Most Washtenaw County towns were founded because of the potential water power nearby. Chelsea, in contrast, owes its existence to the early arrival of the Michigan Central Railroad. When the Michigan Central passed through Sylvan Township in 1841 on its way from Detroit to Chicago, the present site of Chelsea consisted of four small hamlets, each of which had been started in the 1830's. The largest one was Pierceville, founded by Nathan Pierce at the current intersection of M-52 and Old US-12. (Pierce's house can still be seen at 14300 Old US-12.) On the north side of present-day Chelsea, in Lima Township, Nathan's brother Darius had started a town he called Kedron, after a river in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, two other brothers, Elisha and James Congdon, had settled on plots facing each other on either side of the present Main Street. The Congdons, who hailed from Chelsea Landing, Connecticut, called their settlement Chelsea and eventually convinced Darius Pierce to adopt the name for his hamlet, too. In 1848 the railroad built a small station about a mile west of what is now downtown Chelsea. When this station burned down, the Congdons offered free land to the railroad for a new station. In 1850 Michigan Central took them up on their offer, a decision that guaranteed Chelsea's primacy. The same year, Chelsea became a post office, its first store opened, and the Congdons' land was platted. The businesses in the other settlements soon moved into what is now downtown Chelsea. Thanks to the railroad, Chelsea grew and thrived. By 1881, according to Chapman's county history, Chelsea was the largest produce market in the county, shipping grain, apples, stock, and meat, and the largest wool shipper in the state. "With the exception of a day of exceedingly dubious weather. Main and Middle Streets are thronged with farmers' teams," Chapman wrote, "and the stores of these thorough-fares crowded with customers." In 1891, Frank Glazier, son of Chelsea banker George Glazier, started manufacturing oil heating and cooking stoves in two buildings on Main Street. After a disastrous fire, he rebuilt on land north of the railroad station. He built on a grand scale, and the stove works' red-brick clock tower remains Chelsea's best-known landmark. Also active in politics, Glazier rose to become state treasurer, but was forced to resign in 1907, when it was revealed that he had deposited state money in his own bank and had pledged the same stove company stock as collateral for loans all over the state. His company went bankrupt, and Glazier served two years in prison for misusing state funds before returning to Chelsea to live out his life on Cavanaugh Lake. Until ten years ago, Chelsea still had a small-town feel, with the stores on Main Street serving residents' everyday needs. But with the opening of a shopping center at M-52 and Old US-12, downtown stores started moving there, returning full circle to the original site of Pierceville. Almost overnight, downtown Chelsea became a more upscale regional shopping and entertainment area: The Common Grill restaurant replaced Dancer's, the quintessential small-town clothing store, and local son Jeff Daniels opened his excellent new theater, the Purple Rose.

Bridge to the Nineteenth Century: Can Bell Road's span be saved?

The Bell Road Bridge in Dex­ter Township is on the Na­tional Register of Historic Places. The plaque so designating it, however, is sitting in neighbor Bill Klinke's garage—because for twelve years the nineteenth-century "iron through-truss bridge" has been rust­ing away on the banks of the Huron River. As the Bell Road Bridge lies there, overgrown with brush and poison ivy, it seems impossible that it could ever rise up out of the muck again. Yet citizen efforts have already saved two similar bridges downstream.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Huron River was spanned with iron bridges at ev­ery mill town—including Dexter, Scio (at Zeeb Road), Osborne Mill (at Tubbs Road), and Geddesburg (near present-day Washtenaw Community Col­lege)—as well as in Ann Arbor and Yp-silanti. Another iron bridge crossed the River Raisin in Manchester.

The bridges came in kits, like giant Erector sets, the pieces sent by rail. Locals assembled them and rolled them on logs down to the river to place on abutments made by local stonemasons. They were a lot better than wooden bridges that needed continual upkeep.

Iron truss bridges, patented by broth­ers Thomas and Caleb Pratt in 1844, are supported by a series of iron triangles held together with iron pins. A "through-truss" bridge has a top section that helps hold up the sides. "These old bridges supported more weight than you would think," says Richard Cook, who helped save the Delhi Bridge downstream of Dexter. "They car­ried not just horses and wagons but heavy steam-powered agricultural equipment."

In 1832 Samuel Dexter, the founder of Dexter, and Isaac Pomeroy built a sawmill a mile below Portage Lake. A later owner added a gristmill, and the hamlet of Do­ver grew up around it. At its peak it had a church, a hotel, a store, a blacksmith shop, several dozen houses, and a post office. A drawing in the 1874 County Atlas shows a wooden bridge across the Huron there. But by the time an iron bridge was installed in 1891, the village was waning; Dover's post office was torn down the next year. The bridge was named after John Bell, whose farm was across the river. By 1915 Dover no longer appeared on maps.

The other surviving bridges also served mill towns. Samuel Foster, a miller from Massachusetts, answered Dexter's invita­tion to work at his mill in Dexter. Eventual­ly Foster started his own mill downstream, where Zeeb Road crosses the Huron; the village of Scio grew around it. Foster later built a second mill downstream at Maple Road. The settlement there, originally named Newport, became Foster's Station but was never very big. There was an iron bridge there as early as 1876.

Another iron bridge was built in 1888 at Delhi. At its peak this village, founded in 1831, was a railroad stop with five mills, a school, and a post office. The last mill was dismantled in 1906, and the stones from the mills spilled into the river, forming the rapids that are now the main attraction at Delhi Metropark.

During the twentieth century, the iron bridges disappeared one by one from the Huron, until only three were left— Bell Road Bridge, the Del­hi Bridge, and the bridge at old Foster's Station, now known as the Maple/Foster Bridge.

In 1992 the Bell Road Bridge closed for awhile after a drunk driver ran into a post. It reopened with a load limit of four tons, which made it impassable for garbage trucks, school buses, delivery vehicles, and fire engines. Its abutments were crum­bling, and in 1995 the Washtenaw County Road Commission put the replacement of the Bell Road Bridge on its wish list for the state's Critical Bridge Fund. Admin­istered by the Michigan Department of Transportation, the fund covers almost all the cost of repairing or replacing failing bridges. In a typical CBF project, the local government pays just 5 percent of the bill; 15 percent comes from the state and 80 percent from the federal government.

The road commission wanted to re­place the narrow iron bridge with a two-lane concrete span. Neighbors pushed in­stead to repair the old bridge, arguing that it was good enough for a small rural road, and that emergency vehicles could cross the river on North Territorial Road a mile south. They attended road commission, township, and county meetings, gathered hundreds of petition signatures, and got the National Register designation.

Eventually the road commission agreed not to replace the bridge. But in 1997 the bridge was taken down; its abutments were so weak that it was feared a spring flood might wash it away. It's been sitting on the riverbank ever since.

Three years later the same is­sues arose downriver, when the road commission decid­ed the Maple/Foster Bridge was unsafe and needed to be replaced with a bigger, stroriger span that could carry emergency vehicles and school buses. Again, neighbors ral­lied. They formed the Citizens for Foster Bridge Conservancy and raised more than $40,000 to hire an engineering firm. It re­ported that repairing the bridge was feasi­ble, though costly. Barton Hills, northeast of the bridge, offered to put in $250,000 from an escrow fund built up over years of refunds from state road repair money. (Barton Hills is a private village, and it pays for its own street repairs).

In 2003 the road commission spent five months repairing the bridge—replac­ing the timber deck, improving guardrails, and installing cable to strengthen the sides. Roy Townsend, the road commission's di­rector of engineering, estimates the total cost was about $800,000, so the road com­mission paid about $550,000.

Two years later, the Delhi Bridge was closed by the road commission as unsafe. Because the abutments needed much work, the cost of renovating the bridge would be even greater than for Maple/Foster—and there were fewer neighbors with deep pockets like the residents of Barton Hills. Still, a citizens group, the East Delhi Road Conservancy, raised $50,000 from the Kellogg Foundation and $10,000 from in­dividual donations and sales of lemonade and T-shirts.

An engineering study, paid for jointly by the road commission, Scio Township, and the conservancy, showed that the bridge was in good enough shape to reha­bilitate—if money could be found to do so. Then the conservancy discovered that Critical Bridge Fund money could legally be used to restore historic bridges. Al­though MOOT agreed, the road commis­sion was leery, joining the effort only after state representative Pam Byrnes convened a meeting with all the stakeholders.

In September 2005, when the Delhi Bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the way was paved for repairing it with CBF money. With 95 per­cent of the cost covered by the federal and state government, the road commission agreed to put up half of the local contribu­tion; the other half was split between the Delhi Road Conservancy and Scio Town­ship. When the cost of the projected repair ballooned to $1.2 million, Huron-Clinton Metroparks chipped in $15,000.

