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When Inglis House Was The Inglises' House

When Inglis House Was The Inglises' House image When Inglis House Was The Inglises' House image
Parent Issue
Day
19
Month
May
Year
1974
Copyright
Copyright Protected
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
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The house my Aunt Kate and Uncle Frank lived in still looks like a farmhouse and because they lived where they did is, I think, why Inglis House is there. At least, precisely there. Inglis House, the "Blair House" of Ann Arbor, where Shahs and world-famous scientists, government leaders, all guests of the University, are munificently entertained, is a world away from the farm which was its son. From milk warm from the cow. Aunt Kate - to go far back - was one of six children of Dr. Richard Inglis, a Scotland-born-and-raised, and dearly-loved Detroit physician, and his also-Scottish wife. It was Kate who started the migration of the other second-generation-ites to Ann Arbor. Uncle Frank Smith, Kate s husband, had been told for health reasons, to get out into good country air and so, in 1901, they bought a farm, and moved with their three small daughters, into the accompanying house, on Geddes avenue (number 2105) in Ann Arbor, exactly outside the city limits. In those days the City Limits sign was at the bottom of the hill where Highland meets Geddes, below the Saunders. Where now are the circhng city streets of Highland road and Lenawee, Regent Drive and Lafayette, my Uncle Frank's milk cow grazed - and the horse, used for his plow and his cart. His grape vines were strung along the land on Geddes between what are now Highland and Concord (where Senator Gil Bursley lives now); and back of them the current bushes, which I remember greedily, delightedly, because we nieces and nephews who came along later were allowed to piek them, reeeïving 2 cents for each quart. According to Katherine Snith Inglis (she married a second cousin), whQ lives next to Inglis House, her father raised chickens primarily, many of them "show" birds which he washed in the kitchen sink for beauty treatment before taking them to the fairs. He also raised apples and pears and, most famously, guinea pigs, which he supplied to the U-M Medical School for research. It was logical, then, that Kate's younger brother, James, and a by-then successful Detroit industrialist (owner of the American Blower Company), should choose the back seven acres - the piece with the view - for his new house. Until 1928, when the big house was finished, the family lived at 920 Baldwin Avenue in what is now the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity house. It was truly a "creating" - building that house - and most particularly that garden, where there had been, before, only long grass and wild blackberries and a few pear trees. In my Aunt Elizabeth's later years, in Portóla Valley in California, where she still Uves, it has been the garden, and her compost piles, and her boxwood (she developed a hardy, northern strain on her own) that have loomed in her memories of those halcyon days. Walter Stamphli, her gardcner, she has always remembered too - gratefully - as her mentor and horticultural Author Carol Inglis Spicer spenl many happy childhood hou m Inglis House, when it was still the family residence of her uncle and aunt James and Eüzabeth Inglis. James Inglis died in 1950 and later that ye his widow moved to Portóla,' Calif., leaving he r home to he University. Her niece recalls here the days when Inghs House bustled with family activity. ?uide. When the University moved in, in 1951, Walter stayed on as chief gardener and still lives in the Hans Christian Andersen-like cottage on the grounds. For Jim, or "Jamie" (the name he grew out of) , the only son in the family, memories are masculine: the cost of the house (around $250,000); the "terrific" asparagus in his mother's vegetable garden; the electrically-operated garage doors; and - especially - the separate wash bowls in his parents' bathroom (pretty plush for those times, when the average family was happy with one bathroom) . David, my brother, harks back to the skiing (on what was in summer a three-hole golf course) in front of the house, and then, skiing done, leaving skis outside the Frenen doors and stepping right through, right back to whatever was going on in the library. Marge (Mrs. Karl) Litzenberg, friend of Betty who was the only daughter of the house, remembers Frieda's (the cook) boned chicken within boned chicken (heady food for those times); and, as attendant to Betty the bride, walking all alone down the stately stairs. For me, the best thing was listening to records - all of us "young ones" stretched out on the floor in front of the fire in the panelled and book-lined downstairs room. And the tennis court! Saturday afternoons and all day Sundays we played, sitting, between sets, on the stone wall or on the bench of the stone-paved courtyard above, drinking rounds of lemonade from the pitchers that came from the kitchen. I don't remember the boned chicken but I do remember Frieda's white-frosted cakes with the melted bitter chocolate oozing over the way the paint in the paint ads oozes over the globe. And the family dinners at the long table in the living-dining room (keen: a dining-living room!) with Únele Jim and my father reminiscing, booming with laughter, about old days in the house on Gratiot avenue in Detroit, and their bachelor apartment years together, for neither married until his mid-thirties. The house was designéd by "Woody" Woodworth (Lilburn was his baptised name), a young and obscure architectfriend of the family who had only one house to his name at the time, the Arch Diack house at the bottom of Geddes Heights. It was a gamble - giving the assignment to one so untried - but to listen to the paeans of praise from the famous ones who have been wined and dined and lodged at Inglis House, like Hepzibah and Yehudi Menuhin, and Mr. Yogaroon, an African ambassador - even the groups from the Republic of China and the U.S.S.R. who've been here recently were enthusiastic - the gamble has turned out well.