Real Estate Transfers

Frank J. Inward to Chas S. Smith, Ypsilanti, $1,865.
Hiram Fairchild to Chas. S. Smith, Ypsilanti, $500.
John Blakeslee, Adm., to Burt Lawnsburg, York, $735.67.
Anneth M. Lazell to Mary E. Stoner, Bridgewater, $2,000.
Nelson P. Hill to Jerry W. Walsh, Ann Arbor, $850.
C.H. Kempf to Adam Bohnett, Chelsea, $110.
Sarah M. Joslyn to A.L. Parker, Ypsilanti, $350.
Racheal Ring to Miriam Gallagher, Ypsilanti, $500.
Delos Townsend to Phebe Townsend, York, $1,500.
Dorothy Frey to Herman Hardinghouse, Ann Arbor, $1,382.
John Frey, by ex. to Herman Hardinger, Ann Arbor, $6,000.
John Frey, by guardian of heirs, to H. Hardinghouse, Ann Arbor, $620.
Jonathan S. Gould to Abraham Maybee, Augusta, $2,000.

When kids could sled down city streets all winter long

Sledding down the middle of city streets? No parents in their right mind would let their children do that today, but in the 1920s and 1930s it was done with the blessing of the city. Every neighborhood had at least one steep street blocked off for sledding, and often there were several within walking distance.

"Oh, it was fun, really fun," recalls Walter Metzger, who sledded on three such streets: Koch from Third to Main, Division from Packard to Hill, and Eighth from Washington to Liberty. "The city blocked the streets with a big long [saw] horse. They also blocked the side streets, but they'd leave room for the residents to drive through. It was very safe. I never remember anybody having an accident with a car."

Al Gallup, who sledded down Highland and Awixa, recalls that the city brought out a sawhorse at the beginning of the season and left it at the side of the road except when the kids were actually sledding. Hills on Broadway and Felch were popular spots. Bob Ryan, who lived on Longshore, used to sled from the top of his street clear down to Argo Pond and, if possible, right out onto the frozen water. "There was no traffic," he recalls. "The only house was Mr. Saunders's of the canoe livery, and he knew to be careful [when driving]."

If there were no sawhorses, one of the kids would stand guard at potentially dangerous intersections, warning sledders when they needed to stop. Braking was done by dragging feet, swerving onto lawns, or, if all else failed, jumping off just before a collision. Harlan Otto, who used to slide down Koch Street, remembers they didn't necessarily stop even at Main. "We'd have someone at the bottom [of Koch] to look out. One time we went down and around the comer on Main all the way to Madison."

Flexible Flyers were the sleds of choice because "you could steer them," explains Coleman Jewett. "Others you had to lean on to guide." Brad Stevens recalls that Flexible Flyers came in different lengths: "The longer it was, the more prestigious." John Hathaway recalls that his Flexible Flyer (which he still has hanging in his garage) was purchased at Hertler's, and that as a special deal the Hertler brothers cut him a piece of rope to tie on the front.

"Not many had sleds," recalls Otto, so "we used to ride double. The bigger kids would get on the bottom and the little on top." Kids sometimes went down a hill on a number of sleds chained together, sticking their toes between the opening where the sled was steered. Occasional mishaps occurred, but the victims all lived to tell the tale.

Larger groups of kids rode on toboggans and bobsleds, the latter often homemade. Hathaway recalls that the bobsleds went a lot faster and could be dangerous if you left a limb dangling. Jewett says that a family in his neighborhood, the Bakers, had a toboggan that held twelve or fourteen kids. "It was fun. Just don't sit in front or back," he warns.

Sometimes kids would enhance their sledding routes by pouring water in the tracks. Metzger recalls that "Bob Muehlig used to take buckets of water and pour it on the curb to make runs for a bobsled." Ryan remembers pouring water on Longshore in new snow so toboggan tracks would freeze at night. "We'd go like the gun the next morning," he recalls.

The kids would come home sopping wet after sledding. "We all had coal furnaces with registers on the floor. We'd take off our clothes to dry off," Metzger recalls. "The adults hated the cold and snow, but kids loved it," says Jewett. That part is probably the same today.

—Grace Shackman

Photo Caption: John Hathaway still has the Flexible Flyer his parents bought at Hertler's.

