The Nieman-Marcus of Ann Arbor

Urged by Elsa Goetz Ordway, for years we have intended to do a piece on Mack & Company, the big department store that once occupied four floors covering the larger part of the west side of Main Street between Liberty and Washington, from the sites of the present-day DeFord's department store to the Parthenon.

Mack & Company was Ann Arbor's counterpart to downtown Detroit's big J.L. Hudson store. It sold everything from furniture and carpets to cosmetics and lingerie, from dry goods to insurance, from health food to postage stamps. It had its own pharmacy. And it even had its own bank. Weakened by the Depression, Mack & Company finally closed in 1940. Its story would die out with the last generation of old Ann Arbor who remembered it, Mrs. Ordway feared. Thanks to the energetic investigations of Grace Shackman, who talked with twenty Mack & Company employees and patrons, we are happy to have finally produced this piece.

The history of Mack & Company, like the history of most major Main Street retail stores and banks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is closely connected with Ann Arbor's large German community. The store's founder, Christian Mack, immigrated from the region of Swabia in the kingdom of Wuerttemburg, where most Ann Arbor Germans are from. He worked in John Maynard's dry goods store for five years before starting his own business at the age of twenty-three. Three years later, in 1860, he formed a partnership with his brother-in-law, Frederick Schmid, Jr. Schmid was the son of Pastor Schmid of the Bethlehem Church, the first German-language minister in Michigan. Mack & Schmid, like many downtown stores back then, sold a big variety of merchandise including yard goods, crockery, carpets, and groceries. In 1881 it was the first Ann Arbor store to replace its wooden sidewalks with stone ones.

Both Mack and Schmid were active in business and civic affairs, as would be expected, and both were deacons at Zion Lutheran Church. Schmid was president of Ann Arbor Piano and Organ, the factory founded by David Allmendinger. Mack served on the school board for twenty-five years and had an elementary school named in his honor two decades after his death. In 1895 Schmid left the firm. Christian Mack's youngest son, Walter, became a part owner, and the store was incorporated as Mack & Company.

Walter Mack had joined the store as a clerk, but soon "his natural abilities manifested themselves and demanded recognition," according to the quaint but not entirely straightforward write-up in Past and Present of Washtenaw County, a 1906 publication which described prominent citizens who agreed to underwrite the cost of publication. Some employees remember Walter Mack as charming; others considered him condescending and unfair. He was at the top of a clearly ordered store hierarchy, with clerks at the bottom, going up to department heads, to floor managers, and finally "the boss." Former employees agree that his word was law and also that he was careful with money. Some idolized him, while others could not stand him. Some complain that he gave preferential treatment to favorites and that he refused to pay for overtime. But others loved the store, working there for years, even during the worst years of the Depression when they were no longer paid salaries, just commissions. Because Mack was willing to hire young people, many have fond memories of the store as their first place of employment. Also, women could find work there in a day when few jobs were open to women.

The high-caliber employees were what many customers remember about Mack & Company. Many were already specialists in their fields when hired; others were trained to be. In the Schwaben Verein building on Ashley, where Mack had warehouse space linked by hovered ramps, regular classes were held to demonstrate new products and to give pep talks on being nice to customers. In those days Ann Arbor was small enough that most customers were known by name. The store altered garments and offered free delivery and even free pick-up for items purchased on approval which customers wished to return. The wagons and horses used for deliveries until after World War One were housed in the building on Washington at First, which was erected in the 1840's for Bethlehem Church.

One of the best-remembered salespeople was Myrtle Dusty, who ran the art department. She taught many Ann Arborites to knit. Another favorite was Mary Rogers of the sheet music department, who often demonstrated pieces on the piano. Music teacher Geraldine Seeback remembers going there as a child and singing the songs being played as a crowd gathered round. Many of the store's employees later started businesses of their own, notably Mae Van Buren, who ran the corset department; Walter Mast of the shoe department; and Charles Hutzel and Guersey Collins, both of women's ready-to-wear.

