Mills, roads, and trains shaped Washtenaw’s towns

In 1824 thirty-eight-year-old Orange Risdon and thirty-two-year-old Samuel Dexter spent four months on horseback exploring mostly uninhabited land in southeast Michigan. At the end of the 2,000-mile trip, they settled within a few miles of each other.

Risdon bought 160 acres fronting the Great Sauk Trail, the Indian footpath that ran all the way from Detroit to Rock Island, Illinois. Dexter bought land that included a stream that flowed into the Huron River, ideal for powering mills and machines and for irrigating. These were the beginnings of Saline and Dexter.

Risdon and Dexter came from very different backgrounds. Risdon left school when he was thirteen and was always proud he’d earned his own way. He learned surveying by apprenticing in western New York, where he helped lay out the towns of Lockport, Brockport, and Buffalo. During the War of 1812 he served as an assistant surveyor for the army. In 1816 he married Sally Newland. Six of their children were born in upstate New York, and the seventh and last in Saline.

Dexter’s ancestors, members of the Protestant ruling class in Ireland, came to the United States in 1642, fleeing a rebellion. His father, Samuel Dexter VI, was a Massachusetts congressman and senator who also served in the cabinets of two presidents. He was secretary of war under John Adams and secretary of the treasury under Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Samuel Dexter VII obtained both a college degree and a law degree at Harvard--unusual at a time when most lawyers learned by apprenticeship. When he finished law school in 1815, he set up a practice in Athens, New York. The next year he married a local woman, Amelia Augusta Prevost, and they started a family.

In 1822 Amelia and their two-year-old son both died. Dexter decided he needed to start a new life rather than obsess over his losses. He later wrote to a cousin, “I came to Michigan to get rid of the blue devils, or to speak more politely of the ennui which like a demon pursues those who have nothing to do.”

Michigan Territory was established in 1805, but most of the land remained in the hands of Native tribes until 1819, when they ceded much of the Lower Peninsula in the Treaty of Saginaw. The following year the government started reselling the land to settlers for $1.25 an acre. The first permanent settlement in Washtenaw County, Woodruff’s Grove, was founded in 1823 (today it’s part of Ypsilanti).

It’s not known how or where Risdon and Dexter met or why they ended up exploring together. But Risdon, too, had suffered misfortune in New York--he had been speculating in land, and lost money in the panic of 1817. Michigan needed surveying, so Risdon came here in 1823 and spent a month exploring on foot. The following year he and Dexter found new centers for their lives.

Dexter built a sawmill on the stream that ran through his property, naming it Mill Creek, and went back to New York that winter. Risdon found work extending Woodward Avenue from Detroit to Pontiac. He also started work on a map of Michigan lands available for settlement.

In 1825 Risdon became the chief surveyor for the first major road built across the state. Father Gabriel Richard, Michigan Territory’s representative in Congress, had convinced the federal government to build a wagon road along the Sauk Trail. Though sold to Congress as a way to move troops quickly in case of an Indian uprising, it proved more useful in settling the state. Known variously as the Military Road, Chicago Road, or Old Sauk Trial, today it is US-12 or Michigan Avenue.

The survey was difficult. Risdon wrote to his wife, Sally, of “job delays” and “the hardship of the weather and other obstructions,” noting that after “a few days wading in warm water our feet were so sore it was like dipping them in scalding water. We had to stop every three or four days to doctor.”

Meanwhile Dexter returned to Michigan with a new bride, Susan Dunham. They lived first in a log house on the west side of Mill Creek--originally built for the mill workers, it was the first residence in Webster Township. Then he built a wooden house near the Huron River on what is now Huron Street. On the other side of Mill Creek, Dexter had a gristmill built.

When Dexter and Risdon first came to Michigan, the trip overland was long and tedious, made worse by a swampy area near Toledo. In 1824 it took Ann Allen, the wife of Ann Arbor cofounder John Allen, two months to make her way from Virginia in a covered wagon. But in 1825 the Erie Canal opened, shortening trips from the East considerably. From the canal’s terminus at Buffalo, travelers could board a steamboat and get to Detroit in three days.

By 1826 enough settlers were coming that the organization of Washtenaw County, carved out of Wayne County in 1822, could begin. Territorial governor Lewis Cass appointed Samuel Dexter its first chief justice. He was also the village postmaster; once a week he rode to Ann Arbor to hear cases and get the town’s mail.

Dexter continued to develop his village. He built and stocked a drugstore in order to lure the area’s first doctor, Cyril Nichols. He donated land for several churches. He had the first school built. And he started Forest Lawn Cemetery after Susan died in childbirth, followed soon by their infant son.

A year later Dexter married sixteen-year-old Millicent Bond, who had come to Webster Township the year before with her mother and sisters. A justice of the peace presided at Millicent’s sister’s house. The bride and groom rode horses back to the village. “Millicent’s trousseau was packed in the saddle bags that Dexter used to carry the mail,” wrote their granddaughter Ione Stannard in a family remembrance. “When fording the Huron River her wedding dress was dampened but the saddle bags kept the judge’s trousers dry.”

Both Dexter and John Allen were fervent anti-Masons, part of a short-lived movement whose members believed Masonic lodges were conspiring to take over the country. Annoyed that Washtenaw County’s only newspaper was neutral on the issue, the two men bought the Western Emigrant in 1829. Allen, perennially short of money, soon sold his share of the paper to Dexter. From then on Judge Dexter’s trips to Ann Arbor included working on the paper. “Once a week my father rode to Ann Arbor on his fine white horse, with saddle bags strapped to the saddle behind him, to edit and print his paper,” his daughter Julia Stannard recalled in 1895. If Dexter planned to stay overnight in Ann Arbor, Millicent, who had been appointed his assistant postmaster, rode with him so she could bring back the mail the same day. According to family legend, one night she was followed home by a panther that stalked her until she reached the village.

In 1829 Orange Risdon finally stopped returning to New York each winter and moved his family to Saline. He and Sally built a house on a hill near the Saline River overlooking the Chicago Road. The house served as a stagecoach stop and inn. It also was the town’s post office for the ten years that Risdon was postmaster, and a courtroom and wedding chapel for the twelve years he was justice of the peace. Voters in the first Saline Township election cast their ballots in the house in April 1830. For good measure, the front parlor was rented to Silas Finch to use as a general store. Like Dexter, Risdon donated land for schools, churches, and a cemetery.

Both Dexter and Risdon waited a few years to plat their new villages--Dexter was busy developing his mills and Risdon was surveying. In 1830, when Dexter finally got around to laying out his town, he was helped by twenty-year-old John Doane. “We began the survey at the west end of Main and Ann Arbor streets, the judge picking out the trees to mark for the center of the street, which now comprises the business part of Dexter,” Doane later wrote. “After the stakes were glazed, I had his instructions to pace three rods each side of the stake to form Ann Arbor Street.” Risdon laid out Saline two years later, no doubt using more professional methods.

In the early nineteenth century, water and roads determined the locations of towns. By the middle of the century, railroads played a big role too. Manchester began in 1832 with the damming of the River Raisin. Chelsea was established in 1850 when Elisha and James Congdon convinced the Michigan Central to locate a railroad station on their farm.

Unlike Dexter and Saline, Manchester did not have the advantage of a single strong leader. But within the current village limits, the River Raisin dropped forty feet, offering great prospects for powering mills. Settlement began in 1832 when John Gilbert, an Ypsilanti entrepreneur, bought twenty-two acres straddling the river. Gilbert hired Emanuel Case to dam the river and then build and run a gristmill and a sawmill.

The following year James Soule put another dam a mile downstream and built a bridge and a sawmill, starting a separate settlement known as Soulesville and later as East Manchester. A third dam was built between the first two, at what is now the Furnace Street bridge. Barnabas Case built a distillery there in 1838 and Amos Dickinson a foundry a year later. These early dams were primitive affairs “built by laying trees and logs lengthwise of the stream and throwing on stones and dirt to the required height,” according to Manchester’s First Hundred Years.

Emanuel Case built the town’s first hotel, a block east of his mills. He kept an office there in his role as justice of the peace. The hotel was rebuilt in 1869 as the Goodyear House, later known as Freeman’s. Today it’s a gas station, but the hotel dining room’s tin ceiling can still be seen in the back room.

The mills drew more settlers to Manchester. In 1834 Lewis Allen built the first school, William Carr opened the first store, and Dr. Bennett Root started the first medical practice. The block east of the mill filled with shops.

After Risdon completed work on the Old Sauk Trail, a new road was built north of it to bring settlers into the second tier of counties north of Ohio. (Originally called the Territorial Road, it’s now known variously as Jackson Road or Old US-12.) Around the same time, a north-south wagon road, today’s M-52, connected Manchester to Stockbridge.

In 1832 brothers Nathan and Darius Pierce came to Washtenaw County from upstate New York. The house Nathan built on the Territorial Road still stands on the north side of Old US-12, just east of the entrance to Chelsea Community Hospital. Nathan often put up travelers overnight--and when one visitor didn’t get up the next morning, Pierce started the cemetery on Old Manchester Road near the fairgrounds.
Other settlers soon arrived in “Pierceville.” Stephen Winans kept a store, postmaster Albert Holt ran a sash and blind factory, and Israel Bailey was the blacksmith.

Darius Pierce settled north of his brother, where the Manchester road crossed Letts Creek. About five families gathered there and christened the hamlet Kedron. Farther south, at the corner of today’s Jerusalem Road, was a settlement called Vermont Colony. With no waterpower, these communities could not develop into manufacturing centers, but they did serve as trading towns for the surrounding farms.

In 1833 brothers Elisha and James Congdon arrived from Chelsea Landing, Connecticut. Elisha bought 160 acres south of Kedron on the east side of the Manchester road. James purchased 300 acres across the road. This proved to be an ideal location.

In 1841 Samuel Dexter donated land to enable the Michigan Central Railroad to reach his town. The next stopping point west was a small refueling station on Hugh Davidson’s farm, just west of James Congdon’s spread. When the station burned down in 1848, the Congdons gave the railroad land for a new station where the tracks crossed the Manchester road. Their donation made it easier for farmers to bring their crops to the train, and businesspeople from Pierceville began moving closer to the depot so they, too, could more easily send and get goods. The residents of Vermont Colony also relocated nearer the station, building a Congregational church on land donated by the Congdons. And so Chelsea was established.

The railroads let farmers ship their goods much farther and faster. As they prospered, so did the towns that served them--Dexter and Chelsea grew quickly because of the Michigan Central. In 1855 the Michigan Southern built a spur that passed through Manchester, followed in 1870 by a Detroit, Hillsdale, and Indiana line that passed through both Saline and Manchester. Orange Risdon was at the festivities marking the train’s arrival in his town; he died in 1876 at age eighty-nine.

All four communities have preserved landmarks to celebrate and honor their early years. Chelsea’s railroad station is now a museum and meeting place, and Elisha Congdon’s house is part of the beautifully expanded McKune Memorial Library. Dexter’s historic landmarks include its railroad station and Gordon Hall, Samuel Dexter’s third residence.

Manchester tore down its railroad station but saved its last blacksmith shop as a museum. The last Manchester Mill is now divided into offices and shops. In Saline, Orange Risdon’s house was moved to 210 West Henry Street in 1949 to make room for Oakwood Cemetery; it’s still there, now divided into apartments. Saline’s old depot is a historical museum, and on its grounds is Risdon’s livery barn. A walking path follows the old train tracks.

Carleton Angell's beloved sculptures return to the Natural History Museum

The two pumas that guarded the Ruthven Museums Building on North University for sixty-six years are missing. Generations of kids had clam­bered over the stylized black cats, and countless museum visitors had posed for pictures standing in front of them. But last July, a hole was noticed in the head of one of the pumas.