Side by side, separate resorts catered to blacks and whites

People once came from all over southeastern Michigan to play golf, dance, swim, and fish at two resorts on neighboring lakes north of Chelsea. But the guests rarely mingled, because one group was white and the other was black.

Both resorts were established in the 1920s—Inverness, on North Lake, by a white former Detroit business owner, and Wild Goose Lake, a short hop away, by three black families from Ann Arbor. The latter was born in controversy. When word first got out that some farmers were considering selling their land to blacks, neighbors circulated a petition urging them not to do so. When grocer Perry Noah refused to sign—he reportedly told the petitioners, “My father died in the Civil War to free these people”—his store was briefly boycotted.

The sellers, descendants of the area’s original settlers, refused to be intimidated. And that is how dual resorts, each with its own country club and a beach, grew up almost side by side.

The land around the two small lakes, about five miles north of Chelsea, was first permanently settled in 1833. Charles and John Glenn and their sister Jane Burk¬hart came from upstate New York with their spouses and children. Charles Glenn reportedly had decided to move west after his first wife and two young children were killed when flax she was spinning caught fire.

The siblings bought adjoining tracts of government land and built houses. Charles Glenn’s original house at 13175 North Territorial Road still stands. John Glenn had a fancier Italianate house down the road. The Burkharts settled just south of Wild Goose Lake.

Other settlers quickly followed, enough to justify a post office at North Lake in 1836. That year the Glenn family organized a Methodist church. Nineteen people gathered at John Glenn’s house for the first service, with Charles Glenn presiding as lay preacher. Ten years later the two brothers built a small church that also served as a school. In 1866 John Glenn deeded land for what is now the North Lake United Methodist Church. He also gave land for a cemetery on Riker Road.

The land around the lakes, hilly and full of glacial gravel, was best suited to fruit farming. Charles’s son Benjamin Glenn went into the nursery business with his cousins William and Robert, starting apple trees from seeds they procured at a cider mill. (At Wild Goose Lake today, aged apple, pear, and cherry trees are the remnants of a much larger orchard.)

The local Grange built a hall that served as the community’s social center. The North Lake Band, which played in neighboring towns, was based at the Grange Hall from about 1897 to 1906. In 1925 the North Lake church bought the building for $1 and moved it to church property to use as a Sunday school, dining room, and kitchen.

In 1920, Doug Fraser, president of American Brass and Iron Company in Detroit, retired and moved to North Lake. Fraser had ulcers, and his daughter Lauretta had contracted whooping cough, tonsillitis, and diphtheria; he hoped farming would be a healthier way of life for them both.

Fraser and his wife, Laura, bought John Glenn’s seven-bedroom Italianate farmhouse from John’s grandson Fred Glenn. The dining room was so large, Lauretta Fraser Sockow remembers, that the family preferred to eat meals in the sunroom next to the kitchen.

Sockow, now in her nineties, remembers how she loved the rural area as a child. She attended the one-room North Lake School at 1300 Hankerd, now a private home. Her family joined the North Lake church and sometimes hosted barn dances, playing music on their Victrola. Fraser grew apples, strawberries, raspberries, and currants and also raised pigs, but his pride and joy, according to Sockow, was his registered cattle.

Unfortunately, her father eventually developed an allergy to them. “His arms swelled up to the size of a football,” Sockow recalls, and he had to sell his animals and machinery and find another way of making a living.
His property reached all the way to North Lake, so in 1927 Fraser decided to start a resort. Invoking his Scottish heritage, he called it Inverness and gave its streets such names as Glencoe, Aberdeen, and Bramble Brae. He divided the land between his house and the lake into lots for cottages and set up the deeds so that all owners would have lake privileges. He put in tennis courts behind his house, and he built a nine-hole golf course, expanding into additional land he’d bought along North Territorial Road. He moved his family to Ann Arbor and turned the former Glenn home into the golf course’s clubhouse.

Fraser’s gamble paid off. In the 1920s, greater prosperity and rising car ownership created a new demand for resort communities, even in once-remote areas like North Lake. Ads for Inverness noted it was “only sixty miles from Detroit,” and Fraser encouraged potential buyers to drive out for the day to sample activities, such as pony rides for children and dances for adults (the clubhouse living room was big enough to accommodate two sets of square dances simultaneously). Sockow remembers that one neighbor might play the piano and another the violin.
Sylvia Gilbert, who today lives in the house built for the farm’s hired man, says the original clubhouse “was gorgeous. There was a beautiful powder room upstairs, wicker furniture. You could eat in the dining room or the sun porch.” Gilbert recalls dances where people would dress in kilts, and Halloween parties with elaborate decorations. Her house has since been moved from its original spot to 7095 Glencoe, around the corner.

