. Cyrus Burrett and Dr. Dean T. Smith, first at 721 E. Washington, then at 416 S.
Fifth Ave.
Classen Private Hospital, Dr. Carrie Classen, osteopath, 429 Hamilton Place
Cowie Private Hospital, Dr. David M. Cowie, 320 S. Division St.
Curtrest Maternity Home and Hospital, Mrs. Severine C. Curtiss, 1100 E. Huron St.
Dr. Neil Gates, 314 S. Fifth Ave.
Grove Cottage Hospital, Josephine and Otto Grove, 1422 W. Huron St.
Herdman's Private Hospital, Dr. William James Herdman, 709 W. Huron St.
Institute of Ozonotherapy, R. M. Leggett, manager, 120 N. Fourth Ave.
Maplehurst, James and Muriel McLaren, first at 314 S. Fifth Ave., then at 822 Arch
Dr. Katherine Martin, 120 N. Fourth Ave.
Dr. Peterson's Private Hospital, Dr., Reuben Peterson, 620 S. Forest Ave.
Washtenaw Private Hospital, also known as Dr. Cummings's Private Hospital, Dr. Howard Cummings, 216
N. State St.
Vreeland Maternity Home, Mrs.Velva C. Vreeland, 315 W. Mosley
[Photo caption from book]: Dr. Rueben
Peterson, standing by his wife's roses, ran a hospital for women and children that also served as
a nurse's training school.
[Photo caption from book]: Dr. Neil Gates ran the city's last private
hospital at 314 S. Fifth. Unable to keep up with advances at public hospitals, it closed after his
death in 1945 and was torn down in 1973.
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