Officials first sus­pected vandalism. "They've been hit with paintballs. They were once trimmed with masking tape to look like zebras. And they've been painted green (probably in deference to a certain Big Ten ri­val)," writes museum employee Dan Madaj. But a more careful look made it clear that the real culprit was years of exposure to the ele­ments. The big cats were removed for restoration and replace­ment—the first time they'd left their perches since museum sculptor Carleton Watson Angell put them there in 1940.

A farm boy from Belding, in west Michi­gan, Angell overcame great obstacles to build a career as an artist. Born in 1887, he got his first art lessons as a child from a customer on his father's milk route. But then his father died, and his mother moved back to her hometown of Hion, New York, where Angell worked for seven years to save up for art school. He finally enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1909, at age twenty-two. Afterward he worked at the American Terra Cotta Company in nearby Crystal Lake, making decorative panels for building facades but lost that job dur­ing an economic downturn. He returned to Illinois, worked in his brother's grocery store, and married Gladys Thayer.

But Angell continued sculpting and drawing, and in 1922, when he was thirty-five, his persistence finally paid off: he got an offer from the U-M to be a half-time instructor at the College of Architecture and Design. By then he and Gladys had three children, so to supplement his income, they ran a boardinghouse at 1438 Washington Heights (about where the new School of Public Health building is today). Their daughter, Jennett Angell Hamilton, re­members watching her dad strip the sheets from the beds and bring them down for her mother to wash.

In 1926 Angell was offered additional work at the U-M Museum of Natural His­tory, which was preparing to move from State Street to North U. Celebrated indus­trial architect Albert Kahn designed the V-­shaped building, but Angell contributed many decorative details, including the bronze front doors and the limestone bas-reliefs of animals and naturalists on the facade. And even after the building opened in 1928, he continued to produce busts of important people connected with the museum, both living and dead. They were placed in alcoves around the rotunda as he finished them during the 1930s.

The pumas were his last major contri­bution to the decoration. In an article in the August 17, 1940, Michigan Alumnus, Angell explained that although lions are often chosen to guard public buildings, he preferred Michigan's native cats. After building scale models to check the propor­tions, he constructed full-size figures of wood, wire, plaster of Paris, and clay. From these he created plaster molds, which were used to cast the final versions in terrazzo, a stone aggregate. Sixty-six years later, the terrazzo finally began to show its age.

Angell's main job was to make mod­els for dioramas, miniature re­creations of natural and historic scenes. He worked with scientists to mod­el extinct animals from fossil skeletons, and with anthropologists to show how people in different cultures lived. He often depicted American Indians, whom he typi­cally showed at work—making pottery, drilling, carrying things.

None of Angell's Indian dioramas are still on display, but it's interesting to wonder how he would have reacted to the recent protest by art students who charged that the museum's current repre­sentations of Native Americans are racist. Angell worked hard to create accurate de­pictions. Jennett Hamilton recalls how the family traveled to a reservation in Missaukee County, where her father spent nine hours sculpting an Ottawa chief named Henri. When the chief died soon afterward, the Angell family went back north for the funeral.

His work at the museum led to com­missions from other university depart­ments, community groups, and individu­als. Angell eventually completed hundreds of local projects, including a bronze bas-relief of philanthropist Horace Rackham in the Rackham Building and a plaque at An­gell School depicting the school's name­sake, U-M president James B. Angell (the two Angells were believed to be distant relatives).

By 1936 Carleton Angell was earning, enough that he and his family were able to leave the boardinghouse. They lived at 933 South State Street and 1217 Lutz before building a home at 3125 Hilltop in the early 1950s. Angell created Arborcrest Memorial Park's Four Chaplains monu­ment in the family room at the Hilltop home. It depicts four clergymen—two Protestants, a Roman Catholic, and a Jew—who died after giving up their life jackets to others when their ship was tor­pedoed during World War II. He complet­ed another commission—relief panels for the Washtenaw County Courthouse depict­ing local life—in the home's garage. Daughter Jennett remembers how when he was done her father enlisted her husband and brothers, along with every other able-bodied relative and friend he could find, to help him deliver the massive artwork.

Angell died in 1962 from a massive heart attack. Though he was seventy-four, granddaughter Barbara Gilson says that his death came as a shock, since he seemed in good health and was by then taking care of Gladys, who had suffered a stroke. Dariel Keeney recalls, "The last thing my grandfather said to me on my last visit to him in the hospital, hours be­fore he died, was 'Take care of your grandmother. She is so precious to me.'"

Since their installation, Angell's pumas have served as symbols of the museum, standing out in all weather. Over the years various small repairs were made, but last July's discovery made it clear that the time had come for a com­plete overhaul.

This time the museum is taking a twor pronged approach. The Fine Arts Sculp­ture Centre in Clarkston made molds from the original figures and then cast replicas in bronze. The Venus Bronze Works in Detroit has added a black finish to the bronzes, and also has restored the original terrazzo figures.

The pumas are expected back around the middle of May. The bronze cats will take over the plinths outside the doors, while the terrazzo originals will be placed in a yet-to-be-determined location inside the museum. On June 2, the museum will celebrate their return with a Puma Party, including a display of Carleton Angell's work in the rotunda.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Farm-boy-turned-artist Carleton Angell created much of the ornamental detail on the Ruthven Museums Building, including the ornate bronze doors and the bas-relief sculptures on the facade. The two pumas guarding the entrance were the final touch—Angell chose Michigan's native cats instead of the customary lions.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Bronze replicas of the pumas were cast at the Fine Arts Sculpture Center in Clarkston. The Venus Bronze Works in Detroit has since added a black finish to match the terrazzo originals.

Photo: Carrie, Jeffrey, and Laura Pew at University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, August 1972

The garage at the center of the greenway debate

When the Washtenaw County Road Commission built a garage at 415 West Washington in 1925, no one dreamed that its future would ever be so hotly contested. But today, the Arts Al­liance of the Ann Arbor Area, Downtown Kiwanis, and the Allen Creek Task Force have all taken an interest in the crumbling masonry structure.

When the WCRC began operating in 1919, its offices were in the County Court­house, and the site on West Washington was a storage yard. By 1921, when former U-M All-American football player Ernie Allmendinger began working there, the commission maintained 104 miles of roads, only 8 miles of which were paved.

By 1925 it could afford its own build­ing—a simple concrete structure with of­fices above a garage. Three years later, the commission added a one-story workshop, and in 1930 the complex took on its pres­ent form with the completion of an addi­tional, brick garage.

By 1937 the WCRC staff was main­taining 1,411 miles of road. In an article written ten years later, Allmendinger re­called how three-person crews would go out and determine road and fence lines, of­ten with the help of property owners who showed them markers or deeds. The commission would then make im­provements, such as straightening roads, extending culverts, reshaping steep hills, and digging drainage ditches.

During the Great Depression, there was never enough time or money to do all that was needed. Then, in World War II, it was impossible to buy new equipment, or even parts for old equipment.

"We didn't have tools. We would work by hand, by shovel," recalls Thomas Kittel, who worked at the road commission after graduating from high school in 1944, and then again when he came back from the war in 1946.

In spring the challenge was to make muddy roads passable, mainly by spread­ing gravel. Then the crews had to grade the dirt roads to smooth out the ruts and potholes. If they didn't finish the road surfaces fast enough, "they would dry up harder than the devil," remembered one worker.

In the summer the challenge was the re­verse—keeping them from becoming too dusty. Washtenaw was the first county in the state to use liquid chloride to solve this problem. John Rayburn and Ernie Schel­lenberger worked on the first chloride truck. Rayburn recalls that he opened the tap that let out the chloride while Schellenberger drove.

Winter was the most challenging time. The crews would mix sand with flaky, sol­id chloride to keep the sand from freezing. During snowstorms, Carl Thayer's job was to stand at the back of the truck and push the sand onto a wheel that spread it onto the road. When Thayer got too cold, he would bang with his shovel on the back of the cab, and the driver would stop and let him come in to warm up.

WCRC employees fortunate enough to have indoor or part-indoor jobs—surveying, engineering, bookkeep­ing, purchasing, and personnel—worked on the second floor of the main building. Two other small county of­fices were also there: planning, with two full-time employees, and building inspections, with one. Eileen Westfall Gondak worked half time in each.

Gondak, who start­ed as a teenager in 1948, recalls that her boss, planner George Hurrell, "worried about the strip [on Washtenaw] between Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. He said if we don't zone better, with greenways, we won't be able to tell when one city ends and the other begins." According to Gon­dak, "Everyone laughed, saying, 'Where are you coming from?'"

Road crews ran the gamut from foot­ball star Allmendinger to someone who couldn't read. Many were farmers who worked their fields in their off hours. Sum­mer help often included football players recruited by Allmendinger.

Thayer—who, like Rayburn, went to work for the WCRC in 1947 after serving in World War II—recalls that they alternat­ed between working fifty-five and forty-five hours a week. Every other Friday, when the men got their checks, many would go drinking at Prey's Cafe on West Washington and not be in shape to come to work on Saturday.

After World War II, the road commission slowly be­gan replacing its equipment. One acquisition was a truck that sprinkled sand automati­cally, so that the only crew needed was a driver sitting in a warm cab. The delighted Thayer was the first to use it. The old trucks, which were just barely functioning, were sold for scrap.

In 1965 the road commis­sion moved to a modern garage on Zeeb Road. It was right in the middle of the county and much closer to the areas where work was needed, especially after the freeways were finished.

The City of Ann Arbor took over the Washing­ton Street build­ing. Upstairs are offices for parks and recreation, forestry, parking, traffic engineer­ing, and Fairview Cemetery, along with the sign shop.

The first floor is still garage. Community Standards—the former parking enforce­ment office, now expanded to include neighborhood parking regulations and "clean community" violations—is also in the building.

This summer most of the building's op­erations will move to a new garage now being constructed on Stone School Road south of Ellsworth (Community Standards will move to the former Fire Station 2, on Stadium near Packard). There is a broad spread of opinions on the best future use of the building—or the site if the building is torn down.

The Allen Creek Task Force is divided three ways on the site's future use—be­tween tearing the complex down to form a park, tearing it down and building some­thing new on the highest portion of the land, and restoring the 1925 building for another use. Several groups are interested in the building, including Downtown Ki­wanis for its sales, and the Arts Alliance of the Ann Arbor Area for artists' studios. (See "Land War: The Three-Way Fight over the Future of Downtown," October 2006.) The final decision will be up to city council.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Above): Arts advocate Tamara Real and Kiwanian Dan Dever both want the eighty-one-year-old garage for their nonprofits. (Right) The building under construction in 1924, just five years after the Washtenaw County Road Commission began operating. (Below) Ernie Schellenberger and John Rayburn sprayed liquid chloride on dirt roads to keep down the dust.

Ann Arbor's first suburb recalls the golden age of landscape architecture.

Barton Hills Village is a 140-home enclave set on rolling hills between the Huron River and Whitmore Lake Road. Ann Arbor's first suburb was a financial dis­aster for its developers, but a century af­ter it was conceived, it remains a master­piece of the landscaper's art. Designed by the Olmsted Brothers, whose father created New York's Central Park, it was carefully planned to preserve and em­phasize the land's natural forms. Today, its winding lanes and thoughtfully sited homes recall a moment in American his­tory when landscape architecture was an important cultural force.

Apparently, the area has always been recognized as special. In 1998 a builder working on a new home uncovered human remains at a site on Barton Shore Drive. He called the Washtenaw County sheriff's office, which called the U-M Museum of Anthropology. Archae­ologist John O'Shea came to investigate.

In a subsequent talk to Barton Hills residents, O'Shea recalled that he and his colleagues at first doubted whether the site was of archaeological interest: the remains seemed too fresh, and the bones seemed too long to be pre­historic. But further analysis of the bones, soil, and arti­facts established that the first recorded person at the site of what is now Barton Hills was a tall, slim young woman who lived more than 1,000 years ago. She must have been something of an aristocrat, because when she died, she was buried in a stone-lined grave instead of being left ex­posed to birds, insects, and weather, the usual practice at the time.