The last hurdle, paying for the upkeep, was cleared when the bridge activists gath­ered enough signatures to ask the township to form an assessment district. About 120 nearby properties will pay around $30 a year to help maintain the bridge.

For further protection, the group got the county to establish an East Delhi Bridge Historic District, encompassing just the bridge itself. This designation ensures that the bridge may not be changed or moved without permission of the county's historic district commission.

"It was a grind," admits Cook. "It took a couple of years, endless meetings, and beat­ing our heads against the wall." But he adds, "Very few get saved. We're very happy."

In fact, according to Townsend, this was the first bridge in Michigan to utilize CBF money for a historic rehabilitation. Because it was historic, the state waived the requirement that the bridge have two lanes. Instead, a traffic light will be put up, perhaps on side poles to make it less ob­trusive. The bridge is scheduled to reopen in June.

Only five Pratt through-truss bridges survive in Michi­gan, and three of them are in Washtenaw County. The restored bridges at Foster and Delhi are the only two still in use in their original locations. The fate of the third, the Bell Road Bridge, remains uncertain.

The cost of saving the bridge hasn't been calculated, but it won't be cheap— Townsend says the abutments would have to be replaced. If it ended up costing $1 million—halfway between what was spent at Foster and at Delhi—then the lo­cal 5 percent match would be $50,000.

Cathy VanVoorhis, one of the leaders of the Bell Road group, is still hopeful. She says that the bridge isn't in bad shape-that most of the rust is on the parts attached to move it, and that it's easier to work with on the ground. "It's not abandoned," she says. "It's a project sitting there waiting for funding."

Dexter Township supervisor Pat Kelly says she wants the bridge saved, but "it's not likely to be rehabilitated anytime soon. In these economic times, there is no way." Meanwhile, Bill Klinke is keeping the bridge's historic plaque safe and dry. "It was the least I could do," he says. "I was hoping someday someone would call and say, 'Let's put it up.'"

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: A 1936 photo of the Delhi Bridge in its prime; in contrast, the Bell Road Bridge sits unused and rusting, and its historic plaque is in a neighbor's garage.

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: A $250,000 contribution by Barton Hills helped save the Maple-Foster bridge, an important route into the village.

During World War II, the Ypsilanti factory became a worldwide symbol of American industrial might. To get it built, Charlie Sorensen had to overcome red tape from Washington, skepticism from the aircraft industry, and his own quixotic boss, Henry Ford.

Ann Arbor High senior Don Exinger spent the summer of 1941 working on a farm east of Ypsilanti. Named Camp Willow Run, after the creek that wound through its woods and gently rolling fields, it belonged to auto pioneer Henry Ford. Ford was determined to instill his own work ethic in the teenaged campers: they slept in army tents and were roused at 5:30 a.m. to attend church services before breakfast and a hard day's work in the fields.

But even as Exinger's group planted and reaped, bulldozers were leveling Camp Willow Run's woodlot. By the next summer, the first of a corps of 50,000 factory workers were crowding out Ford's youthful campers. Two years after that, new B-24 Liberator bombers were pouring out of the Ford Willow Run plant at the rate of one each hour, headed for battle in the European or Pacific theaters.

Then, almost as quickly as it began, it was over: fifty years ago, on June 24, 1945, the farm-turned-factory completed its last bomber and halted production.

At the outbreak of World War II, Henry Ford was an elderly, unpredictable man riddled with contradictions. Decades earlier, he had been far ahead of his time in paying workers at the unheard-of rate of $5 a day. Now he was threatening to close down Ford Motor Company rather than accept workers' efforts to unionize. He was often spiteful toward his only son, Edsel, although he doted on his four grandchildren. At first loath to build weapons for a conflict he believed to be driven by a conspiracy of moneyed interests, he ended up as one of World War II's most prolific arms makers.

Ford abandoned his stand against the war when the Nazis swarmed across Europe in May 1940. But at first he insisted that his weapons be used only to defend the United States. In June, he vetoed a contract Edsel had negotiated to manufacture Rolls-Royce aircraft engines under license, because most of the engines were destined for England. A few months later, the elder Ford accepted a contract to build 4,000 Pratt & Whitney engines for U.S. aircraft.

In January 1941, Ford executives were invited to visit Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego, California, in the hope that the company might expand its involvement in aircraft production. Henry Ford had made it clear that he wasn't interested in collaborating with any aviation company, but Edsel made the fateful journey anyway, accompanied by Ford manufacturing boss Charles Sorensen.

Sorensen had begun his Ford career in 1905 as a $3-a-day pattern maker. The Danish immigrant was Hollywood-handsome, with a commanding presence, piercing blue eyes, and swept-back blond hair. Associates admired his quick mind as much as they feared his hot temper. Though little known compared to his publicity-hungry boss, Sorensen was Ford Motor Company's top manufacturing expert.

The Ford executives were polite to their hosts, but Sorensen in particular was unimpressed by the methods Consolidated was using to produce its B-24 Liberator bomber. There were no blueprints or accurate measuring tools. Major components were custom fit, so each plane was different from the next. Final assembly took place outside in the California sun. In his memoirs Sorensen observed sourly, "What I saw reminded me of the way we built cars at Ford 35 years earlier."

Sorensen knew that the assembly line method he had perfected in building more than thirty million Ford automobiles could easily eclipse Consolidated's modest goal of one airplane per day. When asked how he would manufacture the B-24, Sorensen replied confidently, "I'll have something for you tomorrow morning."

He wasn't kidding. He sequestered himself in his Coronado Hotel room, and by 4 a.m. the next day, he had sketched out the plan that became Willow Run. Working solely from figures he carried in his head, Sorensen estimated that it would take 100,000 workers and a $200 million plant to meet his goal of delivering one finished airplane every hour.

Over breakfast the next morning, Edsel Ford pledged his full support for Sorensen's bold stroke. George Mead, the government's director of procurement, was delighted, but Major Reuben Fleet, Consolidated's president, wasn't convinced. His counteroffer: a contract for Ford to build just 1,000 wing sections. Sorensen flatly replied, "We'll make the complete airplane or nothing."

Back home in Dearborn, Sorensen explained his scheme to Henry Ford. First he got an antiwar lecture, then a diatribe on how General Motors, the Du Fonts, and President Roosevelt were conspiring to drag the country into war and take over Ford's business. But in the end the cranky Henry agreed to the plan.

With little more than a letter of intent from the government, an army of Ford laborers set to work in a frenzy. Late in March 1941, 300 men with saws, axes, and bulldozers attacked the 100-acre woodlot where the plant would be situated. A steam-powered sawmill was brought in from Greenfield Village, Henry Ford's outdoor museum, to convert the felled trees to 400,000 board feet of lumber.

The fields were cleared for construction of the plant, designed by renowned Detroit architect Albert Kahn. Tool designers and other engineers were dispatched to San Diego to learn everything they could about building B-24's. Tool and die maker Martin Chapin traveled to San Diego with the first wave of 240 Ford personnel. "Consolidated had built and assembled aircraft for generations, and they thought our innovations were almost sacrilegious," he recalls, "They built airplanes with plumb bobs and levels, while we were used to sophisticated fixtures and gauges."

Ford engineers were particularly amazed by Consolidated's design fora landing-gear pivot. It was assembled out of half a dozen pieces of steel, a couple of large tubes, and some flat plates, all held together by nearly a hundred welds, each of which had to be X-rayed. Back in Dearborn, the inevitable conclusion was that Consolidated had never engineered the B-24 for high-volume production. Ford engineers reduced the landing-gear pivot to just three large castings.

Nine hundred men and women worked night and day seven days a week to design the critical tooling. More than 30,000 metal stamping dies—equivalent to eight or nine car model changeovers—were ultimately required to manufacture the bomber's 1,225,000 parts.

On April 18, 1941, five weeks after receiving an initial $3.4 million contract to build B-24 subassemblies, Ford broke ground for the plant. It was dedicated less than two months later, shortly before Henry Ford finally consented to the very first contract between the United Auto Workers and the Ford Motor Company. The last load of concrete for the adjoining mile-square airport was poured on December 4, three days before Pearl Harbor.