Inverness attracted people of means from Detroit and Ann Arbor. Doctors, dentists, and businessmen built large cottages. Laurence Noah, Perry Noah’s son, earned money by doing chores for the summer people, such as delivering wood and taking away garbage. In the winter, Laurence and his father cut ice from North Lake and stored it to sell in the summer.

A mile away, at Wild Goose Country Club, the members enjoyed the same amenities as at Inverness—swimming, dancing, fishing, and golf. But for the people who frequented it, Wild Goose represented a much rarer opportunity.

“Blacks had no place to go,” explains Mercedes Baker Snyder. Her father, Charles Baker, along with Donald Grayer and Iva Pope, bought the land and organized the resort. Baker, co-owner of the Ann Arbor Foundry, was interested in the venture because “he loved golf, and blacks couldn’t play at public courses,” explains Mercedes’s husband, Charles Snyder.
The partners developed the club on the 250-acre farm of Sam and Fred Schultz, who were descendants of the original settlers, the Glenns. The petition drive that residents of North Lake started to keep out the black resort community didn’t deter the Schultzes. After the sale was completed on June 1, 1927, the Wild Goose Country Club was formed, with ninety-three lots for cottages and a stretch of communal lakeshore with a fishing dock. As at Inverness, the original farmhouse eventually was converted to a clubhouse. A nine-hole golf course began behind the clubhouse and went across Wild Goose Lake Road toward the lake. A dance hall was built on a hill.

Pawley and Carrie Grayer Sherman, Charles Baker’s father- and mother-in-law, became the first residents when they moved from Ann Arbor to the farmhouse. Mercedes Snyder, who came out for weekends to visit her grandparents, remembers it had three bedrooms downstairs, two big living rooms, and a big kitchen, but no plumbing. Her dad would play golf while the children romped around, walked in the woods, or swam in the lake.
The first two cottages, one built by the Shermans, the other by Donald Grayer, were log cabins made from Sears Roebuck kits. A couple more cabins were built before the Depression. The rest of the eighteen or so members merely owned unbuilt lots, which sold for $100. “At that time most Ann Arbor blacks worked in fraternities or cafeterias,” explains Charles Snyder. “Fifty cents an hour was considered a good wage, so they couldn’t afford to build.”

Most of the members were relatives or friends of the organizers. A much larger group, consisting of other friends and extended family members, came to visit and swim, dance, or golf. Visitors often traveled for hours to get there; in those days there weren’t many recreational facilities open to blacks.

Coleman Castro used to come in the 1930s to fish with Don Grayer Jr., his future brother-in-law. Ann Arbor resident Donald Calvert recalls coming out in the late 1940s or early 1950s to swim with friends at Wild Goose Lake. Back then, he says, the resorts favored by his white classmates, such as Zukey Lake or Groomes Beach at Whitmore Lake, did not allow blacks.

In its heyday, Wild Goose hosted big dances organized by Jim and Harriet Moore (a Sherman daughter), who moved into the clubhouse after the senior Shermans moved out. The public dances attracted blacks from all over southeastern Michigan. U-M dentistry graduate D. J. Grimes, who was one of the first black dentists in Detroit and a cousin of Jim Moore, told his Detroit friends about the dances and also put Moore in touch with good bands. Ann Arbor residents would go home after the dances, but the Detroit visitors often stayed, sleeping in rooms the Moores rented to them, either in the clubhouse or in another house they built across the road.

The lakeside resorts’ golden age was brief. Once the Depression hit, “people didn’t need cottages. People didn’t need to play golf,” says Sockow. Sales at Inverness dropped so precipitously that her father had to incorporate and bring in other investors to keep going. Although he ceded control of the development to a board of directors, he kept managing the country club until his death in 1952.