Mack & Company went all-out for special events. Many longtime Ann Arborites like Ted Heusel recall the store's outstanding toy department. Christmas featured a real Christmas tree on a revolving music-box stand and Santa Claus, played year after year by Grandpa Brooks, the bewhiskered elevator operator. Two or three times a year fashion shows presented the latest styles, especially those from the store's exclusive "French Shop." Big-name bands were hired for them, and once Walter Mack paid five hundred dollars for a woman to come from New York to coach the models, who were always selected from among the prettiest employees. At these shows Mrs. Mack, a Southern belle from Kentucky who lived a reclusive life in the Macks' big house on Haven Street, was the guest of honor, smiling at the models as they made their appearances.

Mr. Mack spent much of each year at his cottage on Whitmore Lake, where he raised dogs and gladioli. The glads, planted by the acre, were sometimes used for decoration at the store. After World War One Mr. Mack employed many German refugees, using them in the store as painters, custodians, drivers for the delivery trucks, and as chauffeurs. They also worked at keeping up the grounds at Whitmore Lake and in digging up, dividing, and replanting the gladioli bulbs.

During the Depression years Walter Mack struggled valiantly to keep his store afloat, employees recall, but as sales went down, he no longer could afford to replenish the stock, so sales decreased even further. He tried renting out on a commission basis departments such as furniture, rugs, and china, but the new operators could not do any better. By 1939 the store was in too bad a financial shape to continue, and Mr. Mack announced that he was "quitting business forever, and everything must be sold to the bare walls in the shortest time possible." Chauncey Ray tried running the store for another year as Mack, Inc. but did not succeed, either.

In the last years of his life, Walter Mack continued to run the insurance business which had once been a small part of his big department store. Since he had rented out the rest of the building on Main at Liberty, the owners of the Liberty Inn let him enter his second-floor office through their restaurant. Mr. Mack died in 1942 with almost no money and his store only a memory.

Many former Mack employees were interviewed for this article: bundle girls Eleanor Snow, Fern Braun Shaffer (who later worked in the approval office), and Mabel Marie Seyfried Sager (who was an occasional model as well); ribbon department manager Rowena Schmid; elevator operator Don Hough; Elsa Weber St. Clair, who did alterations and made draperies from scratch, including some extremely large ones for the Michigan League; Elizabeth Maier and Betty Smith in cosmetics and drugs; Elsie Feldkamp and Agnes Wright, basement clerks; window trimmer Frank Pardon; Helen Rice, office; Alfred Graf, carpenter; Erma Jahnke, the cashier in the "cage" on the mezzanine; and Gertrude Druyoer, who woked in the commission furniture department after Walter Mack left the store. Former customers Edith Staebler Kempf, Louella Weinman, and Geraldine Seeback were also contacted.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: In 1905 Made & Company occupied five storefronts on Main 'Street just north of Liberty. "The Leading Furniture and Carpet House," proclaimed a large sign on the south side. (Top right) In 1899 fire destroyed an earlier location of Mack & Company on the southwest corner of Main at Liberty. (Above) The present-day site of the old Mack & Company. The store extended from the corner of Main and Liberty through part of the site of DeFord's.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: 85 store employees posed for this 1924 group portrait in the meeting rooms of the Schwaben Verein on Ashley. (Inset) Walter C. Mack, store president.

When the Ann Arbor Central Mills on First Street opened in 1882, the increased use of farm machinery, especially the thresher, made wheat growing so profitable that over a million bushels a year were being grown in Washtenaw County. This mill exported flour to New England, the Midwest, the South, and even abroad. It operated from 1882 to 1927, spanning some of Washtenaw County's best and worst years for agriculture.

The property, originally the site of a brewery, still has the basement tunnel vaults which were used to store and age the beer. G.F. Hauser's City Brewery first occupied the site, which was next to Allen's Creek, in 1860. By 1868 it was called John Reyer's City Brewery and in 1872, the Ekhardt Bros. Brewery. The brewery property was probably chosen as the mill site in 1882 because of its location beside the Ann Arbor Railroad tracks, which had been laid only four years earlier. Much flour was shipped by rail, and in later years Ann Arbor Implement, the building's present occupant, used the train to transport farm implements.

The Central Mills' principal owner, Robert Ailes, retired in 1884. He sold his interest to his two partners, G. Frank Allmendinger and Cottlieb Schneider. The 1884 Industrial Census records that the mill employed twelve men, who worked twelve hours a day each, except for one minor, who worked ten. By 1894 three more employees had been hired. The salaries ($1.25 to $1.87 a day) were enough for a working man to buy a house on.