Even after white settlers cleared the trees from the hills early in the nineteenth century, the 1,000-year-old grave lay hidden and forgotten. Then, a century ago, the land­scape underwent another dramatic change.

In 1905, Detroit's Edison Illuminating Company pur­chased Washtenaw Light and Power, which had been fur­nishing electricity to Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti from a hydroelectric plant on Dixboro Road. Edison also bought other properties along the Huron where hydropower could be developed or improved, including the river be­low Barton Hills.

In Kilowatts at Work, a 1957 history of Detroit Edison, author Raymond C. Miller writes that the company wanted the sites mainly to eliminate competitors like Washtenaw Light and Power. Even then, it was clear that hydropower couldn't meet the area's demand for electricity. Nonethe­less, Edison went on to build the dams and generating stations that still define the river all the way from Belleville to Barton Hills.

The company's president at the time was Alex Dow (1862-1942), a Scottish immigrant who taught him­self science. According to Miller, Dow was a well-read man with many interests. "No one could ignore the fact that the introduction of dams and power plants would as­suredly alter the scene," Miller writes. "Dow himself was too much a lover of nature to do unnecessary violence to natural beauty, and the contemporary national emphasis on conservation and the protection of natural resources at­tracted his approval and interest."

Miller's book, commissioned by Detroit Edison, wasn't likely to portray Dow in any but a flattering light. But there's no question that Dow was a visionary. To ob­tain the property for its dams and flowage area, Edison of­ten had to buy larger parcels, including entire farms. In 1913 the company combined all the excess property, total­ing 2,000 acres, into one entity, the Huron Farms Compa­ny, and hired William E. Underdown, a 1904 Cornell graduate, to manage it.

The original idea had been to sell off the excess land, but soon Dow was full of plans to use it. He created a demonstration farm on Whitmore Lake Road, opened a resort for the company's women employees on Huron River Drive, and donated land on Argo Pond to the city for a boathouse and municipal beach. But his most lasting impact came when he hired the nation's leading landscape architects, Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts.

Frederick Law Olmsted and his then partner, Calvert Vaux, were the first people ever to describe themselves as "landscape architects." Their signature creation was the vast and innovative design of New York City's Central Park. The park's "natural design" was not natural at all: it was a carefully engineered replacement for what was then a swampy lowland. Beginning in 1857, Olmsted and Vaux changed it to a glorious centerpiece of the city by adding hills and meadows, massive plantings, curving pathways, and stone walls and bridges.

Olmsted founded his own firm in 1883. Driven by the conviction that beautiful settings would improve the health and welfare of ordinary people, he and his associ­ates shaped such beloved American landscapes as Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.; Detroit's Belle Isle; the spacious grounds of Stanford University; and Boston's "Emerald Necklace" of linked parks. The firm even con­tributed early designs for Yellowstone National Park.

Under Olmsted's son and stepson, who took over in 1895, the firm continued to win high-profile assignments, including the National Mall and the White House grounds in Washington. (In 1918 Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. ex­cused himself from a Barton Hills trip, writing that he was "continuously employed in Washington upon government work.") But during the "City Beautiful" movement of the early twentieth century, many smaller communities also sought guidance from the prestigious firm. Before World War I, Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and the U-M all commissioned master plans from the Olmsteds. The firm's list of Ann Ar­bor projects also includes plans for nine east-side sub­divisions and landscapes for an equal number of individual property owners. (Its landscape plan for Harry and Carrie Earhart's mansion on Geddes has been re-created by the building's present owner, Concordia University.)

Edison president Alex Dow oversaw construction of the company's power dams on the Huron River. Dow's wife, Vivienne, chose the site for their sprawling shingle-style home for its view of Barton Dam.

Dow sought the firm's advice on the entire Huron Fa^ms project. But its biggest contribution was its design for Barton Hills. Dow envisioned stately homes, a country club, and even a hotel on the rolling hills north of the newly created Barton Pond.

Some skeptics had trouble imagining the transformation Dow proposed. Be­cause the area had been cleared for graz­ing long before, they jokingly dubbed the planned community "Barren Hills."

On December 22, 1915, Underdown reported to the Olmsteds that he was surveying the hill land north of Barton Pond and "would like to arrange with you to lay this out for [a] subdivision ... for fairly high class private homes." By April 1916 the firm had delivered a preliminary plan. The lots were large, from one to eight acres, and a cover letter explained that each had been laid according to "impor­tant views, and with the shape of the land."

The letter noted that the country club was sited high on a hill, "in a most com­manding position" on Barton North Drive. Deceptively rustic, the roads were actually carefully engineered for optimal grading and drainage. The Olmsteds added that Barton Shore Drive, which roughly paral­leled Barton North Drive at a lower eleva­tion, would "undoubtedly prove the most attractive when built as it will follow com­paratively near the water and will command an uninterrupted view over the pool."

"It's that drive along the shore that does it," comments Realtor Ed Surovell, who lives in Barton Hills. "On most of the recreational lakes in this area (and almost everywhere else for that matter) roads have been placed behind the houses (usually seasonal cottages) so that there is no road between cottage and water; here, the mo­torist or pedestrian gets the benefit."

The site was not entirely empty. While the dam was being constructed, several unassuming, traditional houses had been built on the shore for Edison employees; they are still there, now used for Barton Hills staff. During World War I a few grander homes were built by individuals with Edison connections. Underdown, the Huron Farms manager, began work on a house for his family in 1916. He consulted with a "Mr. G. Gibbs" of Olmsted on the construction of the access road, later named Underdown.

Infrastructure work began in earnest af­ter the war. In 1919, by special action of the Huron Farms board, Dow's wife, Vivienne, was given her choice of any lot in the subdivision for $1. She chose a centrally located sixteen-acre site, halfway between the high road and the shore road, that had an excellent view of the pond, so her hus­band could look out and see his dam.

Designed by U-M architecture dean Emil Lorch (who probably also did the Underdown house), the Dow home was started in 1921 and occupied by 1922. It is large, with twenty rooms, but feels com­fortable and homey. In the manner of the British rural gentry, the Dows gave it a name, "Brushwood." (According to their granddaughter, the name came from one of Vivienne's favorite poems.)

After the house was completed, Alex Dow commuted to Detroit, sometimes staying the night or part of the week. For many years Vivienne continued to consult the Olmsted firm, asking about such things as where to locate the rose garden, the configuration of the path to the beach, and how to add a stone wall in front. In Febru­ary 1927, Ferris Smith, who had replaced Gibbs as the Olmsted representative, visit­ed the Dows and reported, "Met Mrs. Dow at 10 o'clock, also Mr. Dow. He left after a few minutes and said that Mrs. Dow was boss of the place."

According to a reminiscence written by former resident Ole Blackett in 1974, the developers first focused on selling multi-acre sites to buyers seeking "large houses suitable for country estates." But if Dow had hoped to lure other Detroit executives to Barton Hills, he was disappointed— most of the early buyers came from Ann Arbor. "For several reasons, among which are the rapid expansion of the University and the great amount of heavy traffic along Washtenaw Ave., it seems that sev­eral people have already decided that they wish to move further out," Smith reported in June 1922. "And while I was in Ann Ar­bor, among those who came out to Barton Hills to look at property were the Dan Zimmermans, Dr. R. Bishop Canfield, Dr. and Mrs. [Breakey], and Dr. and Mrs. Loree." Drs. Breakey and Loree both lived near Central Campus, while Canfield and Zimmerman, a businessman who had in­vestments in everything from artificial ice to ball bearings, were neighbors on Wash­tenaw. (The Canfields' home later became the Women's City Club.)

As lots were sold, architects began con­tacting the Olmsted firm for site informa­tion. For instance, a July 1922 letter from Cuthbert and Cuthbert (William and Ivan, local architect and engineer respectively) asks for specifics for lots 7 and 8. Because each site plan needed detailed drawings, the Olmsteds suggested hiring a full-time architect; they recommended George Babson, who had done similar work for them at Forest Hills Gardens on Long Island.

Detroit Edison completed the first nine holes of Barton Hills Country Club in 1919. In 1922 the clubhouse was built and the course extended and redesigned. "The idea of the country club was to embellish the subdivision," explains Edmond DeVine, who today lives in the Underdown house and as a boy often came to the golf course with his father. The club's original mem­bers constituted a who's who of the com­munity; among them were U-M regent Junius Beal and Walter Mack, owner of the town's largest department store. (Member­ship is not linked to residency—of the 540 current member families, only fifty-six live in the village.)

The first two houses, Underdown's and the Dows', were in the shingled Arts and Crafts style. In the 1920s the English Cot­tage style was popular, with its steeply pitched roofs, casement windows, stained-glass windows, and curved entrances. Cuthbert and Cuthbert excelled at this style, winning an honorable mention in an architectural magazine for the Vernau home on Underdown.

According to Ole Blackett, however, "suddenly the sale of lots stopped....Ap­parently the demand for expensive country estate had run out and Edison was forced to alter its sales policy." Blackett believed that Edison then subdivided larger lots to produce more affordable parcels. How­ever, even the earliest Olmsted maps show many relatively modest homesites of an acre or so. More likely, the developers simply changed their focus from multiple-lot blocks to individual sales.

The first clue that Edison might be lowering its sights came in 1924, when Under-down asked Frederick Olm­sted Jr. his opinion of Henry Flagg houses, which, Underdown ex­plained, were "built low to the ground without cellars." Olmsted was out of the office when the letter arrived, but his staff answered, "We know that Mr. Olmsted has been more or less acquainted with the 'Flagg' house for some time, and while we cannot quote him we understand he is not enthusiastic over them." Nonetheless, three Flagg houses were built near the east end of the development.

Edison's hopes for Barton Hills peaked in 1925, when the company had Olmsted sketch out a possible extension of the de­velopment all the way west to the Foster Bridge on Maple Road. But there weren't enough buyers to fill the original subdivi­sion, much less the extension. Edison stopped consulting the Olmsted firm after 1927, presumably to rein in expenses.

The 1931 advertising brochure empha­sized that "homes need not be pretentious" and invited future buyers to "notice the di­versity of architecture and to see how har­moniously the smaller homes blend with the larger residences." Even many of those larger houses seem relatively normal to­day. "The houses that I remember were not fancy," says Sarah Riggs Taggart, who as a child spent a lot of time at Barton Hills because her grandparents on both sides, Henry and Emma Riggs and Grace Walzer, and her aunt Lizzie Oliphant all lived there. "I remember the Breakey house as comfortable, the Riggs house likewise. Gram [Walzer]'s big house was the fanciest, and the fact that subsequent owners haven't tampered with it suggests that everyone has loved it as it is."

Barton Hills grew slowly but steadily even through the Depression. Instead of executives, many of the new arrivals in the 1930s were U-M faculty, such as Bill Haber and his wife, Fanny; William and Louise Trow; and Ole and Ruth Blackett. Helen Underdown built a smaller house on Juniper Lane after William was killed in a car crash in 1930.

In 1941 Dr. Howard and Cecilia Ross built a multipillared house that neighbors sarcastically dubbed "Tara," after the man­sion in Gone With the Wind. That same year, at the opposite end of the architectur­al spectrum, Otto and Eleanor LaPorte built the first Modern-style home in Barton Hills. Designed by U-M architecture pro­fessor George Brigham, "it was so modern, Otto and Eleanor had a difficult time get­ting financing," reports Adele LaPorte, Otto's second wife. "It was so outre, the bank said they'd never get their money out of it." A year later Gene and Sadie Power also built a Modern house, designed by Birmingham architect Wallace Frost.

Home building stopped during World War II, when materials were needed for the war effort. That may have been the final straw for Detroit Edison. As early as 1931, financial people at the company were com­plaining that Huron Farms, as the develop­ment was still called, had cost roughly $234,000 and produced only $22,000. There were also ongoing costs, with Edison employees often siphoned off to do chores at Barton Hills and the other properties.