Cottage building completely stopped at Wild Goose Lake during the Depression. The dance hall was knocked over during a big storm in the 1930s and was never rebuilt. Russell Calvert, Donald’s brother, remembers that the golf course was still there in the late 1940s and 1950s but had become less popular because by then blacks could play on municipal courses. It eventually fell into disuse and is now overgrown.

North Lake residents and Wild Goose Country Club members apparently reached a state of grudging coexistence after the failure of the initial petition drive. Wild Goose people patronized North Lake businesses and report they were treated well. But the two groups did not socialize much.
After World War II, building at both lakes resumed. The prewar cottages were winterized and often enlarged, and the old prejudices began to ease. In the 1960s a Wild Goose resident, Bessie Russell, joined the North Lake church. “They were glad to have her,” recalls Mercedes Snyder. “They needed someone to play the organ.”

Today, both former resorts have turned into bedroom communities where working people and retirees live year round. At North Lake, the Inverness Country Club is going strong, with a waiting list to join. Buying a house in the original subdivision bestows automatic membership. The clubhouse has been replaced with a more modern building that looks like a ranch house.

The Wild Goose clubhouse was sold and is again a home. Much of the communal land, including the golf course, has also been sold and is divided into residential lots awaiting development.

The biggest change at Wild Goose Lake is that the population is now about 50 percent white. “As older blacks die, young blacks don’t want to live in the country,” explains Charles Snyder. But residents still often have family connections—including some that cross the old color line. Members of one of the new white families are the in-laws of Coleman Castro’s son, Tommie.

7-5-1 Doug Fraser boating on North Lake with daughter Lauren “Courtesy Sylvia Gilbert

7-5-2 Glenn House, later the country club “Courtesy Sylvia Gilbert”

7-5-3 Inverness clubhouse today “Courtesy Adrian Wylie” 

7-5-4 Shirley, Sherman, Carl, and Mercedes Baker at Wild Goose Lake with their father, Charles, and grandfather Pawley Sherman. “Courtesy Mercedes Snyder”

7-5-5 Wild Goose sign “Courtesy Adrian Wylie”

7-5-6 Original plat for Inverness “Courtesy Sylvia Gilbert”

7-5-7 The first cottages at Wild Goose Country Club were log cabins built from Sears Roebuck kits “Courtesy Mercedes Synder”

7-5-8 Mercedes Baker Snyder and her husband, Charles, still enjoy the lake. “Courtesy Adrian Wylie”

When switchboard operators ran the show

In the days when telephones had human connections, the most feared person in Dexter was Min Daley. As the village’s switchboard operator, she had the goods on everyone. From her perch on the second floor of the Gates Building, Daley kept an eye on everything in town, and she could listen in on anyone’s phone calls. She even slept in a small room behind the switchboard office, and if there was a blaze, she roused the volunteer firefighters.

Information is power, and Daley had it. She could answer such questions as “What stores are still open?” and “Has the band concert begun?” She could tell wives whether their husbands had left work for the day, and she knew where the doctor could be reached. It was hard to hide anything from Min Daley.
In these days of the Internet, it’s hard to imagine one person wielding the authority of Daley, who was Dexter’s ears and eyes from 1906 to 1938. Maybe she really didn’t listen in on very many calls, but just knowing she could do so made townspeople wary of her. When telephones were a place’s only means of speedy communication, the switchboard operator was the information gatekeeper.

It’s also hard to imagine a time when communication was so intimate. Before connections were automated, operators were so vital to village business and social life that they usually operated from thrones of a sort. In Manchester the phone switchboard was in a small second-floor office in the Arbeiter Building (now the site of a laundry and pizza store). In Chelsea switchboard operators sat above Oscar Schneider’s grocery store, now the Chelsea Market. In Saline a small Greek Revival house at 200 South Ann Arbor Street was devoted to telephone operation. These were the power centers of their communities for many years.

Phone service began in western Washtenaw County in the early 1880s, just a few years after Alexander Graham Bell’s famous 1876 conversation in Boston with his assistant Thomas Watson. The first local phones were like Bell’s, one-to-one devices linking two places--such as an office and a home, or two locations of a business, like a mill by a river and the mill’s downtown office.

The first phone in Saline was set up in 1881 by Beverly Davenport to connect his store at Ann Arbor Street and Michigan Avenue with his home on East Henry Street. “Not only can a conversation be carried on with perfect ease, but also while in the store we could distinctly hear the music of the piano Mrs. D. was playing,” reported the Saline Observer. Some lines were set up purely for social reasons. Chelsea’s John Keusch recalls that his mother had a line connecting her with a friend a block away.