The harsh spotlights of publicity now shone on Willow Run. The sheer size of the facility was daunting. In his journal, Charles Lindbergh called Willow Run "a Grand Canyon of the mechanized world." With 2.5 million square feet of usable floor space, Willow Run had more aircraft manufacturing area than Consolidated, Douglas, and Boeing combined. The press extolled the sheer size of the undertaking without understanding that Willow Run still had to be equipped with effective tools and a functioning workforce. Production began in November 1941, but ten months passed before the first B-24 rolled off the mile-long assembly line. People began calling the plant "Willit Run?" prompting Senator Harry Truman to undertake a special investigation. According to a May 1943 article in Flying magazine, "The Truman Committee, which came to Detroit with blood in its eye, felt better after touring the plant and talking to Ford officials, and left with the pronouncement that 'Willow Run compares favorably with any other airplane plant in the country as far as actual production work is concerned—and we have seen them all.' "

Ted Heusel, then a teenager working in plant protection at Willow Run, remembers getting a call on Sunday morning from his boss, the infamous Harry Bennett, to help shepherd the Truman Committee around the factory. Ordinarily, Heusel's job was to listen in on phone calls made from the plant to watch for possible security leaks. The future WAAM radio host was just one of many Ann Arborites who found jobs at the plant. Based on interviews with people who lived in Ann Arbor during the war, it seems that anyone who didn't work at Willow Run themselves had a friend or family member who did.

Warren Staebler's uncle, Herman Staebler, co-owned the Pontiac dealership, but with car production halted for the duration of the war, he took an office job at Willow Run. Steve Filipiak, retired manager of WHRV (WAAM's forerunner), ran the factory's internal radio station, playing music, interviewing Truman and other distinguished visitors, and selling war bonds. Attorney John Hathaway remembers that almost everyone in his family worked at the plant. His sister Betsy was a long distance telephone operator in Harry Bennett's office. She sometimes drove to work with Ted Heusel. Hathaway's other sister, Mary, inspected hydraulic tubing, while her husband, Ned, worked in shipping and receiving. Hathaway's mother, Lucile Hathaway, identified and inventoried tools. "At Miller's Dairy Store, I had been working for 35 cents per hour," she wrote in an unpublished memoir. "When I drew my first pay at Willow Run I nearly fainted. We were working 9 hours per day and all day Saturday so that my pay at $1.10 per hour was really staggering."

In all, more than 10,000 women worked at Willow Run. Anne Morrow Lindbergh lived in Bloomfield Hills while her husband, Charles, was helping Ford develop the planes. (Opinions differ on whether he was merely window dressing or an important advisor, but many report having seen him at the plant.) After a tour of Willow Run, Anne wrote in her diary, "One noticed chiefly the size, and the number of women working (they all looked like housewives—quite ordinary Middle Western housewives—not a new breed of 'modern women,' as I had expected ...)."

Flora Meyers worked first in fingerprinting (another wartime security measure) and then on the telephones—for instance, she'd call cleanup people when there were accidental spills. Johanna Wiese, retired assistant dean of the U-M School of Nursing, worked as a librarian in the Ford Airplane School, where new workers learned such skills as riveting. Betty Walters Robinson, although trained as a beautician, found herself working as a carpenter at Willow Run, hammering lids onto waterproof boxes that held replacement parts to be shipped to air bases all over the world.

Workers flooded in.from all forty-eight states, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Latin America. John Hathaway, who bought his house from shoe store owners Fred and Gertrude Smith, remembers them saying that some of their customers had never worn shoes before and had to be taught how to walk in them. The late Art Schlanderer remembered bomber plant workers, many of them enjoying real money for the first time in their lives, coming to his jewelry store and making extravagant purchases, like diamond-studded watches. Helen Mast, who was running Mast's shoe store by herself while her husband, Walter, was in the service, sold hard-toed protective shoes to many women who worked at the plant.

By early 1942 there were no rental rooms to be found within a fifteen-mile radius of Willow Run. Resourceful landlords often collected double or even triple rent for rooms: while one tenant worked, the other slept. Many larger single-family homes in Ann Arbor were divided into rental rooms or apartments during this time. Warren Staebler's parents, Dora and Albert, rented a room to a Willow Run control tower operator. Fritz and Bertha Metzger, owners of the German Inn on Huron, rented rooms to four or five lucky people who for $11 a week got not only a bed but meals at the German Inn.

At first Henry Ford balked at building housing for Willow Run workers, but under federal pressure he finally relented. Guy Larcom, later Ann Arbor's city manager, came to Willow Run to work for the Public Housing Administration. The PHA erected an entire town—Willow Village—almost overnight, with dormitories for single workers and small houses for families. The first set of fifteen buildings, accommodating 3,000 people, opened early in 1943. A mobile home park that followed was promptly jammed with 1,000 trailer homes. Ramshackle prefab houses rolled in by the truckload. They were loaded with the floor sections on top and roofs on the bottom, and as a crane lifted the pieces off, workers nailed them up in speedy succession. Each house had a crude coal stove, and residents had to get by with iceboxes instead of refrigerators. They were the lucky ones: many workers lived in converted gas stations, shacks, or tents. By the end of 1943, when 42,331 employees worked at the plant, Willow Village was providing temporary shelter for 15,000—a population greater than the city of Ypsilanti's.

Gradually, Willow Run's production numbers began to mount: from a net output of fifty-six airplanes for all of 1942 (most of them assembled by Consolidated and Douglas, in Oklahoma and Texas) to thirty-one airplanes in January 1943 and 190 in June. By March 1944—shortly after Charlie Sorensen was pressured into resigning from Ford in a power struggle—Willow Run realized his dream, producing 453 airplanes in 468 working hours. Willow Run's output nearly equaled the entire airplane production of Japan that year. Ford's efficient assembly line methods led to a remarkable drop in the delivered price of a B-24: from $238,000 in 1942 to $137,000 in 1944. In all, 8,685 B-24's were built at Willow Run before the last contract expired in June 1945—including 1,894 knocked-down kits shipped to other plants for assembly.

After the war ended, Ford chose not exercise its option to buy Willow Run from the government. The airport served as southeast Michigan's main passenger airport until the late 1950's when all the main carriers moved to Detroit Metro. The plant was sold to Kaiser-Fraser for production of automobiles (and, later, of C-119 cargo planes). General Motors acquired the facility in 1953 after fire ravaged its Hydra-Matic transmission plant in Livonia. After a frantic twelve-week conversion, GM began making automatic transmissions at Willow Run and continues making them there to this day. Some of the overhead cranes and hangar doors installed by Ford more than fifty years ago are still in regular use.

For a century, railroads were the heart and soul of our towns.

In 1827 most people in Michigan Territory had never even heard of a railroad. But on Independence Day that year, village founder Samuel Dexter made a speech extolling the wonders of English passenger trains that reached dizzying speeds of thirty to forty miles an hour. Dexter’s vision of the future soon proved prescient: for much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, trains would be the lifeblood of Chelsea, Dexter, Manchester, and Saline.

Nine years after Dexter’s speech, the Michigan Central Railroad began laying track from Detroit toward Chicago. In 1837 Dexter ceded part of his pear and apple orchard so that the line would come through his village. The arrival of the first train in 1841 was the occasion for a public festival.

“Early in the morning of that day the people of the surrounding country came pouring into the village on foot, on horseback, in carriages and wagons,” according to the 1881 Chapman History of Washtenaw County, Michigan. “By 9 a.m. a large concourse of people had assembled at the depot, awaiting the arrival of the cars, which were to bring the visitors from Ann Arbor and other eastern villages along the line of the road.”

By later standards those first trains were dangerous, noisy, and smoky, but residents welcomed them enthusiastically. “We had but a few minutes to wait before the shrill whistle of the iron horse was heard, and instantly the train came in its grandeur and majesty around the curve into full view, and thundered up to the depot, when the air was filled with loud huzzas and shouts of welcome, and everyone was happy,” recalled an eyewitness.

Eight years after putting Dexter on the map, the Michigan Central reached New Buffalo on the Indiana state line. It was known as the “strap railroad,” because the tracks were made of wood with an iron strip spiked to the top.

Those lightweight rails were later replaced with modern solid steel. The original wooden stations similarly gave way to far more impressive structures. Dexter’s first depot was replaced in 1886 by a new building, on the opposite side of the tracks, that still stands today. Its designers were Spier and Rohns, Detroit architects responsible for many other depots, including the massive fieldstone station in Ann Arbor (now the Gandy Dancer restaurant).

Originally, the next stop west of Dexter on the Michigan Central line was Davidson’s Station, on Hugh Davidson’s farm about two miles west of present-day Chelsea. When that station burned down in 1848, arson was suspected. Afterward, Elisha and James Congdon offered free land to the railroad to relocate the station eastward to their farm, where a road to Manchester crossed the tracks. The first shipment from the new station, in 1850, was a 130-pound barrel of eggs sent to Detroit.

The railroad spurred the development of the village of Chelsea, as stores and businesses began to locate nearby. In 1870 tricksters tied a rope to the wooden depot and attached it to the caboose of a train. When the train left, the station fell. Ten years later the Michigan Central replaced it with a station designed by Michigan architects Mason and Rice (George Mason is best known for designing the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island).