So in 1944 the company essentially gave the property to the residents. "They contacted the people who lived here and wanted them to take it over," recalls Walter Esch, the village's maintenance superintendent. But according to Esch, "the people didn't have any money, and they didn't want to take it over. So Edi­son put ten thousand dollars in the bank for them to take it over and left Charlie Gallagher, one of their employees, to stay on the premises."

According to Blackett, who was in­volved in the negotiations, the transaction was carefully crafted to allow Edison to write off its losses on the development without creating any new tax liabilities for the residents. Edison sold out to the newly formed Barton Hills Improvement Associ­ation for just $20,000 —and gave the group a mortgage for the entire amount. Though Blackett was on the U-M faculty, he writes that after the transfer, "I went on the road myself and sold lots in order to meet our mortgage payments and our share of the employment payrolls."

By 1949 Gallagher needed help in maintaining the subdivision's 500 acres. He talked Walter Esch, then twenty-three, away from his family farm on North Terri­torial to take the job. Walter and his wife, Mary, moved into one of three three-bedroom employee houses, where they raised ten children. One of those children, David, and his wife, Jan, now live in one of the houses, too. David is the village's assistant maintenance superintendent, and Jan is the village's assistant clerk.

Walter Esch recalls that one of the more colorful postwar residents was Edgar Kaiser, son of the industrialist Henry Kaiser, who had taken over the Willow Run bomber plant to build Kaiser Frazer cars. Edgar enlarged the Riggs home and added a swimming pool. Every year he put up 3,500 outdoor Christmas lights that drew viewers from all around, and ended the hol­iday season with a big New Year's party. "If they [the guests] had too much to drink, Mr. Kaiser would come and say, 'Walt, take one of the cars'—he always had five or six cars from the factory sitting there—'and take them home,' " remembers Esch.

When he started, Esch says, there were still only about thirty homes in the village. The Detroit Edison people were all gone, and most of the residents were profession­als—doctors, dentists, and professors. But the postwar construction boom was start­ing, and after thirty years of delays, Barton Hills was about to fill up.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many new homes were Modern designs by forward-looking U-M professors, such as Brigham and Bob Metcalf. Architects Fran Quarton and Herb Johe built houses for themselves, and Johe designed four others. David Osler, son-in-law of Emil Lorch, also built sever­al Modern houses, and the Colvin Robin­son firm designed a home for George and Elizabeth (Libby) Langford. Generally, these were flat-roof designs that blended in with the landscape and made economi­cal and respectful use of such materials as glass, wood, and concrete. They probably averaged about 2,800 square feet—consid­erably smaller than the mansions that had preceded them.

Multitalented Walter Esch became, de facto, the landscaper of Barton Hills. Olm-sted had laid one-lane gravel roads. Over time, Esch oversaw their widening to two-lane asphalt roads that retain the Olmsted contours. "Oh, Juniper Lane was gravel," he recalls. He and another employee "blacktopped it by hand because they [the residents' association] didn't have any money." Using rubble from city of Ann Arbor demolitions, he widened the shoul­ders where the river sometimes washed out the road.

Over the years, Esch has also been, de facto, fire chief, chief of police, water commissioner, road maintenance adminis­trator and crew, garbage department head and crew, mailman, rescue squad for household emergencies, and bus driver. "Because Walter came at the time the community was just finding its identity," his daughter-in-law Jan says, "many of the current traditions were his idea, and the two just grew up together."

From 1944 to 1975, between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every day, the Barton Hills bus was available for trips to and from Ann Arbor. "We picked up the maids and everything," Esch says. "There was a family, we had to sit there until the maid had the dinner on the table before we could take her to town, and the board backed her [the lady of the house] up. Charlie and I, we used to argue with the board all the time about that."

The older Esch children went to the two-room Hagen School on Dhu Varren Road. As the district grew, the younger ones went to various elementary schools.

"I think most Barton Hills kids went to University School," Mary says. Walter re­calls that the Barton Hills bus delivered kids to seven schools, including, besides the now defunct University School, St. Thomas, Angell, Tappan, and eventually Greenhills. Ann Arbor school buses now take kids to Wines, Forsythe, and Pioneer.

In 1973 Barton Hills became the first home-rule village in Washtenaw County. This status protected the subdivision from what residents saw then as potential incur­sions of other governments that might ne­cessitate difficult and expensive water and sewage linkups.

"My two best friends," says Libby Langford, a critical player in establishing the village, "were Conrail and the Foster Bridge"—the high-speed tracks and single-lane bridge discouraged traffic from Ann Arbor. "Nobody bothers us; we do our own thing; we love it."

The village has its own well on a cleanaquifer. Each home has its own septic sys­tem, and the village requires periodic in­spections. Residents pay taxes to both the village and Ann Arbor Township, currently totaling about 13.5 mills. (The correspon­ding rate in Ann Arbor is 16.9 mills.) One curious legacy of the village's past is that the Barton Hills Maintenance Corporation owns the roads and therefore is able to limit access to the village—signs at the en­trances announce "No thoroughfare" and "Private road."

Only a few empty lots remain, and most of those belong to families who own two. So, for the most part, if a new house is to be built, an old one must come down. In the past ten years the village has seen about half a dozen "teardowns." The long-forgotten stone grave was discovered during one of these projects, for Domino's Pizza president and U-M regent David Brandon.

These new homes vary in architectural style, but all of them are several times larger than the buildings they replaced.

That's become an issue for the mainte­nance corporation, which must approve all building plans. "As I look to the future," says president Chuck Bultman, "one of the struggles of the corporation is to find a way to work with the larger house typical today, sited on lots designed for a more modest house size."

The first generation of residents were, like Alex Dow himself, wealthy white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But unlike some developments of its era, Barton Hills never had restrictive deed covenants that barred minorities. Today, residents include African American, Middle Eastern, Indian, Kashmiri, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and East Asian families.

Prosperity, however, remains a require­ment. According to the 2000 census, Bar­ton Hills' median household income was $149,000, more than triple Ann Arbor's $46,000. And while Ann Arbor posted a healthy median home value of $181,000, it paled next to Barton Hill's $710,000. Real estate agent Nancy Bishop, who lives in the village, estimates that house values start at about $600,000 and run all the way up to $5 or $6 million.

Since 1949, Walter Esch has done whatever needs doing in Barton Hills. His wife, Mary, raised ten children in a bungalow originally built for workers on Barton dam. Now their son David and daughter-in-law Jan work for the village, too, and live in another of the houses.

There have been a few minor adjustments over the years, but overall, Barton Hills' layout remains remarkably faithful to the parklike de­sign worked out by the Olmsteds more than eighty years ago. The biggest change is that hills once barren are now almost covered with trees.

The Olmsteds recommended trees as early as 1916, and the U-M forestry school oversaw plantings in the 1920s. The firm was never commissioned to develop a maintenance plan for the village, but to judge by its work elsewhere, it would al­most certainly have provided for glades, dells, and long clear views between group­ings of well-tended trees. Instead, coveted and cosseted, the trees have multiplied into a thick forest that presents a major challenge to the Olmsted plan.

The original country club building nes­tled into the landscape yet offered a lovely view of the river from its long covered veranda. Over the decades, however, trees grew and blocked the river view. In the late 1980s the original clubhouse was torn down and replaced by a large, traditionally columned building placed right up against Country Club Road. The site described by Olmsted Brothers as the best in Barton Hills is now occupied by a parking lot.

Knowledge of Dow's Olmstedian vi­sion died out with the first generation of residents. Many present residents inter­viewed for this article hadn't even known of the Olmsted connection when they bought their houses. As the years went by and trees continued growing, people living away from the shore forgot about the views and instead enjoyed the closeness to nature and privacy that the trees provided.

"When the view died, the plan died. Views only exist for the fortunate few," says Ed Surovell, adding that people today are attracted by the trees instead. "It was a change in social values. Trees were good, positive. City folks can't tell good trees from bad."

They're trying to learn. In 2003 the vil­lage's board of trustees hired Clark Fores­try to conduct a study of the state of the woods. (Though the firm is based in Bara-boo, Wisconsin, owner Fred Clark grew up in Barton Hills.) Commissioning of the study "is an indication of the awareness that the trees need to be managed and plans made for the future," Jan Esch says. "It has been supported by consistent, if limited, budgetary funding. Some funds were spent last year on garlic mustard control and ash tree removal, with contin­uing efforts under way for this year." There are other environmental issues as well, such as plant growth in Barton Pond and the village's resident deer herd, which has grown so large that it has to be man­aged by professional sharpshooters under a state permit.

Although it has acquired more and big­ger houses, Barton Hills hasn't become a mere house museum. The rolling hills, al­luring roads, and general focus on the pond remain intact. A century after Alex Dow started buying up property along the Huron, the Olmsted Brothers' work has held up well.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Above) An Olmstead Brothers blueprint shows the signature stone pillars at the entrance. (Left) The country club was set on the hilltop overlooking Barton Pond - one of the many views lost as woods grew up throughout the subdivision (below).

[Photo caption from original print edition]: As early as 1931, Edison's financial people were complaining that the development had cost roughly $234,000 and produced only $22,000. There were also ongoing costs, with Edison employees often siphoned off to do chores at Barton Hills and the other properties.

The stone which the builders rejected

When architect David Byrd was building the chapel that bears his name, he put a quotation from Psalm 118:22 over the front entrance: "The stone which the builders rejected." Joe Summers, vicar of the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, which now occupies the building, finds the message very apt, since the church was built from discarded construction materials and by people who were in danger of being passed over because of their race. "It's a metaphor for all the outcasts that society rejected," explains Summers.

Finished in 1987, just months before Byrd died, the chapel at 3261 Lohr Road was the culmination of his career as an architect and a teacher. A simple rectangular design with a cupola, the chapel looks much like a traditional New England church, except that it is made of concrete blocks rather than wood or stone.

In 1966 Byrd gave up a career as an architect in Washington, D.C., to start WCC's construction technology program. Born in 1921, he was educated at Hampton Institute and Howard University, and later earned a master's and worked toward a doctorate in architecture at the U-M. According to his widow, Letitia Byrd, a retired teacher and a community activist, the job at WCC appealed to Byrd's idealistic side. "He wanted to use architecture to help people," she explains. "He wanted to stimulate black students to study--to create new opportunities, lines of vision."

By the 1960s construction unions were no longer officially segregated, but they were hard to get into if you didn't have connections. One of Byrd's main goals was to get more blacks into the unions by giving them the necessary training. In some cases older students already had the skills but needed a piece of paper as proof. Byrd also encouraged more African Americans to become architects.

In addition to working at WCC, Byrd continued to practice architecture, starting with his own house on Brookside and one across the street for Letitia's grandmother. Many of his projects connected to his social activism, such as the Black Economic Development League building on Depot and a nursery school for Ypsilanti's Greater Shiloh Church of God in Christ. A lot of his projects were church related--converting the former Arnet's Monuments on Chapin into New Hope Baptist, designing and building New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church in Willow Run, and adding on to what is now Crossroads Community Baptist Church, next to Stone School. For his own church, Ann Arbor's First United Methodist, Byrd designed and built a chapel, a memorial garden, and a promenade that serves as a barrier-free entrance.

Whenever he could, Byrd used his commissions to create job opportunities for his students and for black contractors in the area. Victor Hamilton, a WCC student whom Byrd was mentoring, was one of those hired to work on the Greater Shiloh nursery school. Hamilton recalls that as part of the job, the union came out and signed people up. Carl Hearns, an African American concrete contractor, sponsored Hamilton, getting him into the trade he still practices. Hamilton says that if he hadn't met Byrd, it probably wouldn't have happened. "Growing up on the south side of Ypsilanti, I didn't know about unions," says Hamilton. "He put me in that direction."

Byrd also liked finding new uses for old buildings. He built his own office in a onetime garage on East Summit, and converted the old brewery at Summit and Fifth into apartments. In 1969, while serving as a Washtenaw County commissioner, Byrd convinced the county to purchase the old Holy Ghost Seminary at Washtenaw and Hogback; today, it's part of the County Service Center.