Rural residents were the first to get phone lines with multiple users. “Local service was not demanded by small villages that could sling the local dirt over the back fence,” explained Archie Wilkinson, a prime mover in the Chelsea telephone system, in a 1920s reminiscence. “The demand came from the farmers.” As Manchester historian Howard Parr relates, “An influential farmer might go to his neighbors and ask if they wanted to chip in for poles and wires.” Some of these early lines, set up along country roads, were shared by a dozen or more families.

The next step was to establish toll lines between communities. About 1882, Chelsea’s George Glazier began selling coupons for toll service to Dexter. When he had enough money he set up an office over his drugstore on the northwest corner of Main and Middle streets. “You went up the stairs, had operator call party you wanted by name, and then a messenger would be sent out to locate party and bring them to central station” in Dexter, wrote Wilkinson. It wasn’t until 1895 that the Glazier Stove Company installed its own telephone. Later the phone office was relocated above Schneider’s grocery.

Thomas Keech, who had organized the first phone system in Ann Arbor, instigated phone service linking Manchester, Dexter, and Saline. In 1882 Keech asked Mat Blosser, publisher of the Manchester Enterprise, to help sell scrip good for phone rentals and messages. By May 1883 they had sold enough to set up a line between Manchester and Chelsea. Blosser at first managed it out of his newspaper office. Soon they moved the exchange to an office next door in the Arbeiter Building and hired their first operator, Jennie Moore, who later married Keech.

In Dexter, Keech persuaded Thomas Birkett, owner of the local flour mill, to link Dexter with the other long distance lines in his system. A public phone was installed in the Irving Keal drug and medicine store on Main Street, with Keal acting as the first phone manager. As in Manchester and Chelsea, the company helped meet the cost by selling coupons, to be redeemed when the service was completed. The phone office was later moved to the Gates Building.

Keech and Clark Cornwell of Ypsilanti owned a phone line between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, and in 1881 they approached Saline to hook up to their service. Keech’s companies would grow into the Michigan State Telephone Company, later Michigan Bell. In its early days, the company was challenged by a number of small local companies and an Ann Arbor–based regional company called Washtenaw Home Phone. By 1913 Bell had bought everyone out and had become the sole provider, except in Saline, which was served by the Saline Telephone Company, a private company formed by Edward Hauser.

Hauser, a Saline wool dealer, started his own line between Saline and Bridgewater to save him the time and trouble of frequent buggy trips to make deals with farmers. In 1902 he set up an exchange in an office in the Union Block on Michigan Avenue. In 1933 he moved the phone office to the house at 200 South Ann Arbor Street. When Hauser died, he left the company to his sister, Ella Henne; her son, Ed Henne, became its manager. His office and the switchboard were in the two front rooms. A workroom in the back had benches for about four repairmen, a small room upstairs served as the lounge, and the garage stored phone equipment.

In Saline and other communities, the switchboard was linked to the lines of all the local users. People in most homes used wooden wall-mounted “magneto” telephones, so called because the power to start the connection came from a hand-cranked generator. People who wanted to make calls turned the crank to ring the operator, who used a switchboard to plug them into the line of the desired party. Often the operator recognized the caller’s voice. One person remembers calling as a child and asking the operator only “Can I talk to my grandmother?” That was enough to get connected to Granny. That personal service is quite a contrast to today, when you can’t even get someone in directory assistance who’s familiar with your own state.

Two one-volt batteries stored in the bottom of the magneto phones provided the power to send the caller’s voice over the lines. Another type of phone, the “candlestick,” so called because of its tall, thin shape, was more often used in stores and offices. Its batteries could be stored separately and were often kept in a box under a desk or counter. In both models, the batteries had to be replaced periodically. As a child in Manchester, Howard Parr used to take the carbon rods out of old phone batteries and use the rods as crayons to write on the sidewalk.

Party lines were common, especially in rural areas. Incoming calls could be heard at every home on the line, but the ring was different for each family. Sometimes, as a prank or to eavesdrop, somebody in another house would also pick up the phone.