To compete with the Michigan Central, which ran west near the present course of I-94, another railroad was built across the southernmost tier of Michigan counties. Originally known as the Palmyra and Jacksonburgh (an earlier name of Jackson), it became the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern. In 1844 a spur of this railroad, going northwest from Adrian to Jackson to connect with the Michigan Central, passed through Manchester. In 1854 a wooden station was built in Manchester at the site of the present Manchester Market.

In 1870 a second line reached Manchester--the Detroit, Hillsdale, Indiana. This line connected the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern at Hillsdale to the Michigan Central in Ypsilanti. The two lines crossed west of Manchester, and a second station was built at the site of present-day Chi-Bro Park. The DHI continued east through Bridgewater, Saline, and Pittsfield Junction. In 1910 the brick Union Station replaced the original wooden one used by the Lake Shore line. The DHI built a spur to reach the new station.

The DHI was a fairly small line, and railroad historian Sam Breck of Ann Arbor describes its Saline station, which still stands, as “a freight house with a public area on the end.” Nonetheless, Saline residents celebrated their first rail service with great fanfare. City founder Orange Risdon was among the dignitaries who spoke at the opening of the line on July 4, 1870. Eleven years later, the Chapman county history reported that the train “has been of great convenience to the citizens of the village. . . . It has opened up a market for the productions of the country, enabling farmers and others to realize handsomely on many of their investments.”

The hotels in the communities served by the railroads got much of their business from train passengers. Often there were modest hotels near the stations and fancier ones downtown. Horse-drawn carriages met trains at the station to take passengers to the downtown hotels. In Chelsea, the Chelsea House (now the Sylvan Building) was around the corner from the depot, and the Boyd Hotel (now Dayspring Gifts) was a few blocks down Main Street. Manchester’s Don Limpert remembers a boardinghouse near the Union Station, although the Green and Goodyear hotels were much more important. Dexter historian Norma McAllister says there were a number of downtown hotels over the years, with Stebbins House (now Elaine’s Gallery) the most important, and the Railroad Hotel just east of the station. “It was two stories, with a big porch where you could sit and watch trains come in,” she recalls. Converted to apartments, it burned down a few years ago. Only Saline, with its single small line, had no hotels near the station.

Many of the early passengers were immigrants. A Dexter history reported that it was not unusual for fifty to sixty to get off the train at one time and that there were always more passengers than seats. Later, salesmen and visitors accounted for most of the traffic. According to Manchester historian Howard Parr, in the days before national prohibition, when drinking was a county option, “thirsty men from Lenawee County came to drink on Saturday night. Manchester was a German town, so there were a lot of saloons. The clothes stores sold cheap cardboard suitcases, so they could load up with booze to bring home.” Several Manchester breweries supplied those busy saloons.

As the area’s industry developed, commuting workers added to the passenger traffic. Most of the employees at Frank Glazier’s stove company in Chelsea, founded in 1890, came by train, boarding with local residents and returning home on weekends. From Chelsea, workers could commute directly to Detroit or Jackson. In Dexter in the 1930s, McAllister recalls, many people who worked for the University of Michigan commuted to Ann Arbor by train.

In the early twentieth century passenger trains ran all the time; Manchester had twenty a day. People took trains to bigger towns, such as Jackson, Adrian, or Detroit, for shopping, entertainment, and excursions. Parr recalls hearing from his father that the local baseball team would take the train to Clinton to play. Saline historian Wayne Clements has seen old ads for special excursion trains to the Hillsdale County Fair. For U-M football games, Saline residents would take the train to Pittsfield Junction and transfer to the Ann Arbor Railroad. But riding on the DHI had its disadvantages. “They used to call it Old Strawberry, because it was so slow you could get off and pick strawberries,” laughs Clements.

Eventually all the local railroads became part of the New York Central system. In 1881 the former DHI (which by then was the Detroit, Hillsdale, South Western) was leased in perpetuity to the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, which in turn was linked to the New York Central in 1915. The Michigan Central became part of the New York Central in 1930.

In wartime, trains played a major role in transporting troops and supplies. Civil War troops left from Dexter and Chelsea to convene in Adrian. During World War I, a banner supporting the soldiers was hung on the Welfare Building across from the Chelsea station.

Even more troop trains came through during World War II. Johnny Keusch of Chelsea remembers traveling back to Chicago as a soldier: “The train was so crowded by the time it reached Chelsea, I had to stand between cars all the way.”

Passenger trains usually included a post office car. “The mail would stop and unload,” recalls Robert Devine, who was stationmaster at Chelsea after World War II. “If it didn’t stop, they’d just pick up the mail from a crane and throw what they had off on the platform.”

Carrying passengers was an important service, but freight was the moneymaker. Manchester, Dexter, and Chelsea each had a separate freight house to handle incoming goods. When farmers could ship produce quickly and cheaply, they could go beyond subsistence farming to cash crops. Those with farms between the Michigan Central and the Lake Shore benefited from a price war between the two lines.

Farmers would bring goods into the station by horse and wagon and unload them into storage bins that would hold their produce until there was enough to fill a boxcar. Sheep--big business in Saline, Manchester, and Bridgewater--were herded into pens near the stations and eventually led up ramps into cattle cars. Dairy farmers used the train to get their output to creameries, such as the one in Manchester.

The railroad also delivered equipment and supplies. Parr’s family got hatchling chicks from Klager’s Hatchery in Bridgewater. “We’d get a postcard to go down to the station and pick them up,” Parr recalls. Keusch’s father, a grocer, depended on the train for much of his inventory. “We’d get bread from Ann Arbor every morning,” Keusch says.

Frank Glazier sent his stoves all over the country by rail. At the company’s peak, its buildings stood on three sides of the Chelsea depot. During Devine’s time the line into Chelsea had spurs for Chelsea Milling, Chelsea Spring, Central Fiber, Chelsea Lumber, and several coal and oil dealers. In the 1950s Devine’s duties were increased to include Dexter; he recalls that there was less industry there but that D. E. Hoey, right across the tracks, was among several nearby lumber and coal businesses that relied on rail deliveries.

In the nineteenth century Manchester had a lot of manufacturing, including several barrel-making factories. A large gravel pit outside of town sent loads daily by train. As late as 1950, when Delbert Ludwick was stationmaster, the Manchester station had spurs on either side of the main track, one of which served two nearby gas stations. There was also a wool shed “where they brought in the wool and bagged it. When they had enough for a carload, they’d send it out,” recalls Ludwick.

Saline had a ribbon of industry opposite its depot--a blacksmith shop, a planing mill, a concrete block making operation, and the Saline branch of the Manchester Bat and Handle Company, which made baseball bats. These businesses used the train both for receiving raw materials and for sending out finished products. Across the street, Mercantile Delivery had storage facilities for farm products.

After World War II people and companies began to prefer the door-to-door convenience of automobiles and trucks. The stations in Saline and Manchester, which had lost passenger service in 1938, nursed a dwindling freight business. By 1951 the old DHI line was down to two freight trains a week, and it took eight hours to get from Ypsilanti to Hillsdale. Even that service was discontinued in 1961.

Chelsea and Dexter, on the main line across the state, kept going a little longer. In 1947 they were still served by four passenger trains a day, two each way. Although the New York Central connected to transcontinental lines, by then people were making most long trips by car and used the train mainly for local travel. “I’d occasionally sell a ticket to someplace else, to California or Texas or Canada,” recalls Devine. Passenger service in Dexter stopped in the 1950s. The station closed, and freight was limited to full boxcars delivered directly to spurs.

The New York Central halted passenger service to Chelsea in the 1960s, but a small commuter train continued to stop there until the early 1980s. There was no stationmaster after 1975, so people wanting to board had to hoist a flag indicating they wanted to be picked up.

The Manchester station has been torn down, but the Chelsea, Dexter, and Saline stations are still being used. When the Chelsea station closed, concerned citizens formed the Chelsea Depot Association to acquire it. Today, the west half is the Chelsea History Museum, while the east half is used for a meeting room. Dexter’s depot is occupied by the Ann Arbor Model Railroad Club, which is building a model of the Michigan Central line from Detroit to Chicago.

Saline’s depot, also a local history museum, is enhanced by a caboose and a livery stable moved to the property. The Boy Scouts plan to construct a windmill, of the type that would have been used to draw water for the DHI’s steam locomotives. Saline’s model railroad club also meets there, and there is talk of someday turning the whole depot into a railroad museum and moving the other Saline exhibits to another site. In each of the four towns, the local interest in railroad heritage continues to be strong, a generation or more after the last trains left the station.

What do you do with a 104-foot antique?