In 1975 Byrd bought an 1830s farmhouse and sixty acres of land on Lohr, then a dirt road. Although now across the street from Kohl's department store, the house then seemed way out in the country. Run down from years of rental use, it was a perfect teaching tool for restoration practices. Hamilton and others recall helping to raise the sagging floor, jacking up the roof, putting in new rafters, and replacing the gingerbread on the outside.

In another of Byrd's class projects--building a cupola--his students learned how to apply metal to wood. They constructed the wooden frame at WCC and added the metal in Byrd's basement. When it was done, Byrd thought it was so pretty that it should be used. He decided to build something on the land behind the farmhouse.

His original thought was that the building should be a community meeting space. "There were very few places blacks could meet," explains Letitia. But one day, "he felt a calling to build a church," she recalls. "He was very spiritual. If he had lived, he would probably have gone into the ministry. He spent so much of his time studying and researching church work and talking to ministers."

Victor Hamilton was involved in the project from the beginning, laying the concrete blocks on weekends. He worked mostly alone, although another WCC student, Terry Samuels, sometimes helped. Samuels also worked on the altar and other interior brickwork. Whenever he could, Byrd used donated material that contractors didn't need or had rejected--but Hamilton also remembers many trips to Fingerle Lumber.

For work outside his expertise, Byrd looked to the black contractors who had worked on his other projects, such as Flint electrician Tom Flowers. "He was a dear friend--more like a brother," recalls Flowers. At each stage Byrd invited his WCC students to come, watch, and learn.

Byrd's personal stantp was most noticeable inside the chapel. He designed the stained-glass windows, chose the verses to put on the railings and on the stonework, designed the interior cross, and did most of the inside carpentry, including the railings, pulpit, and chancel, where he inlaid a cross in the wooden floor.

The chapel was dedicated in January 1987. The service was beautiful, recalls J. Nathaniel Crout, the pastor at New Covenant. According to Crout, Byrd envisioned the church as "a place people could come to concentrate, meditate--a sanctuary."

Early that spring, Byrd had a heart attack. "He left home in pain one morning. At noon he drove to St. Joe's and was admitted. He never came home," recalls Letitia. He died on May 17, 1987, at age sixty-six, after seven weeks on a respirator. "On the day he died, students poured their eyes out," Crout remembers.

A year after Byrd's death, the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation started meeting in the chapel. The congregation was founded in 1984 by a group from St. Andrew's who wanted to put more emphasis on social justice issues. They had been meeting in various places--private homes, the Pittsfield Grange, the old Arborland--until Letitia heard about their need through her brother, a member of the congregation. She eventually sold them the land and gave them the building, with the provision that it remain in religious use for fifty years. She is now working on turning the restored farmhouse into a museum of African American history.

Since moving to the Byrd Chapel, the Church of the Incarnation has grown to 160 members. Needing more space and amenities, it undertook a major fund-raising effort to build an addition, designed and constructed by Attila Huth, that includes a large social hall, Sunday school space, and staff offices. To meet township standards, the church also replaced the narrow dirt entrance road with a paved two-lane driveway and large parking lot.

The new addition meets public meeting standards, so the building can now be rented out for lectures, concerts, or weddings. Already serving Byrd's vision of a place of worship, it will also fit his original idea of a community meeting place.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: A cupola created by his WCC class inspired architect David Byrd to build a chapel on his property in Pittsfield Township. "He was very spiritual," recalls his widow, Letitia. "If he had lived, he would probably have gone into the ministry."

The Germans in Ann Arbor

A century ago, German immigrants and their descendants were Ann Arbor's biggest eth­nic group. Starting in 1829, and continuing for 100 years, Germans immigrated to the area in waves, fleeing political and eco­nomic troubles in their homeland.

Most came from small villages surrounding Stuttgart in the kingdom of Wurttemberg. They called themselves "Swabians" after the country that encompassed Wurttem­berg in the Middle Ages. "The name stuck although the country didn't," explains Art French, president of Ann Ar­bor's Schwaben Verein.

The Schwaben Verein (roughly, "Swabian Club") was one of dozens of institutions through which Ann Arbor's German-speaking community re-created their European culture. For generations, immigrants and their children could worship in German, attend parochial schools taught in German, and even get their local news from German-language newspapers.

Most lived in what is today the Old West Side Historic District. By 1880 "one-third of the population [of Ann Ar­bor] were Germans or of German extraction," Marie Rominger recalled in an unpublished history written in the 1930s. "These formed a closed community so that that part of the city to the west of Main and south of Huron was occupied almost exclusively by Germans, and on the streets there, one could deem oneself in Germany, for the German language was very gen­erally spoken by old and young."

German pioneers

Conrad Bissinger was probably the first German to set foot in Ann Arbor. A baker from Mannheim, Bissinger arrived in Ann Arbor in 1825, one year after the town was founded. He found a small settle­ment of log cabins, too small to support a baker, so he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he plied his trade while saving money to return to Washtenaw County. In 1830 Bissinger bought land in Scio Township, settling on it in 1831.

Daniel Allmendinger arrived in Ann Arbor after Bissinger in 1825; he also left but returned sooner--in 1829, accompanied by two other Germans, Jonathan Hen­ry Mann and Ernst Peter Schilling. All three were origi­nally from Wurttemberg but were living temporarily in German settlements in the eastern United States: Mann in Reading, Pennsylvania, and Schilling and Allmendinger in Dansville, New York.

According to the Mann family history, written in 1930, "They visited Ann Arbor and were much pleased with the village and while Mr. Schilling remained, the other two returned home for their families, having decided to make Washtenaw County their future home."

Schilling had brought his family with him and so was able to settle immediately on the eighty acres he bought in Scio Township near Park Road. Allmendinger bought land in Scio closer to town--part of the property today is occupied by the Westgate and Maple Village shopping centers--and started his farm before returning east. "The story is told that on this trip Daniel brought on his back all the way from Dansville, New York, four hundred small fruit trees," says the Allmendinger family history. "Daniel planted his fruit trees and a crop of corn on his new land and then again returned to New York. The following au­tumn he came back with his family."

Mann, trained as a tanner in Germany, was the only one of the three to settle in the village and ply his trade rather than farm. According to the family history, "he bought a lot on the corner of Washington and First for twelve dollars and the lot next door on Washington for a pair of shoes. His specialty was tanning deerskins, which must have been plentiful in what was then a frontier town. "He set up a workshop at the rear of his home," Marie Rominger writes. "Here he tanned the hides that were brought him, from all the surrounding country/He would accumulate the leather thus tanned, and when he had a sufficiently large pack, he would load it on his back and start afoot on the old Indian trail for Detroit, the nearest market."

A German magazine writer, Karl Neidhard, met Mann in Pennsylvania while writing about German settlers there. In 1834 another reporting trip brought Neidhard to Ann Arbor, where he was overjoyed to encounter Mann again. "The whole family [the Manns had seven living children] lived in a house with two main rooms, a kitchen, and attic rooms," Neidhard wrote. "A small barn gave shelter to a horse and a cow, while a tract of land sur­rounding the house and extending down the slope of a hill furnished feed for the animals and supplied the family with vegetables and, presently, with fruit. A wild plum tree had already been transplanted into the garden. In the lower part of the garden, a small creek [Alien's Creek] drove a mill wheel."

Peasants and political refugees

Mann wrote to his brother-in-law in Stuttgart, Emanuel Josenhans, "giving a very favorable account of what he saw of the new territory and the route by which it could be reached," his son Jonathan wrote in the 1881 History of Washtenaw County, Michigan. "Mr. Josenhans circulated the letter amongst the peas­antry in the neighborhood of Stuttgart. The consequence was that numerous immigra­tion was started for Michigan by a class of small farmers and mechanics who had very limited means."

Seven more German families came in 1830, and by 1832 there were over thirty. Most of the Germans immigrants who fol­lowed in the next 100 years came from the same villages, drawn by family ties and sponsorships. They came for better eco­nomic opportunities, for political freedom, and to avoid military service.

Disastrous harvests and political and economic dislocation after the Napoleonic Wars motivated the first wave of immi­grants. Jacob Stollsteimer came in 1830 because of crop failure caused by a drought. Frederick and Maria Staebler im­migrated to Scio Township from Wurttemberg in 1831 "to escape Metternich's con­straints and the looming threat of Prussia," according to a memoir by their great-grandson, Neil Staebler.

The abortive revolution of 1848, and the social unrest caused by subsequent efforts to reestablish monarchies in the German states, spurred the second wave of immigra­tion. This group was smaller than the first but often better educated--for instance, Marie Rominger's father, Dr. Karl Rominger, fled to avoid criminal prosecution for his involvement in the failed revolution. A medical doctor, trained at the University of Tubingen, he was also knowledgeable in geology, and in 1869 he was appointed the state geologist.

By 1855 there were estimated to be more than 5,000 Swabian Germans in and around Ann Arbor. Non-Swabians also were coming to the area by then, drawn by the large German-speaking population. According to Irving Katz's The Jews in Michigan before 1850, Jews immigrating from Germany and eastern Europe favored Washtenaw County because "many of the farmers in this county were recent German immigrants themselves, and the Jewish ar­rivals found here the language of their na­tive land and a place where they could earn a living, mostly as peddlers, until they could establish themselves as mer­chants, manufacturers, or craftsmen." The earliest arrivals, the five Weil brothers, came in the 1840s, followed by their par­ents in 1850. In 1845 the first Jewish wor­ship services ever held in Michigan were conducted in the Leopold Weil home on Washington.

In the 1870s and 1880s, more Germans fled the effects of the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War and German chancellor Otto von Bismarck's "iron fist." Christian Schlenker came in 1871 after his parents died in an epidemic that broke out during the war. He and his three siblings were sponsored by their uncle, jeweler Jacob Haller. Schlenker started a hardware store that lasted four generations.

German immigration slowed from 1893 to World War I, because the German econ­omy was doing fine while the United States went through several severe recessions. But one final wave of Germans came after World War I, es­pecially in the 1920s, as the United States prospered and Ger­many fought staggering inflation--baker William Metzger left when it took a bushel basket of money to buy a loaf of bread. Sponsored by Ann Arbor baker Sam Heusel, grandfather of radio personality Ted Heusel, Metzger took over the restaurant that be­came Metzger's, and his brother Fritz became owner of the Old German. A third brother, Gottfried, ran the Deluxe Bakery, sup­plying the black bread used by both restaurants.

A missionary from Basel

In 1832 Jonathan Mann wrote to the Basel Mission House asking that a pastor be sent so that Ann Arbor's Germans could hear preaching in their own tongue. (Al-though in Switzerland, the Basel mission was close to Wurttemberg and received much of its support from people in that region.) Basel sent a recent graduate, Friedrich Schmid, a twenty-five-year-old German from Waldorf.

Schmid arrived in Detroit on August 20, 1833, and from there walked to Ann Arbor, where he lived initially with the Mann fam­ily. "They received me with love and friendliness, and I at once found myself at home in their cabin," Schmid wrote in a letter to his superiors in Basel. He described Ann Arbor as "a little village, mainly of English people, only a few German families are in the city, the remaining families, perhaps forty to forty-six, live out in the woods and forest."

Since most of the local Germans were farmers, Schmid's con­gregation decided to build their church in the country. Daniel Allmendinger donated an acre on a corner of his farm (today part of Bethlehem Cemetery on Jackson Road). Work commenced in November and was finished by the end of December. "A little church in the forest has been erected upon a beautiful hilltop," Schmid reported. "It is thirty-two feet long and twenty-six feet wide, completely of wood, built at a spot which a few years ago was a wilderness where bears and wolves roamed." The first Ger­man church in Michigan, it was formally named the "First Ger­man Evangelical Society of Scio" but known commonly as Zion Church.