Since all the neighbors knew one another, it wasn’t too hard to identify who was listening in. Parr says users would pay attention to various clues, such as “a grandfather clock striking while they were listening, or an asthmatic--we’d hear them puffing.” John Keusch of Chelsea recalls that at his grandparents’ farm “sometimes a third party would join in the conversation,” much to the annoyance of those talking. In the end, “we’d laugh about things. We were all neighbors--it worked out,” recalls Ruth Kuebler of Freedom Township.

Saline residents paid extra to reach other communities on the toll lines that Bell had installed. Kuebler, who grew up on a farm linked with the Saline system, remembers that to avoid long-distance costs her family would drive to a neighbor’s house to make calls to Ann Arbor, or to a different neighbor’s to make calls to Manchester. Neighbors outside the Saline area would come to their house to make calls to people in the Saline system.

In villages the party lines were less personal, because users were not necessarily neighbors. Many villagers went without phones for a long time. “If we had to find out something, we went somewhere to find out,” recalls Norma McAllister of Dexter.

Despite those holdouts, local telephone managers and switchboard operators soon became the towns’ most vital figures. They handled emergencies, calling doctors and police and ringing fire alarms.

In Saline, Ed Henne was a well-loved figure. Running the office during the Great Depression, “he was lenient if people didn’t pay their bills on time,” recalls Doris Henne, his daughter. She says that her dad often took in stray dogs at the office and found homes for them. When he died in 1939 at age fifty-one, the Saline schools closed for his funeral.

Min Daley was Dexter’s lifeblood; in turn, Daley’s whole life was the phone company. She never married. Daley could be very helpful; she’d even take messages for people when they were not home. But she was widely suspected of listening in on calls. “Everyone thought she did. The opportunity was there,” recalls Davenport. “People were afraid of her. They didn’t know what she knew or what she passed on.”

But Daley wasn’t infallible. Louise Mann, who worked as an operator in the late 1930s, recalls, “She once was telling everyone a man died, and then we saw that man walking across the street.”

Like the operators, the telephone repairmen were well-known figures in their communities. Chelsea’s William Van Orman was dubbed “Mr. Telephone.” “People in Chelsea never called the repair department in Ann Arbor--they’d call Dad at home,” recalls his son, Wayne Van Orman, who has a vivid memory from his youth of holding a flashlight one rainy night while his dad shimmied up a pole to splice a broken wire.

Western Washtenaw County villages began switching to dial phones in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The technology, developed in 1919, had been in use in Ann Arbor since 1925, when it was installed in the phone company’s new Beaux-Arts building at 315–323 West Washington. It was a big job to change systems: larger buildings were needed for the automatic equipment, and all the magneto phones had to be replaced with dial versions.

“We’d go from house to house to house putting in new phones,” recalls Bob Kuhn, who worked on the switchover in Milan. The change was always made in the middle of the night, with the phone company workers returning in the morning to pick up the old phones. For many people, this was their last personal contact with their phone companies. From then on, a dial tone rather than a voice greeted customers.

Today, even with the advanced technologies of voice mail, e-mail, and the Internet, getting quick and easy contact with a central source of information can be a daunting task. In the old days in the small towns, all you had to do was pick up the phone and you were connected.

When dial phones arrived in Dexter, Min Daley retired, but she was left with a memento of all the years she’d run the show in town. The company gave her the switchboard to keep in her home.

Delivering coolness door to door

Before the days of electric refrigerators, people kept perishable foods in ice chests cooled by blocks of ice. For most of Ann Arbor's early history, the ice was harvested from frozen lakes and rivers. But after 1909, natural ice was supplemented, and then totally replaced by, artificial ice, so named because it was manufactured rather than gathered.

The main sources of natural ice were the dams on the Huron River and Whitmore Lake. The ice would be cut at the end of January or the beginning of February—after it became thick enough to make the effort worthwhile but before the danger of a thaw. Using horse-drawn ice plows, harvesters would cut the ice into square slabs, then move it to an insulated icehouse for storage.

In 1909 Ann Arbor supported six ice dealers. They made home deliveries to icebox owners and also supplied butcher shops, restaurants, saloons, and beverage companies. Henry Velker, whose grandfather and uncle owned Dupper's beer distributorship on Fifth Street from 1901 to 1919, remembers that their ice came from lakes north of Ann Arbor. The ice was sent by rail, unloaded at the Ann Arbor Railroad depot on Ashley Street, and delivered to a barn on the back of their property that was devoted solely to ice storage.