The Bell Road bridge, which spans the Huron River a mile north of Hudson Mills Metropark, still has its original sign, "Wrought Iron Bridge Company, Canton, Ohio, 1891," clearly legible on the top bar of its Erector Set-like frame. One lane wide and 104 feet long, resting on a fieldstone foundation on an unpaved road, the bridge looks much as it did 100 years ago, when it carried loaded hay wagons from the nearby Bell family farm.

But a century of use has taken its toll, and the bridge is currently closed. Bob Polens, director of the Washtenaw Road Commission, explains, "It is in a deteriorating condition. The truss is deteriorated because of rust, one or more of the wing walls have capsized, and the fieldstone abutments also have cracks." A car crashed into an end post in late 1992, closing the bridge for part of 1993, and nearby residents complained about having to go miles out of their way for necessities such as groceries. The road commission then reopened the bridge, limiting traffic to vehicles under four tons, but when more stones from the abutment began falling into the river, they closed it again while they try to decide what to do.

Of the several options possible, the least likely one is to tear the bridge down. It is an official antique, designated as "historic" in a study jointly funded by the state highway department and the state bureau of history.

The chief consultant on the project, Charles Hyde, is a professor of history at Wayne State University and the author of Historic Highway Bridges of Michigan. According to Hyde, the Bell Road bridge is the state's third-oldest extant metal-truss bridge made by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company. One of the two older ones is also in Washtenaw County: the Maple Road bridge over the Huron, sometimes called the Foster bridge because it is closer to Foster Road on the south, dates back to 1876.

Washtenaw County has two other metal-truss bridges not mentioned by Hyde, both built in 1900: the Delhi bridge at Delhi Metropark (see the August Observer) and the Furnace Street bridge in Manchester. While these historic bridges add to the beauty of our landscape and to our understanding of the past, it's quite a challenge for the road commission to figure out how to make them meet modern load-bearing and safety requirements. The Furnace Street bridge is badly rusted and open only to foot traffic. The Delhi bridge collapsed in the 1917 tornado but was rebuilt using many of the original parts. Repaired many times, the Maple Road bridge is still in use, but only one lane at a time. Because it is limited to twelve tons, it is not safe for many vehicles, including school buses and fire trucks.

The commission has received dedicated funds to work on the Bell Road bridge, but because it is historic and federal funds are involved, it must go through an analysis by the state bureau of history before a final plan is accepted. As Kristine Wilson of the bureau of history explains, "They have to demonstrate they have looked at all the prudent and feasible alternatives. Could it be rehabilitated? Could it be moved? Could it be left and another bridge built beside it while it is used as a pedestrian bridge, or could it be used for one lane of traffic?"

At first the county road commission doubted that the Bell Road bridge could be rehabilitated with any amount of historic integrity, but Polens now thinks it is possible. He says, "While the bridge could never be brought up to today's [structural] standards, it could be renovated and used with weight restrictions, [because] traffic in the area is not expected to increase, since the Stinchfield Woods [owned by U-M] and the Huron Mills Metropark limit future growth." The counter argument to this solution is that the amount of traffic might not justify the cost of the renovations.

Another possible solution is to use the old bridge as a foot or bike path and build a parallel bridge or a new one upstream, maybe connecting Strawberry Lake Road with Stinchfield Woods Road. A third option is to do nothing, leaving the bridge closed and continuing to detour traffic via the North Territorial Road bridge to the south (heavier vehicles must use North Territorial even when the Bell Road bridge is open).

If the road commission decides on this option, they could give the bridge away. Under the terms of critical bridge funding, the money budgeted for demolition of an old bridge can be used to move and repair it. Historic bridges have successfully been moved in other communities. Just recently a Belleville bridge was moved to Kent County to replace a bridge the county had given to the village of Portland. The Bell Road bridge would not be suitable for a highway bridge but could be a beautiful and unique footbridge or bicycle path in any number of river parks in our area.

This fall, after the summer construction season is over, the road commission will turn its attention to the future of the Bell Road bridge, using input from nearby residents and the affected township governments in an attempt to find a solution that works for everyone affected--a process they figure will probably take several years.

[Photo caption from original print edition: Scenic and historic--but no longer safe for traffic--the Bell Road bridge is protected from demolition by state law. It may take several years to decide whether and how to repair it; if repair isn't feasible, it could be given away.]