On his visit in 1834, journalist Karl Neidhard walked out from Ann Arbor to attend services with Mann. "Soon there were oth­ers, men with pointed hats and women wearing Swabian bonnets appeared from the bush and joined us. ... About a hundred peo­ple attended. I was told that no one was absent excepting those whose state of health or whose advanced age made the long walk inadvisable. Mr. Schmid . . . rose and delivered a very sound and moving sermon which was not only listened to in absolute silence but was also understood and appreciated I am sure. As far as pos­sible, he spoke in the Swabian dialect. The rituals were those of the homeland. The German hymns, the profound calm of the nearby forest, the simple log house and the good-natured faces of the country people, who, far from their fatherland, were thanking the Lord for leading them safely across ocean and land to the far­thermost frontier of Christianity--all of this was for me a most moving scene."

A year after his arrival, Schmid married Mann's oldest daugh­ter, Sophie Louise. "Our wedding took place on the fourth of Sep­tember in our little Zion Church," Schmid wrote. "My entire con­gregation came and received us with singing as we approached the House of God." As a wedding present, the bride's parents built them a house.

By 1836 the congregation had grown to more than eighty, and so a second church was built three miles away on Scio Church Road. Originally called the "German Salem Society," it is today Salem Evangeli­cal Lutheran Church. Schmid preached at Zion on Sunday morning and at Salem in the afternoon. His house was built on a six-acre site across from the Salem church, so he could grow food instead of buying all his groceries in Ann Arbor--a considerable savings, since he and Sophie Louise eventually had twelve children.

In his missionary capacity, Schmid also ministered to other German communities all over southern Michigan. He was directly responsible for starting twenty churches, but if one includes all the congregations where he was the first to give a sermon, the number is between forty and seventy.

Schmid's traveling ministry also led to his being an informal land agent: if new arrivals couldn't find what they wanted in Washtenaw County, he could guide them to other German commu­nities. The Schmids hosted many Germans when they first arrived. "At times the parsonage resembled a hotel, with this difference--that the guests were free to come and go without charge," recalled their son, Frederick Schmid Jr.

Almost all the earliest arrivals started out as farmers, even those who had practiced a trade in Germany. But as Ann Arbor grew bigger and farmland grew scarcer, more Germans settled in town. By 1839 the in-town German population, tired of the week­ly three-mile trek to church, asked for more convenient services. Schmid began alternating between country and village, initially preaching in the Presbyterian church and the County Courthouse. In 1845 the congregation bought a lot at First and Washington, di­agonally across from Mann's house, and started building. Bethle­hem Church was finished in 1849. The same year, Schmid moved to town. After that the original country church on Jackson was used only for weddings and funerals, until it was torn down in 1881.

Settling the Old West Side

In 1845 merchant and developer William Maynard bought a large parcel of the land just west of the village and began dividing it into house lots. Maynard's property extended west from First to Seventh, north to Huron, and south to Mosley. (Though Maynard prosaically used numbers for most of his streets, Mosley is named after his mother's family.)

Maynard's subdivision, conveniently located between Bethlehem Church and the German farming community to the west, was the natural destination for the town's rapidly growing German popula­tion. They built not only houses but also factories, businesses, and recreational fa­cilities in the area we now know as the Old West Side.

Alien's Creek, running north along the eastern edge of Maynard's subdivision (approximately where the Ann Arbor Rail­road tracks go today), attracted industries that needed water, such as breweries and tanneries. Other business people located downtown, including pharmacist Christian Eberbach and cabinetmaker Florian Mueh-lig. In 1852 Muehlig starting making cas­kets as an offshoot of his furniture busi­ness, which later segued into today's Muehlig Funeral Chapel. Jacob Haller, trained as a watchmaker in Germany, set up shop on Huron Street in 1858.

In the post-Civil War economic boom, factories owned and run by Germans flourished. In 1866 John Keck started a furniture company at 405 Fourth Street (now the Argus Building). In 1872 David Allmendinger (Daniel's nephew) started an organ factory in his home; by 1907 he employed 107 men and had built a large brick factory at the corner of Washington and First. The same year Christian Walker founded a successful carriage company; his Liberty Street factory is today the Ann Arbor Art Center.

Germans also dominated the Main Street shopping district. In 1860 Frederick Schmid Jr. joined with his brother-in-law, Christian Mack, to start what became Ann Arbor's leading department store, Mack & Co. In 1867 Philip Bach built a store for his dry goods business at the corner of Wash­ington and Main; the building continued in that use until 1980 (it's now the Hopper Hathway law office). Across the alley on Washington, William Herz opened a paint store (today Cafe Zola). Henry Schlanderer apprenticed to watchmaker George Haller (Jacob's son) and took over his business in 1911. Today two downtown jewelers, Seyfried's and Schlanderer's, can trace their lineage to Haller's.

The farmers were not forgotten. They could grind their wheat at the German-owned Central Mills at First and Liberty, have their horses reshod at many German-owned blacksmith shops, buy harnesses and work clothes at Ehnis Brothers on Liberty, and get agricultural supplies around the corner at Hertler's on Ashley. When they were done, they could stop at several nearby workingmen's bars to so­cialize before returning home.

The factory and business owners built large homes near their businesses. In 1870 Peter Brehm, owner of the Western Brew­ery on Fourth Street, built a Second Empire house at 326 West Liberty. (Brehm's brew­ery now houses the journal Mathematical Reviews, while his home is the Moveable Feast restaurant.) That same year, Christ­ian Walker, owner of the carriage factory, moved into an Italianate house on the cor­ner of Seventh and Liberty. Gottlieb Schneider lived at 402 West Liberty, just a few houses away from his mill. In 1890 David Allmendinger built a house for his large family at 719 West Washington and developed extensive grounds that includ­ed two ponds and a gazebo.

Their workers built more modest homes, often on lower ground near Allen's Creek or its tributaries. The earliest were simple buildings, such as the 1850s cabin house at 626 West Liberty that housed la­borer William Kuhn, his wife, Catherine, and their eight children. Later homes, built between 1870 and 1920, included exam­ples of all the major styles of the day, in­cluding Queen Anne and Colonial Re­vival. Most, however, were simple vernac­ular structures, usually wood with five or six rooms. Although not unusual architec­tural specimens, they did (and do) evoke a pleasant way of life, with front porches en­couraging neighborly visits along the tree-lined streets.

The new home owners developed their grounds as they would have in Germany, planting flowers and vegetables they were familiar with. Many residents had grape arbors and made wine from the grapes. Those with livestock, a horse or a cow, had barns. Today the Old West Side is dot­ted with such structures, now used for garages, but two doors, a small one for the horse and a larger one for the buggy, are often discernible, as well as hitching posts and carriage steps.

A German society

When Friedrich Schmid arrived in 1833, all the German Protestants in the area were delighted just to have services in their language. But as the population grew larger, different groups began breaking off. The congregation of First German Methodist Episcopal, forerunner of today's West Side Methodist, were the first to leave, in 1846. In 1896 they built a church in the heart of the Old West Side on the corner of Jefferson and Fourth (now home to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).

The biggest split took place in 1874 and is still talked about today. When Schmid retired from Bethlehem in 1871, the new pastor, Hermann Reuther, drew big crowds, and church leaders decided a new church building was needed. When about half the members refused to con­tribute to the cost, they were expelled and started a new church, which returned to the old name of "Zion."

Both congregations are still flourishing today, Zion as a Lutheran church, Bethle­hem as a United Church of Christ congregation. Bethlehem built the first phase of its beautiful fieldstone complex on South Fourth Avenue in 1895; Zion moved to its present home overlooking West Liberty in 1956.

Trinity, the city's first English-language Lutheran church, was organized in 1893 with support from Zion. The church served not only non-German Lutherans but also Germans who wished to become more assimilated into the mainstream cul­ture. Also in town were a handful of Ger­man Catholics, such as the stonecutter families of Baumgardner and Eisele, who joined the Irish and Italics at St. Thomas.

The last predominantly German church, St. Paul's Lutheran, was organized in 1908 after U-M students petitioned the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to send them a pastor. The congregation located in the Old West Side, first on Huron Street and then in their present place at 420 West Liberty. St. Paul's attracted many of the fi­nal wave of German immigrants in the 1920s, since it continued to offer German-language services as the older congrega­tions were switching to English.

Churches weren't the only custodians of German culture in Ann Arbor. In 1848 a German-language school was organized for grades 1 through 8. Classes were held in the basement of Bethlehem Church un­til 1860, when a school was built on First Street. By 1873 the school had 121 pupils. From 1875 to 1918, Zion also ran a parochial school for grades 7 and 8.

In 1861 a public school opened on the corner of Jefferson and Fourth streets; originally called the Second Ward School, it was renamed in 1898 in honor of Philip Bach, who had served on the school board for thirty-four years and as mayor in 1858-1859. Although the instruction was in English, most of the students and teach­ers were German.

Musical institutions were central to Ann Arbor's German society. Christian Gauss, whose son went on to become a dean at Princeton, was a member of the Mannerchor, a men's singing group that met once a week. One of the senior Gauss's prized possessions was a flute that he had brought from Germany; he regular­ly played duets with his neighbor, black­smith Henry Otto, an excellent violinist. Otto was also the leader of Otto's Band; under him and his son Louis, thd band played for most major town events.

Reuben Kempf was sent by his parents to Basel to study for the ministry, but when he started following bands around town, officials at the seminary suggested he switch to music. In 1890 Kempf and his wife, Pauline, opened a music studio in their home at 312 South Division (now the Kempf House for Local History). The Kempfs owned the first grand piano in town, a Steinway; the university borrowed it for concerts.

German clubs were everywhere on the west side. The Turnverein (Gymnastics Club) exercised on land they owned south of Madison between South Fourth and South Fifth streets (approximately where Turner Park Court is today). Just to the west, German volunteer firemen owned the Relief Fire Company Park. The Schutzenbund Park, which belonged to a shooting club, was nearby on Pauline, where Fritz Park is now. Other clubs met in Hangsterfer's Hall or Fred Rettich's Orchestrian Hall on Main, or at the Germania Club in the Staeblers' Germania Hotel (now the Earle Building).
The Schwaben Verein (officially Schwabischer Unterstiitzungs Verein) was founded in 1888. Originally a burial socie­ty, it was also a social club, mostly for Ger­mans who arrived during the 1880s wave of immigration. Originally members had to be from Swabia, but today it's open to any German or person of German ancestry. In 1908 it bought the Relief Fire Company Park (the Fire Department had by then be­come professional), where it built a club­house, beer garden, and small bowling al­ley. (The bowling alley still stands, much altered, at 731 South Fifth Street.)

The Schwaben Verein left the most durable mark on the city. In 1914 it built a four-story headquarters on its Ashley Street property, after reaching an agree­ment to rent most of the space to Mack's Department Store. Mack's, by then the city's premier store, was directly east of the new building, facing Main, and con­nected to it by an enclosed bridge. The Schwaben Verein used the second floor for meetings and social gatherings. After Prohibition was instituted in 1919, the group could no longer operate a beer garden, so it sold its park, using the money to pay off the Ashley Street building. Reenergized by the final wave of German immigration in the 1920s, the Schwaben Verein has lasted into the twenty-first cen­tury, although it recently sold its building.

Many other German institutions, how­ever, closed in the wake of of the anti-Ger­man hysteria during World War I. Although German Americans had been citizens for generations, had been prominent in civic af­fairs, and had fought in America's wars (during the Civil War, Ann Arbor's Steuben Guards fought side by side with the Yankees), they were still suspect. Elsa Ordway, who attended Bach School during World War I, recalled that her class was walked to Hill Auditorium to hear a talk on German atrocities, and that the children were required to write reports when they returned. T. H. Hildebrandt, a math professor who played the organ at the Congregational church, was fired. In later years, when elderly Germans were asked whether they spoke German, they would often answer, "I used to know it, but my family stopped speaking it during World War I."