Farmers, who needed ice to preserve their meat and dairy products, usually had their own icehouses, and often filled them with ice harvested from ponds on their property. Ann Arbor's most famous farm, Cobblestone Farm, originally had a stone icehouse on the east side of the property near the smokehouse. Mary Campbell, granddaughter of the 1881 owner, William Campbell, remembers reading in her grandfather's diary of trips to the Huron River to collect ice.

Relying on ice from natural sources had several drawbacks, including the vagaries of the weather (an early thaw could be a disaster), melting during the long summer storage season (dealers cut two pounds for every pound they sold), and the risk of infection from contaminated water. So in the late nineteenth century, inventors began experimenting with ways of manufacturing ice. By 1909, commercial ice making reached Ann Arbor with the formation of the Artificial Ice Company.

The company's first plant was located at 301-315 West Huron, running from the corner of First Street down to the railroad tracks. (In the 1990s an elegant restaurant, named “Robby's at the Icehouse” was in that building but a floor above where the ice was made.) The company owned more land, on the north side of Huron just west of the railroad tracks, which they used for horse barns and for coal storage. In 1927 they moved the whole operation there, having built a larger, more modern plant at 408-416 West Huron.

Both plants had a production area, a storage room, a loading dock, a truck repair space, and an office. In the first plant, water took forty-eight hours to freeze, while in the newer one the time was cut to twenty-four hours. City water was poured into 200- or 300-pound molds. After it froze, the ice was lifted with cranes and removed from the molds with running water, then stored upright in the storage area until needed.

A few customers came to the factory to get their ice, but most had it delivered. Walter Schlecht, who worked as a driver at the first plant, loaded his horse-drawn delivery wagon by hand, sliding the ice to the loading dock with the aid of ice tongs. Clarence Haas, a driver in the second plant, had it easier: he drove a truck, which he loaded by pushing the ice blocks onto a conveyor belt that automatically notched the ice into twenty-five-pound sections on its way down.

Schlecht had a longer day than Haas—he had to spend time each morning getting the horses from the barn and hitching them to the wagon—but he found that horses did have advantages. He was hired in the summer of 1918, while still a teenager, to replace a driver who had been fired when he showed up for work drunk. When Schlecht asked where to go, his boss answered "Just follow the horses—they know the route."

Customers placed square cards in their windows, each corner differently colored to indicate orders for 25, 50, 75, or 100 pounds. The icemen would cut the desired amount on site, since carrying the ice around in large blocks reduced melting. Even so, some melting occurred during the day, and customers toward the end of the route sometimes complained that their 25-pound pieces were not as big as they should be.

Electric refrigerators were first seriously marketed for homes in the teens of the 20th century, but it took them a long time to totally replace iceboxes. "The change was gradual," recalls Haas, who began work as a driver in 1929. He says the change was further slowed by World War II, when manufacture of refrigerators ceased so those factories could be used to make war supplies.

Because ice sales were heavily concentrated in the summer, the Artificial Ice Company developed a complementary business selling coal during the winter. But coal sales also were hurt by technological improvements, as people switched to oil and gas furnaces.

To eke out more money as the ice and coal business waned, the Artificial Ice Company changed the truck repair shop in the back of the factory into a cold storage area for keg beer used by area bars. This area has been remodelled into the kitchen for Say Cheese.

The last owner of the Artificial Ice Company was Carl Rehberg, son of Louis Rehberg, the brewmaster of Northern Brewery on Jones Street. Rehberg inherited the brewery, and during Prohibition started Arbor Springs water company, selling the spring water formerly used for beer. A part owner and employee of the Artificial Ice Company from the early days (he was the immediate boss of both Schlecht and Haas), he worked out joint contracts with many local companies to have drinking water and the ice to keep it cool delivered simultaneously.

After the Artificial Ice Company was dissolved in 1965, Rehberg continued running Arbor Springs. After he died, his wife, Elsa, ran it a few years and then sold it to the present owners, Bill and Judith Davis.

[Photo caption from book]: The complex at 408-416 W. Huron, now houses offices. “Courtesy Bentley Historical Library”

Linking town and campus at the turn of the century

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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