Before Ann Arbor was a city of restaurants, it was a city of gas stations. “If there was a corner, you had to have a gas station on it,” recalls Jake Kooperman, who with his brother Joe ran several local stations from the 1940s to the 1960s. The first gas station appeared in Ann Arbor in 1918. By 1938 the town supported sixty-six of them. Most stations were owned by big gas companies, which rented the buildings and equipment to local operators. Rent was either a flat rate or a few cents per gallon sold. “It was an inexpensive way to go into business and make a few bucks,” explains Kooperman. With “a couple hundred in your pocket [and] a little mechanical ability, you could succeed.” That was an attractive proposition during the Depression, when business opportunities were scarce. “Most neighborhoods had a gas station with their own clientele,” recalls Ted Palmer, who grew up in Ann Arbor. “I knew just about everyone [who came in],” says Warren Staebler, who for many years ran a station at Packard and Arch and also worked at several others. Though cars eventually transformed Ann Arbor, they were slow to catch on at first. “This is a peculiar town,” complained the city’s first car dealer, Edward Staebler, in 1906. “Our population is 18,000 and we have not over a dozen machines here. Half of those are used but very little.” The first local drivers bought their gas in small quantities from local grocers--either from Staebler’s brother, Fred, at 120 West Washington, or from Dean and Company at 214 South Main. In 1904 both Staebler and Dean installed curbside pumps, but rising demand soon overwhelmed their capacity. On weekends, when drivers tended to go on excursions, the line of motorists waiting to get gas would often stretch several blocks, and a policeman was needed to keep order. In 1918 Standard Oil opened the first drive-in station in town, on the northeast corner of Huron and Fifth Avenue (now part of the City Hall parking lot). The same year, the Staebler brothers organized the county’s first wholesale gas and oil company after a supplier threatened to cut them off. At first they operated out of Edward’s store, but in 1921 they moved into more spacious quarters in the old Philip Bach mansion at 424 South Main. The following year, the Staeblers turned their wholesale office into a retail operation by installing gas pumps on the mansion’s former front lawn. The next year, 1923, Hortaio Abbott, a local real estate agent and postmaster (also, coincidentally, a Democratic activist, as was Edward Staebler), opened a rival gasoline wholesale company; Abbott would eventually supply ten Ann Arbor gas stations as well as others in the county. A third early local chain was the Michigamme Oil Company, with headquarters in its station on the corner of Huron and Division. Staebler grew the fastest, eventually owning eighty-three stations in southeast Michigan. By 1928 Ann Arbor had thirty-five gas stations, most of them in or near downtown. (The exceptions were three stations north of the Huron in Lower Town, two west of town on Jackson Road, and Titus Schneider’s station on South Main, across from what is now Pioneer High.) It was not unusual for a busy intersection, such as Division and Huron or Packard and Hill, to have three competing stations. Then as now, gas stations and car dealerships clustered near highways. But at that time, the highways passed right through the heart of town. East-west traffic entered Ann Arbor on Washtenaw and exited on Huron (the route still followed by today’s Business I-94). East-west traffic was not terribly heavy, however, because Michigan Avenue, the main road between Detroit and Chicago at the time, took a more southerly route through Ypsilanti and Saline. East-west traffic was further eased after Stadium, then called the “bypass” or the “cutoff,” was built in the mid-1920s, allowing drivers to pass south of downtown and connect with Jackson Road at Maple. North-south traffic was a bigger problem, because anyone heading north to Flint or south to Toledo had to pass through downtown Ann Arbor. Traffic followed the route that is today Business US-23: cars coming from the south on what is now Carpenter Road would turn west onto Washtenaw, follow Washtenaw and Huron downtown to the county courthouse, and turn north again on Main Street. Cars were often held up at the north end of town, where the narrow Whitmore Lake Road bridge crossed the Huron River. “If a truck and car were crossing at the same time, somebody had to put their wheels on the sidewalk,” recalls Maynard Newton. And even after they crossed the river, travelers were still not in the clear. “It was gravel up to Brighton and not in a straight line like [modern] US-23,” says Bill Lewis. Washtenaw County’s first pavement was laid in 1918 on Jackson Road west of Ann Arbor and on Michigan Avenue east of Ypsilanti. In the 1920s, flush with cash from the booming auto industry, the state launched a huge road-building effort. Using convict labor, the highway department paved most of the principal roads leading out of town, including Whitmore Lake Road, Plymouth, and Washtenaw. Á The changes required to accommodate the automobile ripped huge holes in Ann Arbor’s nineteenth-century streetscapes. Along main traffic routes, homes and business blocks alike were demolished and replaced by gas stations, car dealerships, and parking lots. Cheap and easy to put up, gas stations became the signature buildings of the automotive age. The first ones were often primitive. Hoists weren’t invented until 1925, and not all stations could immediately afford them. Instead, mechanics climbed into pits in the floor to work under cars. Illi’s Auto Service, at 401 West Huron, still has three of the five pits used when the building was the Atwell and Son gas station in the 1930s. The pits are now covered with boards. “We had a robbery here once, and they pried the boards off. They must have thought we hid the safe under there. They must have been surprised when all they saw was the basement,” laughs owner Ray Roberts. Some followed Staebler’s example of locating in old houses. Michigamme Oil Company had its main gas station in front of an old house at Huron and Division; Mallek and Hoppe’s first station was a little house where Jackson and Dexter merge with Huron. Others built small wooden or metal buildings alongside the pumps. Concerned citizens, not just in Ann Arbor but around the country, began complaining that these hastily constructed buildings were a blight on the landscape. Gas companies reacted by commissioning more elegant designs. In 1925 Waldo Abbott built a gas station at William and Maynard designed to look like a Greek temple. A few years later, the Atwell station (now Illi’s) was designed to resemble a castle, complete with parapets and turrets. Houselike stations were especially popular, on the theory that they could blend with residential neighborhoods. Paul’s Service Station, built in 1930 at the northwest corner of Ann and Fourth, was done in Tudor style, complete with a brick facade and slate roof (partially obscured by a later cinder-block addition, the building is now Adam’s Garden of Eden). The prettiest local example has to be the 1927 Tuomy Hills station at Washtenaw and Stadium, which local architects Lynn Fry and Paul Kasurin designed for Bill and Kathryn Tuomy. Built of stone in a style reminiscent of an Irish gatehouse, it was so distinctive that a copy of it was displayed at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Today, owned by University Bank, it’s the city’s most elegant ATM. Early Staebler gas stations were built in a Spanish style, complete with red tile roofs. Although obscured by later additions, the stations at the corner of Liberty and Ashley (now Dream On Futons) and Fourth and Detroit (now Argiero’s) still reveal traces of their original style. Other Mediterranean-style buildings included Erle Koons’s station on the southeast corner of Liberty and First (now Painters Supply & Equipment) and the stucco-and-tile Hunter station at Huron and First (now Fine Flowers). Eventually, such elaborate attempts at disguise became a public joke. In the 1937 movie A Damsel in Distress, Gracie Allen visits an English estate and remarks, “It’s pretty enough to be a gas station.” Changing fashions combined with economic pressures to radically alter gas station architecture during the Depression. With a growing number of stations forced to share a shrinking market, stations put more emphasis on repair services. Typically a station added a pair of service bays, one with a hoist and another for tire repairs and other light mechanical work. Space was also needed to sell auxiliary products, called by the trade “TBA” (for “tires, batteries, and accessories”). Some stations added service bays to existing houselike buildings, while others tried to apply homely details to the new, boxier structures. The Sinclair station at State and Packard (now Bell’s Pizza) is a rectangular box decorated with turrets and a tile roof. But most companies opted for buildings that were easily identified as gas stations, completely reversing their initial goal of blending into the neighborhood. In the 1930s and early 1940s enameled-steel facades became popular. Locally the Staeblers led the way in 1933, tearing down the Bach mansion and replacing it with an ultramodern enameled station designed by local architect Douglas “Pete” Loree, who also helped design the bus depot. The same year the Staeblers put up a duplicate at the corner of State Street and Jefferson (before the construction of the U-M’s LS&A Building, Jefferson went through to State). Casey’s gas station on the corner of Huron and Fourth (now Vault of Midnight Comix and Rosey’s barbershop) was built in 1937 with glazed tile and appears to be another creation of Loree’s. Former owner Clan Crawford says that the late architect Dick Robinson told him that he designed it when he was just out of school and working for Loree. Unlike most other gas stations, it was designed to hold other businesses as well--an appliance store and a watch repair shop. “It was built to get rent until they could tear it down and get something decent there,” Crawford says, “but no one has.” The major oil companies hired architects to design stations that could be replicated all over the country. In 1937 Walter Dorwin Teague created a rectangular green-and-white Texaco station with large glass windows that was heavily influenced by the International style. Texaco stations with Teague’s design soon became ubiquitous, and other companies followed suit with similar buildings, all with an art deco or streamline-moderne flavor. Most of Ann Arbor’s remaining enameled stations have been covered up, but at the former Schneider’s Amoco (now Rainbow Creations) across from Michigan Stadium, the panels can still be seen beneath a coat of yellow paint. The distinctive square towers that once marked Pure Oil stations are easy to spot on Japanese Auto Professional Service at Main and Madison and Victory Lane Quick Oil Change at Packard and South Boulevard. Station operators kept busy in their newly enlarged stations, because cars needed much more service than they do today. Not only did they break down more often, but also routine maintenance, such as oil changes and tune-ups, had to be done more frequently. Staebler’s station at Main and Packard lured customers by offering pickup service. An employee on a three-wheeled motorcycle would pick the car up at the customer’s home or business and drive it to the station, towing the motorcycle behind him. After the repairs were done, he would return the car the same way. Stations also cultivated customer loyalty by offering premiums such as carnival dishes, glass tumblers, Pepsi, and trading stamps. Attorney John Hathaway worked at Warren Staebler’s station as a young man, and he and his wife, Mary, still have a set of Czechoslovakian Christmas ornaments from the station. People who were around before World War II don’t remember downtown traffic then as any big problem. Ted Palmer recalls that it was even easy to find a parking place at the county courthouse at Main and Huron. “You didn’t have to drive around the block like you do today,” he recalls. “I used to drive an old Model T that I got for fifteen dollars to high school.” Although he often arrived at Ann Arbor High, then at the corner of State and Huron, at the last minute, “I could always park opposite the door.” One big reason for the light car traffic was that trains were the preferred way of getting to other towns, even for people with cars. Freight also was usually sent on trains, not trucks. Many people in town still walked to stores and workplaces. And except among the very rich, multicar families were still in the future. Gas stations held their own during the Depression, when, if operators didn’t get rich, they could at least eke out a living. Other car-related industries did not fare as well. Road paving stopped except for a little work done by Works Progress Administration crews, and car sales dipped very low. During World War II all available materials and labor went into building war-
related products such as tanks and airplanes. Gas was strictly rationed, as were tires. Some stations kept alive by retreading tires. After the war, though, people made up for the years of abstinence, buying new cars as fast as they could be made. The surge in vehicle traffic hit Ann Arbor particularly hard, as thousands of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill to enroll at the U-M. The resulting parking problem was temporarily solved by mayor Bill Brown, who in 1945 instituted meters on the streets to raise money for building parking lots and structures. But the problem of the increased traffic pouring through town as the economy picked up was not so easily solved. Bob Kuhn, who lived on Ann Street near the courthouse, recalls that big trucks hauling cars from Flint to Milan would “try to turn at Main and Huron and make a big clang and bang.” A woman who moved to a new house near Pauline and Stadium in 1955 recalls that she had trouble sleeping because the car haulers were so noisy. “They’d backfire as they went down the hill, day and night.” “In the fifties the downtown was jammed. They were going through because there was no other way to go,” recalls Jack Dobson, who was a member of city council at the time. He and his colleagues were planning to solve the problem by routing traffic on a loop west of downtown, going on Beakes and Ashley to Packard. On the state level, legislators were discussing building a turnpike similar to ones being built in Pennsylvania and New York. All the discussion became moot in 1956 when Congress passed President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway Act. The act created an entirely new network of limited-access highways, with the federal government covering 90 percent of the cost and the state the remaining 10 percent. According to Michigan Department of Transportation records, Washtenaw County’s portion of I-94 was built in stages from 1956 to 1960, while US-23 north of Ann Arbor was built in 1957, with the southern part finished in 1962. “With so much work in a seven- or eight-year period, it’s all due at the same time for repairs,” remarks Bob Tetens, director of the Urban Transportation Study Policy Committee. The expressways marked the end of the golden age of downtown gas stations. “One by one, they were sold,” recalls Kooperman. Small stations were the first to go. “The bigger ones could undersell little ones. They could get gas cheaper,” recalls Warren Staebler. Even before the expressways, gas stations and car dealers had begun moving farther out of town, especially along Stadium and Washtenaw. As styles changed again, the surviving downtown stations made another attempt to blend with neighborhoods, using residential details like the mansard roof on J.B.’s Auto Service at Liberty and Second, or the Colonial cupola on Mallek’s at the Jackson-Dexter fork. The other big design change in recent years is the return of canopies. Early gas stations usually had canopies as an integral part of the building, but in the 1930s architects began leaving them off, disliking the way canopies interfered with the clean lines of their enameled boxes. Canopies returned to Ann Arbor when Alden Dow designed the Leonard station (now Total) on the corner of Arbordale and Stadium. “Leonard was new in town. It was a brand no one knew. They had to sell the name, so they had canopies and cheaper prices,” recalls Harlan Otto, who ran the Amoco station in Ypsilanti for forty years. Canopies became nearly universal after the switch to self-service in the 1970s. Total is now planning to demolish Dow’s station. Plans filed with the city call for replacing it with a new building with more sales space. Coming full circle from the days of Fred Staebler and Sedgwick Dean, most stations now make more money selling groceries and snacks than they do from gasoline. Last January an Observer survey found that the number of gas stations in Ann Arbor had fallen from eighty-seven in 1950 to fifty in 1980 and just thirty today. As stations have closed, their buildings have been either torn down or converted to other uses. Former gas station buildings still standing, in addition to those already mentioned, include Copy Quick on Packard, Old Brick Quality Refinishing on Detroit, the Ann Arbor Convention and Visitors Bureau on Huron, and Econo-Car on Division. Many others have found new life as food-related businesses, including DeLong’s Pit Bar-B-Q on North Fifth Avenue, the Main Party Store, the Big Market on Huron, and Ali Baba’s, Jimmy John’s, and the Cottage Inn, all on Packard near State. With a new awareness that pollution left by leaking underground tanks requires massive cleanup, building new structures on gas station sites has become more problematic. In 1990 the Washtenaw County Historical Society had to do a major cleanup on the former station site at 303 North Main before moving an old house from Lower Town to become its museum. Several sites have been converted to parks. Warren Staebler’s old gas station on Packard is now Franklin C. Forsythe Park, named after the first president of the Jaycees. Liberty Plaza is a gas station site. Two other stations, the old Clark station at Division and Detroit and Ben Wilkes’s station at Summit and Main, are being considered for the same use.