According to a church history, the First German Methodist Episcopal Church changed its name in 1919, "when the Ger­man language fell into disrepute because of World War I." According to Louis Doll's History of the Newspapers of Ann Arbor: 1829-1920, Eugene Helber, editor of the German newspaper Die neue Post, "took a somewhat too outspoken pro-Ger­man stand during World War I, with the result that he was summoned before feder­al court to show cause why his paper should not be barred from the mails." Ac­cording to Doll, Helber changed not only his policy but also his language, publish­ing from then on in English.

The nationalist fervor hastened a process that had already begun. By then the Bethlehem school was already bilin­gual, and the church was alternating be­tween German and English for services. Zion's services had been exclusively in English since 1910.

Decline and rebirth

The Old West Side went into a decline during World War II and the years imme­diately following. The nineteenth-century houses were aging, and Germans with the means were moving to newer homes. At the same time, the economic boom that ac­companied the war had caused an acute housing shortage, and many of the once gracious family homes were cut up into duplexes or apartments. After the war, de­velopers started tearing down houses to build small apartment buildings, stark modernist cubes that clashed with the sur­rounding Victorian survivors.

The Old West Side Association was formed in 1967 to fight a proposed devel­opment that would have replaced all the houses on First between Jefferson and Madison with apartments and condos. The early activists were a mixture of longtime German American residents, such as Harry Koch and Florence Hiscock, and newer ar­rivals interested in preserving the area's vernacular urban environment, such as U-M art professor Chet LaMore and land­scape architect Clarence Roy.

In 1972 the Old West Side was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of the first neighborhoods of ordinary homes to receive this recognition. The next year the association started its popular homes tour to show how livable old homes could be. In 1978 the Ann Arbor City Council passed a historic-preservation or­dinance that protects the outside of homes from inappropriate remodeling.

Today, senior citizens living in the Old West Side are likely to be of German ori­gin, but the younger people represent an ar­ray of ethnic groups. Many descendants of the original Germans still live in the Ann Arbor area, although not necessarily in the Old West Side. Besides the Schwaben Verein, two other German groups still function: the Greater Beneficial Union (GBU), a fraternal organization that pro­motes German American culture, and the German Park Recreational Club, which during the summer months hosts picnics featuring German music, German dancing, German food, and German beer at its beer garden on Pontiac Trail (see Events, Au­gust 25).

New residents of the Old West Side of­ten make major changes to their houses, adding skylights, hot tubs, and backyard decks, and enlarging rooms by tearing out walls. But in one matter, they are true to the original spirit. Most have moved into the neighborhood seeking the old-fash­ioned sense of community that the original settlers established. People are choosing to raise their children on the Old West Side, adding on to their houses, rather than move.

"Everybody watches each other's chil­dren. They are in and out of each other's houses," says Christine Brummer, presi­dent of the Old West Side Association. "The parks are always in use. You always see people walking in the streets.

"It's another regeneration."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Missionary Friedrich Schmid led construction of the 1833 Zion Church —the first German church in Michigan. (Upper left) The first Bethlehem Church after the split of 1874. (Left) One of a hpst of civic groups, the Germania Club took its name from the Germania Hotel—todays Earle Building.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: German farmers scarcely needed English to navigate nineteenth-century Ann Arbor. They could buy supplies from German-owned stores and grind their grain at the German-owned Ann Arbor Central Mills on First (right, today the Millennium and Cavern clubs).

[Photo caption from original print edition]: German shopkeepers and industrialists built much of downtown Ann Arbor, including the Ann Arbor Carriage Works on Liberty (left)—today the Ann Arbor Art Center.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The David Allmendingers relax in their gar­den on the Old West Side. Workers and busi­ness owners lived side by side in the German neighbor­hood.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: In 1873, this German-language school on First Street enrolled 121 pupils. German institu­tions and language survived for generations in Ann Arbor—but were largely swept away during the anti-German hysteria of the First World War.

WCBN's Apostle of Country Music

"Country music is real stories, about real people, about real situations," says WCBN deejay Chad Williams. "It's a refined tradition with many branches and different in­fluences. [But] it's looked down on, especially in this town."

Williams, who calls himself "a farmer in a nonfarm town," is out to change that. As "the Funky Farmer," he co-hosts the free-form U-M station's Down Home Show, explaining and popularizing country music to his Ann Arbor listeners.

On a recent Saturday, Williams started his show with a new George Jones CD, which led to a set of hot-rod songs, which naturally segued into truck-driving songs, which then led to truck-stop songs. Williams is so familiar with country music that he can put sets like this together on the fly, rummaging through piles of his own recordings or jumping out of the broadcast chair to fetch a disc from WCBN's library. He fields phone requests with equal ease—his normally deadpan expression lighting up when someone re­quests a contemporary favorite like Lone­some Bob or Mike Ireland and Holler.

Williams, twenty-five, has come a long way from the uncomfort­able freshman who entered the U-M in 1991. He grew up on a farm in central Ohio but was studying actuarial math so that he could earn a better living than farming offered.

"I didn't fit in at all," recalls Williams. "When I said my dad was a farmer, some­one actually asked me, 'What are you, some kind of hick?' The U-M was full of rich kids. Everyone wanted to be in a fra­ternity and had parental support. I worked forty hours a week, mainly in dorm cafete­rias, while taking a full load. Instead of trying to fit in, I hung on to my roots. That's how I carved my niche."

Dan Moray, another Down Home Show deejay, remembers Williams's first tenta­tive calls to the station to request Johnny Cash tunes. "He was so shy he could bare­ly tell his requests," Moray recalls. But Williams accepted Moray's invitation to come down to the station and was soon behind the microphone himself. Since 1993, "the Funky Farmer" has hosted the show every third Saturday, taking turns with Dan "the Two O'Clock Cowboy" Moray and Jim "Tex" Manheim.

Compared to his cohosts, Williams says, he plays more contemporary country in addition to a wide variety of classics. (His all-time favorites are Emmylou Har­ris, Merle Haggard, Jimmie Rodgers, and Guy Clark.) Williams also hosts two other WCBN shows: Bill Monroe for Breakfast, a bluegrass show on Saturday mornings, and Free Roots, on Wednesdays, which features a wider selection of music known in the trade these days as "Americana."

Once eager to leave Ann Arbor, Williams now has mixed feelings. He will stay at least long enough to finish the twenty credit hours needed for his ac­tuarial degree (he had to drop out several times to earn money and currently works full-time as a computer consultant at the U-M School of Social Work). In odd mo­ments between work, school, and the radio station, he's written fifty country songs, performing them on Monday open-mike nights at the Tap Room in Ypsilanti.

As a teenager, Williams went through periods of liking other kinds of music but always came back to country. "I'm a sim­ple guy who's been through a lot like everyone else," he says, "and country mu­sic is what I fall back on.

"I came to college to be all successful, to be full of money, but I lost my desire for it," says Williams. "College was tough. I worked all the time and learned things the hard way.

"Now I don't want to be an actuary, but to do what makes me happy. I like com­puters a lot and music. Those two things are the way to go."

"Not too many in Ann Arbor lived such a life," says Molly Hunter Dobson of her great-aunt and great-uncle, Carrie and Harry Boyd Earhart. The Earharts' 400-acre estate along the Huron River included a small golf course for "H. B." to practice his swing, forty acres of woods where he went horse­back riding, and formal gardens and a greenhouse where Carrie indulged her love of flowers. Today, most of the estate has disappeared, swallowed up by Concordia College and the Waldenwood subdivision. But the stone-walled mansion the Earharts built in 1936 still stands on Geddes Road near US-23. Newly renovated to serve as Concordia's administrative center, the man­sion and adjoining gardens will reopen with public dedications on June 16 and 22.

Born in 1870, H. B. Earhart made his fortune in the gasoline business. He was the Detroit agent for the White Star Refin­ing Company, a faltering oil company based in Buffalo, New York. Earhart bought the company in 1911 and moved its headquarters to Michigan--just as the automobile industry was taking off. Under his direction, White Star grew into a major enterprise, with a chain of gas stations and its own refinery in Oklahoma. Earhart eventually sold out to Socony Vacuum, later Mobil.

Four years into his retirement, at age sixty-six, Earhart decided to replace the farmhouse where his family had lived since 1920. Earhart's correspondence with his landscape consultants, the famous Olmsted firm of New York, reveals that Carrie Earhart had doubts about the proj­ect. Though she eventually went along with her husband's desire for a big house, she insisted that it be functional rather than gaudy or ostentatious. Their extended fam­ily would use every inch of it, from the basement pool room to the attic theater.

The mansion was designed by Detroit architects Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls, with input from the Olmsted firm. Its clas­sic, simple proportions were enhanced with elegant details that included a slate roof, copper eaves and detailing, and a Pewabic ceramic fountain. Outwardly traditional, the house incorporated the latest in modern technology. Beneath the limestone exterior (hand-chiseled to simulate age), its struc­ture was steel and concrete. It boasted what is believed to be the first residential air-conditioning unit outside of New York City, showers with ten heads, and vented closets with lights that went on when the door opened. There were bells every­where--Carrie Earhart never had to go more than ten feet to summon a servant.

The Earharts and their four children moved to Ann Ar­bor in 1916. "I always un­derstood that we did so be­cause Mother liked small town living, and Ann Arbor at that time had a population of only about 28,000, not counting the university," daughter Eliza­beth Earhart Kennedy explained in her 1990 memoir, Once Upon a Family.

The Earharts initially rented a house on Washtenaw Avenue. But within a year, they bought a historic dairy farm on Ged­des Road known as "the Meadows." Be­fore they could move in, World War I in­tervened. Feeling he should be closer to his business, H. B. moved his family back to Detroit for the duration. They used the farmhouse for vacations and getaway weekends until 1920, when they moved to Ann Arbor permanently.

By then, the three older children, Mar­garet, Louise, and Richard, had left for college. Elizabeth attended Ann Arbor High, but because the family lived so far in the country, she had to be driven each day by her mother's chauffeur. Embar­rassed, she had him drop her off two blocks from school so she could arrive on foot like everyone else.

H. B. Earhart kept the farm active, but he did promptly tear down the old barns, which according to Kennedy's memoir, "were too near for mother's fastidious nose." He had them rebuilt on the other side of Geddes at the corner of what would soon be renamed Earhart Road.

While vacationing in North Carolina the first year they lived at the Meadows, Elizabeth fell in love with horseback rid­ing. When they returned home, her father bought a pair of horses. Like his daughter, H. B. Earhart enjoyed riding, and although Carrie Earhart did not share their enthusi­asm, she contributed to their pleasure by having daffodils planted in the woods, which spread and naturalized. "She was to daffodils as Johnny Appleseed was to ap­ples," says her grandson, David Kennedy. Even today, residents of the Earhart subdi­vision tell of buying a house in the winter and being pleasantly surprised when the daffodils bloom in the spring.

H. B. and Carrie Earhart were both inter­ested in gardening. They established a for­mal garden behind the house and built a greenhouse behind the garage. To superin­tend it all, they lured to Ann Arbor a prizewinning horticulturist, James Reach. Born in Scotland, Reach was working on an estate near Philadelphia when the Earharts met him at a flower show in New York.

The late Alexander Grant began work­ing as a gardener for the Earharts in 1929. In an interview before his death in Janu­ary, Grant admitted that when he first came looking for work, he didn't know "a daffodil from an ice cream cone." But when Reach discovered that Grant had grown up near Edinburgh, his own birth­place, he hired him anyway.

Carrie Earhart was herself a serious gardener. She won prizes at national gar­den shows, served as president of the Michigan Federated Garden Club, and was cofounder of the Ann Arbor Garden Club. For two years in a row, she and Reach re­created part of the Meadows' garden on the stage of the Masonic Temple for the Ann Arbor Flower Show.

While the new house was being built, near the site of the old farmhouse, H. B. and Carrie went on a round-the-world cruise. Returning, they settled into their new home. H. B. filled the library with history books. On the walls of the library the Earharts displayed their art collection, which included origi­nals by Velazquez, Picasso, Millet, and Goya. Carrie enjoyed music, so the living room was dominated by a grand piano. She often hired members of the Detroit Symphony to perform for guests.