Allmendinger was the partner with marketing and financial connections. A U-M graduate in engineering, he belonged to the big Allmendinger clan, descended from early (circa 1830) German pioneers to Ann Arbor. Organ manufacturer David F. Allmendinger was his cousin. A leader in many other organizations, ranging from the Farmers' and Mechanics' Bank and the Michigan Bean Jobbers' Association to the University School of Music and the First Congregational Church, Allmendinger was active in city and county Republican politics. He ran for mayor and lost by one vote, and he led a successful fight to prevent Felch Park (in front of the present-day Power Center) from being sold to private developers. Allmendinger's impressive home on South Main is now the American Legion hall. Nearby Pauline Street is named after his wife.

Schneider was the operations half of the Central Mills team. A German native, he had farmed and had worked in other mills. He lived just around the corner at 402 West Liberty, in the house next to The Moveable Feast. Edith Kempf, who grew up across the street, remembers that the neighbors called him Mr. "Miller" Schneider to differentiate him from Emanuel Schneider, a plumber who lived on the corner. In later years some of his customers thought his name really was Mr. Miller. Schneider dressed as his workers did, in one-piece washable denim overalls, which by day's end were covered with flour. Arthur Reiff remembers Schneider as a man uniformly good natured and always friendly to farmers. Reiff's farmer father used to bring wheat and grain to the mill. He would trade the wheat for flour, taking back the leftover middlings and bran to feed his livestock. The grain, mainly oats and corn, was also used as feed. It was ground in a device that was something like a big coffee grinder. In addition to regular flour the mill sold graham flour, rye flour, granulated meal, and buckwheat flour. It also had a cooperage that made flour barrels, usually for a hundred pounds of flour.

The 1896 Headlight magazine promoting Ann Arbor boasted that the Central Mills probably had Michigan's most complete milling equipment, including a steel roller system. Steam-powered steel rollers had been replacing water-driven millstones in the 1880's because they were more efficient and easier to control. The Central Mills had had rollers since 1884, if not earlier. No record of a water-driven millstone exists.

About 1900 the present brick building replaced the earlier wood structure. Actually, it appears the original wood frame was kept and brick walls were added. The vaulted basement tunnels were used to store vinegar and possibly wine from the Ann Arbor Fruit and Vinegar Company, another Allmendinger and Schneider business just across the tracks. In 1902 the company was consolidated with two other Ann Arbor mills to form the Michigan Milling Company. Allmendinger was secretary-treasurer and Schneider the plant supervisor.

As the years went by, Washtenaw's wheat became less competitive. Flour consumption decreased due to Americans' changed eating habits. Vast wheat fields opened on the Great Plains and grew hard wheat (preferred for bread) as well as the soft wheat grown in Michigan. By 1910 the county's wheat production was a third of what it had been in 1880. By the end of World War One the mill was operating at a loss. It kept going until 1927, but flour milling stopped soon after 1925, when Gottlieb Schneider died. Only feed was ground after that.

In 1929 Ernie Lohr, owner of a farm implement store on South Ashley, bought the building and continued using it as a feed store. He remodeled it in 1939 and moved in his implement business, now run by his son, Paul, and grandson, Fred. Big farm implements like tractors, combines, and milking machines have given way to lawn and garden supplies, chain saws, and the like.

Many reminders of the old mill survive. Painted exterior signs still advertise the firm's products. The vaults now house large lawn tractors and display the Lohrs' collection of antique farm implements, which visitors may see upon request. The original Central Mills safe may be seen next door at The Blind Pig cafe, which had been the old mill's office. Today the safe stores wine, not money.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Viewed from the railroad tracks, the back of the old mill buildings looks much as it did around the turn of the century.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Diagram (circa 1880) of a roller mill, showing the steel rollers that crush the grain as it falls from floor to floor. Steam-driven roller mills like these gradually replaced water-powered mills and their mill wheels.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Old flour bags from the Michigan Milling Company (which operated the First Street mills). "Every kernel sterilized " is the legend on MIMICO golden corn meal.