In 1930, Ella Prochnow quietly made history as the nation’s first female car dealer

Ella Prochnow, probably the first woman in the United States to own an automobile dealership, never anticipated her career. She didn’t even know how to drive when her husband died in 1930, leaving her his seven-year-old Buick dealership. But as she said in a 1964 interview, “I did know that income must be greater than outgo and based my business on this simple but essential point.” According to Prochnow’s sister, Edna Lage, “It was an unheard-of thing for a woman to take over, but she said, ‘This is my business, and I’m going to run it.’ ” The first thing she did was learn to drive.

Ella Bareis and Walter Prochnow grew up across the street from one another on First Street. Ella, born in 1896, was just a year older than Walter. Both attended Ann Arbor High. Ella was valedictorian of her class and went on to attend the University of Michigan. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Northfield Township while Walter began work as a teller at State Savings Bank (now NBD). They were married in 1922.

A year later, Walter bought the Ann Arbor Buick dealership, then located on Huron Street where the bus depot stands now. Two years later, he moved the business a block west to the corner of Huron and Ashley (the present site of a First of America drive-in branch). The dealership took over a three-story Italianate building that had opened in 1862 as the Monitor House hotel. After an 1869 fire, the building had been fitted up as a livery barn, and it was the Rohde feed and grain store when Prochnow bought it.

Walter Prochnow was so successful in the mere seven years that he owned Ann Arbor Buick that his death at the age of thirty-three was reported on the front page of the Ann Arbor Daily News. Ella Prochnow was left a thirty-four-year-old widow with two small children, Walter and Bette. At first, a manager ran the dealership, but then Ella decided she’d rather do it herself. She knew very little about cars, according to her sister, but “they were her lifetime interest from then on.”

A major factor in Prochnow’s success was her ability to enlist the support of her staff, according to her sister. Many people stayed with her for years: mechanic Bailey Rogers, who was working at Rohde’s when Walter Prochnow bought the building, stayed on to work at Ann Arbor Buick for sixty-one years, retiring only five years before his death at age ninety-four. Lage herself soon went to work for her sister, joining the dealership when the bookkeeper left. Lage worked until she was almost ninety.

Prochnow also had to persuade the Buick Motor Company to allow a woman to run a franchise; all of their other dealers were men. Buick might have had doubts at first, but Prochnow always met her sales targets and even won prizes for outstanding sales performance. According to her sister, she eventually developed a very warm relationship with Buick’s management, all the way up to the president. She also gained the respect of other car dealers in the area, serving for more than thirty years as treasurer of the Ann Arbor Auto Dealers Association.

According to her sister, Prochnow “was not a pusher or forward person, but she had a great deal of respect from a lot of people.” Although she worked long hours, she made sure it was not at her children’s expense. She had a housekeeper but made a point of going home every evening to have supper with her children and put them to bed. Only then did she return to her business to work into the night.

Space was tight in the old onetime hotel, but Ann Arbor Buick stayed because all the car dealerships were downtown. The first floor was the showroom and the parts department. Cars were serviced and repaired on the second floor, carried up in a giant elevator. The floor was made of wood, and Walter Prochnow, who owns the dealership today, remembers that customers sometimes got nervous when the floor creaked under the weight.

Car manufacturing was halted during World War II, and after the war it took time for factories to convert from defense back to civilian production. By 1948 Ann Arbor Buick had a three-year waiting list of customers eager to buy new cars. That year Prochnow bought the building next door at 206 West Huron to use for sales and repair of used cars.

Back then, many car buyers picked a brand and stayed with it, periodically trading in their cars for new models. After the initial purchase, that was a relatively inexpensive process. During the 1930’s, Grover Hauer, father-in-law of current salesman Dick Kempf, had a standing order for each year’s new model-—always in black. Trading in his year-old car, he could get a new one for prices ranging from $169 to $428. The yearly introduction of new models was done with a lot of fanfare, and there was excited speculation on what they would look like. Walter Prochnow remembers that the showroom windows would be covered with paper so that no one got a glimpse of the new models until the big day.

Problems with the downtown building became acute in 1958 when the new Buick Roadmaster Limited proved to be too big to fit into the elevator. Walter Prochnow had taken over as general manager by then, but his mother was still active. She devoted her considerable energies to the unavoidable move.

In 1957 she had bought five acres of what was once farmland out on Washtenaw. (Although closer to town than Arborland, it was then outside the city limits. Ads of the 1960’s describe the location as “between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.”) She traveled around to other dealerships, researching the needs of a modern garage, and worked closely with the builder, supervising the countless details.

The new building, at 3165 Washtenaw, was as up-to-date as the downtown garage had been old-fashioned. With its glass-walled showroom and delicate vertical “Buick” sign, it’s still a fine example of the postwar modern style. The 1964 grand opening celebration was attended by politicians (Mayor Cecil Creal and state legislators Gil Bursley and Stanley Thayer), bank presidents, and many business owners. It was still a man’s world: pictures of the ceremony show Ella Prochnow as the lone woman among the dignitaries. She lived twenty-one years longer, dying in 1985 at age eighty-eight, and she stayed active in the dealership almost to the end.

When trains hauled everything from freight to football fans

"I just thought you'd like to know about a fun place to go," John William Scott-Railton, age nine, wrote the Observer. "It's a train's round table." Using John's directions, we walked south from Hoover Street along the Ann Arbor Railroad tracks until we came to a metal shed, welded shut, with a faded "Ferry" sign on the side facing the tracks, and eight tracks fanning out from the main track. Following the outside track into an overgrown area, we came to a crumbling poured concrete circle crossed by a section of track mounted on a rusting steel frame.

Later, talking to train buffs and retired railroad personnel, we learned that John William had stumbled across Ferry Yard. It was once the center of the Ann Arbor Railroad's local freight operation, and on home football days it was a crowded passenger terminus, too. The shed was the yard agent's office, the sidings were to store freight cars and special football passenger trains, and the turntable allowed crews to reverse the direction of engines and freight cars.

The turntable used what trainmen jokingly called the "armstrong method": it was turned by the power of their strong arms. None of the train buffs we talked to knew how old the turntable was (their guesses for date of construction ran from 1878 to the 1920's). Finally, attorney Dan McClary, whose job on the railroad in the summer of 1969 turned him into a lifelong student of trains, found the date by looking at Ann Arbor Railroad annual reports. The original turntable was installed in 1911, the same year the railroad introduced McKeen motor cars to compete with the interurban trolleys. In 1939, the annual report says, "a second hand turntable was purchased and installed at Ferry Field," probably because heavier engines were being used.