The house was decorated with treasures the Earharts had picked up on their travels. "They traveled more, and to more exotic places, than was then common," remem­bers great-niece Molly Dobson. Two huge oil portraits of the Earharts were displayed on the stairwell leading to the second floor. (The portraits hung in Ann Arbor's YMCA for many years, commemorating the Earharts' funding of the Y's residential wing, and are now in the conference room of the Earhart Foundation.) Upstairs, H. B. and Carrie each had a bedroom complete with dressing room and bathroom.

Two of the Earhart children, Richard and Elizabeth, lived on property adjoining their parents' estate. Richard farmed a piece of land just to the north known as "Greenhills." (The school of that name is now on part of his property, as well as Earhart Village Condominiums.) Eliza­beth, married to lawyer James Kennedy, lived west of her parents in part of an or­chard originally owned by Detroit Edison. The southern part of the orchard, running down to the river, was owned by H. B. Earhart's nephew, Laurin Hunter.

Hunter, who worked for Earhart, had originally planned to build a house on his property and had even hired an architect. But one day in 1935, Earhart rode up on his horse while Hunter was working and offered to give him the old farmhouse if he would move it. Although Hunter's property was close enough to be seen from the Earharts', it took three months to move the house--the hard­est parts were turning it at a ninety-degree angle and get­ting it over a ravine.

The Earharts enjoyed having family around and encouraged the younger generation to visit. A room in the basement was fixed up as a playroom, and the pool room--reached by a secret door in the library that looked like part of the bookcase--was a big draw. Grandson David Kennedy re­members having a lot of fun upstairs, too, in the attic theater, which included a stage at one end and a movie projection booth at the other. "We would play in the theater, just goof around," he recalls, "or watch family movies of kids hamming it--not Hollywood movies because there was no sound system."

Outdoors, they could swim, play tennis, or even golf. The area around the house was carefully landscaped. Grant recalled that the gardens included a peony-lined walk, a rose garden, a grape arbor, a gaze­bo, and a lily pond. Grape ivy grew along the back porch and espaliered apple trees were cultivated along the wall to the east of the porch.

Carrie Earhart died in 1940 at age sixty-eight after a short illness. A private fu­neral  was held in the home. Dobson remembers that the living room was filled with a great profusion of Easter lilies from her greenhouse and that Burnette Staebler, soloist at the First Presbyterian Church and a friend of the younger generation of Earharts, sang "I Know That My Re­deemer Liveth." A front-page obituary talked of Carrie Earhart's many contribu­tions to the community.

H. B. Earhart stayed on in the house af­ter his wife died, keeping busy with his many interests and charities. With more time on his hands, he would frequent the greenhouse lounge, reading or talking to Grant, who had become the greenhouse manager after Carrie Earhart's death. Grant described Earhart at this time as a "tall, stately man, very upright, very delib­erate in what he said, and what he said he meant. He wasn't a man who spent time gossiping, he was very serious."

When Earhart had visitors, he often brought them to the greenhouse. Over the years Grant recalled being introduced to many prominent citizens, including Henry Ford, society people, and a physicist from Stanford who was working on the atomic bomb. One day when Grant was edging the driveway, he heard sirens approaching. He looked up to see a police motorcade escorting then Michigan governor Kim Sigler, who was coming to visit Earhart. 

Earhart was involved in many charity works as well. Although he was a member of the First Methodist Church, he took an interest in the nearby Dixboro Methodist Church, where he was friends with the minister, Loren Campbell. Campbell re­membered that when the church needed an addition, Earhart offered to match the con­tributions made by the congregation.

Although much of his charity was not publicly known, Earhart was very re­spected in the community. Campbell re­called in an interview before he died that when Earhart and his sister (Josephine Hunter, who lived with her son Laurin) came to church in Dixboro, there would be a buzz in the community as if a celebrity were visiting.

H. B. Earhart died in 1954 at age eighty-three after suffering a heart attack. He was buried beside his wife in Botsford Cemetery on Earhart Road. His obituary, like hers, was front-page news. Among other accomplishments, the obituary mentioned his support for industrial education and his role as a prime mover in the cre­ation of the Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority, which is responsible for the string of parks still enjoyed today. The Earhart Foundation, which he started in 1929, is still in existence, mainly funding educational projects. After Earhart's death, his son Richard ran the foundation; it is now headed by David Kennedy.

In the early 1960s, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod bought the land for Concordia College from Richard Earhart and the house from the Earhart Founda­tion. The campus, designed by architect Vincent Kling in a 1960s modern style, was dedicated in 1963.

Over the decades, Concordia has grown from a two-year college to a four-year col­lege with an enrollment of 600 students. Now, thanks to a gift from Fred Schmid of Jackson, who donated the money as a memorial to his father, the college has the resources to restore the Manor, the name it uses for the Earharts' house. "We don't have to tear down a lot to bring it back to its former glory," says Chris Purdy of Archi­tects Four. Most of the design features, such as the Pewabic tiles in the bathrooms and the carved wood in the dining room, are still there. The room lay­out will remain the same except for the addition of an eleva­tor, necessary to make the house handi­capped accessible.

The downstairs rooms--the living room, dining room, and library--are be­ing adapted for public uses such as meetings, receptions, or wait­ing rooms. H. B. Earhart's bedroom will be the office of Concordia president James Koerschen, while Carrie Earhart's will be a conference room. The basement pool room will serve as another conference room. The third floor, left pretty much as it was as a theater, provides a perfect meeting place for the Concordia Board of Regents.

Restoration of the gardens is being planned by HKP Landscape Architects. At first it looked like a simple project of putting in plants that would have been used in the 1930s, but as more information surfaces from the Olmsted archive and from those who remember the gardens, a more authentic restoration is now possible.
 
Concordia plans to make the renovated Earhart Manor available to the community for events such as conferences, meetings, or weddings. "We're looking forward to giv­ing it back to the community in Ann Arbor to use and enjoy," says Brian Heinemann, Concordia's vice-president for finance and operations, who is in charge of the project. "It'll be the front door to the college as it was the front door for the Meadows." The work on the house is scheduled to be com­pleted in June. Public dedications are planned for the evenings of June 16 and 22, following church services.

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[Photo caption from original print edition]: H. B. Earhart with grandson James Kennedy Jr. He was sixty-six and already retired from the gasoline busi­ness when he built his dream house. He looked up to see a police motorcade escorting then Michigan governor Kim Sigler, who was coming to visit Earhart.

A fortune built on waste paper

In 1911, George Langford took out a second mortgage on his house in order to start Economy Baler. The company, headquartered on North Main Street, grew to be the largest business of its kind in the world. In a 1943 Ann Arbor News article, Langford claimed that its success was "a direct result of the old system of free enterprise which not only permitted but encouraged the plowing of profits back into the business."

Economy Baler's motto was "turning waste paper into profit." In the early years of this century, corrugated cardboard began to replace wooden crates for shipping. While wooden crates could be used again and again, cardboard was hard to get rid of. Merchants would let it pile up in their basements, where it was a serious fire hazard, before eventually paying someone to haul it away. While paper mills were eager to get more paper waste and were willing to pay for it, the empty boxes were so light and bulky it seldom was worth the trouble to handle and ship them. Langford's invention changed that.

Langford learned about balers, and about business practices, from his uncle, Wendall Moore, manager of the Ann Arbor Machine Company on Broadway. The company made agricultural machines, including hay presses (see "The Broadway Bridge Parks," August). Langford began working for the company while living with his uncle and aunt in their big house on Moore Street, having come to Ann Arbor to attend high school. He held a variety of jobs; the last one, before he left to go on his own, was traveling by horse and buggy to county fairs to show farmers the firm's products. On one of these trips Langford heard that someone had invented a paper compressor. But the crude wooden contraption left him unimpressed.

Believing he could make a better paper compressor, Langford tried to convince his uncle to add one to his product line. When Moore refused, Langford decided to do it himself, quitting his job in 1911 to devote himself to his new enterprise. His only asset at the time was his house, on Greenwood, so he secured a $5,000 second mortgage on it. He spent $100 to build a prototype of a hand-powered metal baler. Using a picture of this single machine, he spent the rest of the mortgage money on advertising, offering to sell the baler for $50, with a $10 deposit. Within a month he had 100 orders. On the strength of those, he went to the First National Bank and asked for a $5,000 loan. They gave him $500.

With $1,500--the bank loan plus the money from his customers' deposits--Langford bought supplies and rented, for $10 a month, a small shop in the alley behind his uncle's business. At first he made the balers himself in the shop during the day. Evenings he worked at home on bookkeeping details. When the business began to take off, he hired a mechanic, Albert Wenk, to help him build the balers. Wenk later became a partner, buying a 1/15 interest for $600. In 1943, reminiscing about those early years, Langford said, "It was a tough job for a while, meeting the payroll on Saturday nights and counting on checks coming in from purchasers in time Monday to keep the company bank account in balance."

By 1912, Langford was in good enough shape to build his own shop at 1254 North Main. Economy Baler's first building was a 35 by 70 foot shed, large enough for fifteen employees. By 1916, the company had expanded into two additional stucco buildings complete with machine shop, forge shop, assembly line, printing, woodworking machinery, and electrical shop. At the north end he built a tall shed for his electric crane. Langford's son, Bob, remembers that the sign on its roof--"World's Largest Baling Press Mfgr."--was so large that it served as a landmark for early pilots.

As his business prospered, Langford became well known in town. Almeda Koebler, who worked as a cook for the Langfords in the 1930's, when they lived on Woodside Road and summered at Winans Lake, remembers Langford as a large man, partly bald, very friendly and outgoing. He loved jokes so much that he would pay people 25 cents to tell him a new one. He was also a practical joker. Anecdotes handed down include one about a chair in his office that collapsed when someone sat in it and another about rubber hooks on the wall that confounded first-time visitors when they tried to hang their coats on them.

By 1925, Economy Baler was able to claim that Ann Arbor made more baling presses than any city in the world. Langford employed 100 men who worked fifty hours a week year-round; had branch offices and salespeople in practically every important city in the country; and was continually adding new presses to handle everything from tin cans to tobacco.

In 1937, Economy Baler built a new office building facing Main Street. Architect Douglas Loree designed a "modernistic" building with glass block windows across the front. Bob Langford, who worked in the purchasing department of the new building, remembers that the glass block let in light but got so cold in the winter that frost sometimes formed on the inside.

Economy Baler continued to thrive after World War II, developing several more special balers including a huge cotton press and a scrap-metal baler that could swallow a whole auto body. By then George Langford was ready to retire. Bob Langford might have taken over his father's business, but although he had worked there, he did not feel right about going in as manager over the heads of older, more experienced people. So in 1945, George Langford sold his controlling stock, taking care to find a buyer who would keep the facility in Ann Arbor. (Bob Langford started his own Ann Arbor business and later developed properties on Huron View Boulevard and Research Park Drive.) George Langford died in 1956.

Economy Baler closed in 1976, when the last owner, American Baler Company, merged the Ann Arbor operation with their plant in Bellevue, Ohio. The company buildings were owned by Lansky's junkyard until 1978, when they were purchased by the Michigan Automotive Research Corporation. MARCO, which does contract testing of engines, transmissions, and vehicles, has adapted the buildings to its own uses. According to MARCO's Mike Boerma, the only indoor remnants of the buildings' original function are the welding outlets on the walls. The exteriors have been modernized, except for the structure closest to the river. It is still stucco, as it was in 1916, and the name painted on the wall is still discernible: "Economy Baler Company."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Economy Baler founder George Langford believed in promotion: he spent $4,900 of his first $5,000 in capital on advertising. By developing a line of machines capable of baling everything from cardboard boxes to junk cars, Langford built Economy Baler into the largest manufacturer of its kind in the world--an achievement he boasted of in a rooftop sign so large that it was used as a landmark by early pilots.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Twenty years after it closed, a single fading sign identifies the former Economy Baler complex, today home to the Michigan Automotive Research Corporation.