Started in 1878, the Ann Arbor Rail≠road originally ran from Toledo to Frankfort, where it crossed Lake Michigan by ferry. Ann Arbor passengers ordinarily used the depot on Ashley--now the Law Montessori School--for trains bound south (the Toledo Torpedo) or north (the Frankfort Fireball). But Ferry Yard was the arrival and departure point of all the freight trains coming through town. All Ann Arbor-bound freight cars were dropped off at Ferry Yard, where the yard conductor would take over, directing crews to deliver the cars to their final destinations: the mills, lumberyards, coal yards, furniture factories, ice companies, and warehouses that lined the railroad's route along Allen's Creek through the Old West Side. In the 1930's and 1940's, according to retired yard conductor Ford Ferguson, a crew of three using a switch engine would move from twenty to fifty cars a day. The switch engine was also used as a pusher to help the bigger trains get over the Plymouth Road hill north of town.

In the 1950's, the Ann Arbor Railroad replaced its steam engines with diesels designed to run in either direction. After that, the turntable was used mainly to turn freight cars around so they could be unloaded from the same side they had been loaded from. McClary says that by 1969 they were moving only six or eight cars a day, the biggest customers being Fingerle Lumber and the Rhode brick yard. On slow days the crew would retire to the caboose to play cards until the shift was over at 7:00 p.m.

The 1920's, 1930's, and 1940's, the heyday of freight service to Ferry Yard, were also the heyday of football trains, specially scheduled runs bringing fans to games. They would come, not only from the away team's hometown, but from anywhere around the Midwest where U-M alumni were numerous enough to organize excursions. The biggest gathering was always for the Ohio State game, where trains would originate in Columbus and go north through Ohio picking up passengers all along the way. With no worry about driving, fans could sing the fight song at the top of their lungs and generally concentrate on having a good time, probably making present-day tailgaters look tame. And of course the winners would celebrate extra hard on the way home.

Ferry Yard, located between Ferry Field, where the football games were played from 1906 to 1927, and the present stadium, was the logical place to drop off passengers. According to Ferguson, the more popular games, such as Ohio State, might bring in as many as fifteen trains. Some of them were so long that they required more powerful freight engines instead of passenger engines; to add capacity, companies even borrowed passenger cars from other lines.

While the football fans were enjoying the game, the railroad employees would work frantically, cleaning up the debris left by the arriving parties, watering and refueling, and turning the engines around on the turntable for the trip home.

Football trains stopped running in the late 1960's, and the turntable stopped being used in the 1970's. Today the Ann Arbor Railroad is divided in two; the section from Ann Arbor to Toledo retains the name and is still privately owned, while what is left of the northern part is operated for the state by the Tuscola and Saginaw Bay Railroad., Although eight to ten freight trains a day still use the southern portion, Ferry Yard is no longer used at all.

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: (Left) Steam engine on the Ferry Yard turntable, November 24, 1951--the last time a steam engine pulled a football train. While the passengers watched the game, yard crews turned the engines around for the trip home. (Below) John William Scott-Railton and Robby Young (in white sweatshirt) investigate their discovery: the Ann Arbor Railroad freight office and turntable.

Linking town and campus at the turn of the century

Streetcars and interurbans appear in many photos of old Ann Arbor, moving along tracks down the middle of major streets and powered by overhead wires. The smaller streetcars, called "dinkies" or "Toonerville Trolleys" (after a comic strip) were used within the city limits. The beefier interurbans used streetcar-type tracks to carry passengers and freight between towns.

Ann Arbor's first streetcar track was laid in the summer of 1890. The system was originally designed to be horse-powered, but just a few months before opening it, the developers switched it to electric power. (The first successful electric-powered streetcar system had opened only two years earlier, in Richmond, Virginia.) A year later, in 1891, the state's first interurban began operating, running down Packard between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.

Ann Arbor had two streetcar routes. The Depot Line ran from the Michigan Central Railroad station (now the Gandy Dancer) to downtown, then east on William to State Street. There the line divided to encircle the U-M campus. The north branch went up North University to Washtenaw to Hill, then to the car barn on Lincoln Avenue near Burns Park. The south branch went on Monroe to East University to Hill, then to the car barn. The second route, the Packard-Huron Line, ran from what is today Vets Park to downtown, then southeast on Packard to the city limits (then Brooklyn Street) near Burns Park.

Dr. Karl Malcolm recalled that when he lived at the corner of Cambridge and Martin Place, he could catch either the north or south branch of the Depot Line on Lincoln Avenue when he was headed downtown, since either one would get him there. Malcolm remembers the streetcars being heavily used: when he went shopping with his mother, the cars would often be full, with people standing, especially near five o'clock or in bad weather.

Bertha Welker sometimes took the streetcar to Forest Hill Cemetery, where her family had a burial plot. Elsa Goetz Ordway usually walked from her home on First Street to the high school on State Street (now the Frieze Building), but would catch the streetcar on William in really bad weather. Morrie Dalitz generally relied on his bike for transportation but sometimes caught a streetcar at Hill and Washtenaw, near his home on Vinewood.

The trolley cars were the same on both ends; front and back were defined by the direction they were going. At the end of the line, the motorman would get out and reverse the trolley attached to the overhead wires, then remove the control wrench from the accelerating switch at one end of the car and connect it to the switch at the opposite end. The detachable headlight was moved from one end of the car to the other. Inside, the conductor would walk down the central aisle flipping the seat backs down so they faced the other way. In summer, the trolley companies switched from closed cars to open ones with running boards, which the conductor used to collect fares since there were no aisles on the summer cars.

An open summer trolley car pauses to pick up a passenger at the corner of Main and Washington early in the century. (The old courthouse tower is in the background.) The large white sign on the front of the car advertises a 10 cent round-trip fare to a baseball game at the county fairgrounds (now Burns Park).

Except in rainy weather, the open cars were more enjoyable. On hot summer nights, the lines offered special 3 cent runs (the usual price was 5 cents) that people would take just to cool off. Malcolm says they were a great treat. "We would beg our parents to take us," he recalls. The special rides also provided a pleasant, inexpensive date.

The first car barn was on Detroit Street between Division and Kingsley. After a fire in 1894 destroyed the building and five of the six cars, the barn was rebuilt at the edge of town, on the corner of Wells and Lincoln across from the county fairgrounds (now Burns Park). The new barn faced Lincoln but ran along Wells, with an empty lot in back where the summer cars were stored. Malcolm remembers the car barn as "just an old shed sort of thing, wooden, open most of the time, with a couple of tracks running into it." The car barn was managed by Theodore Libolt, who lived across the street.

Two of the most famous streetcar employees also lived in the neighborhood: motorman James Love lived on Wells and conductor Marion Darling on Olivia. Milo Ryan, in View of a Universe, wrote, "Everyone enjoyed the joke of [their names], even they. When the car was ready to start up, leaving a switch or whatever, the motorman would sometimes call out, 'Ready, Darling?'
"'Yes, Love.'
"It alone was worth the nickel. But it startled newcomers fresh off the train in this college town."

Carol Spicer remembers Love as a very friendly driver. When his streetcar was forced to wait while another passed in the opposite direction, he would announce a "rest stop" and pass the time entertaining the riders with stories. He was willing to pick up people between official stops or to let them off right in front of their houses as he passed by.

The system reached its full extent by 1900, with six and a half miles of track and ten cars--two on each route and four spares--and covered most of the town that then existed. The depot line was cut back slightly in 1902, when the brakes on one trolley failed going down Detroit Street and it ran into the train station. From then on, the trolleys stopped at High Street, and train passengers had to walk down the hill to the station carrying their luggage. In 1913, to cut costs, the conductors were eliminated. The company bought new cars with only one entrance and a fare box near the driver.

Male U-M students seem to have considered the streetcars fair game. Stories abound about their neglecting to pay, or riding the fenders, or starting fires, or derailing the trolleys by jumping up and down or by lifting them off the tracks. But motormen got their revenge after the trolleys were finally equipped with air brakes: they could stop the car fast enough to send a rider sprawling off.

In early January 1925, a fire destroyed the Lincoln-Wells car barn. Although the trolleys were saved, the fire hastened a civic discussion already in progress about switching to buses. The city was growing, and as more townsfolk acquired cars, streetcar ridership was falling off. Margaret Sias, who lived on a farm on Traver Road, remembers that on the last day the streetcars ran, her mother took her for a ride from downtown to her aunt's house on Hill Street. On January 30, 1925, the streetcars, displaying banners that proclaimed, "Good-bye folks! The scrap heap for me," led a parade that included twelve new buses. In the first bus, a band played funeral dirges.

The interurban stopped running in 1929, but for many years the tracks that the trolleys and the interurbans shared remained. Finally, toward the end of the depression, WPA work crews began removing them. But every now and then, when road work is being done, remnants of the track will be found and puzzle younger workers who don’t know that Ann Arbor ever had a trolley system.