How Cornelius Tuomy's farm became his children's subdivision

The Italianate house at 2117 Washtenaw, an anachronism of an old farmhouse on a busy thoroughfare, is now the headquarters of the Historical Society of Michigan. The Tuomy family lived there for nearly a hundred years, from 1874 to 1966.

The oldest part of the house--a small Greek Revival structure with a center entry and two rooms downstairs and two up--was built about 1854 by George and Jane Bell on what was then a country road between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. The elegant Italianate front portion, which more than doubled the size of the original house, was built about 1864 by Frederick and Almina Spalding. The Spaldings raised five children on the farm; one of them, Volney, grew up to become a U-M professor of botany and zoology and co-founder of the U-M's botanical gardens.

Cornelius Tuomy bought the house and farm in 1874. Though he taught school as a young man, his real vocation was farming, which he learned from his father, Timothy, an Irish immigrant who had developed a successful farm in Scio Township. Cornelius made a success of his farm, growing vegetables, oats, corn, and potatoes; winning prizes for his horses; and raising sheep. He had a herd of twenty-two dairy cows and sold its products in a milk route in Ann Arbor until 1904, when he switched to selling wholesale.

Cornelius Tuomy quit teaching to become a farmer. He grew vegetables, oats, corn, and potatoes, raised horses and sheep, and sold dairy products on his own Ann Arbor milk route.

Cornelius Tuomy was active in St. Thomas Church and also served three terms as a Democratic supervisor of Ann Arbor Township. (Here, too, his father had set the example, serving as treasurer of Scio Township.) In 1885 he married Julia Ann Kearney, also from an Irish family; they had three children--Cornelius W., known as Bill or Will (1886), Kathryn (1888), and Thomas (1890).

Thomas Tuomy died prematurely in the great flu epidemic of 1918, but Bill and Kathryn lived long lives in Ann Arbor after brief periods elsewhere (Bill in the Army Ordnance Corps in World War I, Kathryn teaching business in Kenosha, Wisconsin). They went into business together as Tuomy and Tuomy, selling real estate and insurance. Their office, originally at 122 North Fourth Avenue, was later in a little building behind the handsome stone gas station that they built in 1930 at the convergence of Washtenaw and Stadium.

The Tuomy siblings turned the family farm into the subdivision now usually called "Tuomy Hills," but which they themselves named "Julia Tuomy Estates" in honor of their mother. They gave the streets either family names, like Tuomy and Kearney, or Irish place names such as Adare, Shannondale, and Londonderry.

Julia Tuomy Estates was marketed as "the most exclusive residential district in the city." The Tuomys stipulated that a house could not cost less than $15,000 and the garage could not be built until the house was two-thirds done (perhaps to prevent the not uncommon practice of living in the garage while the house was being built). They also excluded any buyers who were not Caucasians. Such racial stipulations, now illegal, were never common in Ann Arbor; it's possible the Tuomys were trying to keep up with their competitors in the nearby Ann Arbor Hills subdivision, which had a similar racist restriction.

The streets of Julia Tuomy Estates were given family names, like Tuomy and Kearney, or Irish place names such as Adare, Shannondale, and Londonderry.

Neither Bill nor Kathryn Tuomy married, but both kept busy in community activities that mirrored their interests. Kathryn was a founding member of the Ann Arbor Business and Professional Women's Club and an early president of the Michigan Federation of Business and Professional Women. Bill was a charter member of the Erwin Prieskora post of the American Legion, active in the Army and Navy Club and the Reserve Officers Association, and was first city chair of the Citizen's Military Training Camp.

Following his grandfather's and father's examples, Bill was also active in politics, although he switched to the Republican party. He was elected county drain commissioner from 1932 to 1944. He ran on a platform of doing as little as possible, stating, "If I am elected I propose to eliminate every unnecessary drain project from the county program and cut taxes assessed on drains down to the bone."

Kathryn and Bill followed the family tradition of being active in their church. When the Catholic population in Ann Arbor outgrew St. Thomas, the Tuomys were helpful in the founding of the new church, St. Francis, organized to serve the east side of town. In 1945 they sold to the new parish, at a nominal price, eight acres of land facing Stadium at what had been the southern edge of their farm. Later they donated two more acres and paid for the road around the church, now called St. Francis Drive. When they died (Kathryn in 1965 and her brother in 1966), they left a number of generous bequests, including an athletic scholarship in brother Tom's name and a woman's scholarship in Kathryn's name. The remainder went to St. Francis, allowing the church to pay off its building debt of about $137,000.

The Tuomys stipulated that the family house should be used for a "historical or public purpose." Their executor, attorney Roscoe Bonisteel, Sr., was at the time both a U-M regent and a trustee of the Historical Society of Michigan; he arranged that the house should go to those two groups. The society moved in downstairs, and at the invitation of the regents, the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters occupied the upstairs. (An interesting footnote is that Volney Spalding, who grew up in the house, was a co-founder of the academy.)

In 1982 the regents gave up their share of the house, leaving the Historical Society of Michigan as the sole owner and occupant. Founded in 1828, the HSM is a statewide not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving state history. It publishes books and magazines, sponsors meetings and conferences, and has lately embarked on a new program to help teachers to teach Michigan history.

Since gaining ownership, the HSM has been restoring the house, making improvements as they raise the money. "Historic restoration is not for the faint of heart," says executive director Tom Jones. He expects the final cost to be about $725,000.

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: The Tuomy farm was still in operation when the photo at right was taken, but not for long: as Ann Arbor spread eastward, farm kids Bill and Kathryn Tuomy turned the land into an expensive neighborhood. Only their old farmhouse still survives (above); it's now the headquarters of the Historical Society of Michigan.

The Beal mansion had a lot in common with the public library For about a hundred years, a fifteen-room Italianate house stood on the corner of William and Fifth Avenue, where the Ann Arbor Public Library is now. The house, described in Samuel Beakes's 1906 Past and Present of Washtenaw County as "the center of true social life and hospitality," was home to the prominent Beal family. Rice Beal took over Dr. Chase's publishing ventures in 1869, and his son, Junius, was the longest-serving U-M regent. Though the mansion was torn down in 1957, the same ambience prevails at the public library that replaced it: the love of books and the encouragement of education in a place where all segments of society meet. The Ann Arbor School Board bought the house in 1953 from Loretta Beal Jacobs, daughter of Junius and Ella Beal, who had inherited the house in 1944 after her mother died. (Her father had died two years earlier.) Mrs. Jacobs and her family lived in the house only part-time, usually summers; her husband, Albert, had a distinguished academic career, ending up as president of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Bob Warner, now dean of the U-M School of Information and Library Studies, lived nearby on William as a graduate student. He remembers the Beal house as "decorated with Victorian furniture and filled with papers and books." Mrs. Jacobs, he says, was "an intelligent lady who liked to talk." From 1948 to 1950, U-M student Joe Roberts lived in the house during the months the Jacobses were away. (He now works at the library.) His upstairs bedroom, furnished with a cherry-wood four-poster bed, a marble fireplace, and a marble basin, looked out onto the garden's magnolia tree. When it bloomed in the spring, he says, it "made it almost impossible to study." Although the garden was pretty overgrown during Roberts's occupancy, Junius Beal's granddaughter, Loretta Edwards, remembers that in its prime it contained a wildflower area near the carriage house, a rock garden, and many unusual plantings, including an Osage orange tree and an elm grown from a scion of a tree planted by George Washington on the Capitol grounds. The Beal house was built in the 1860's by W. H. Mallory. Rice Beal moved into it in 1865, planning to enjoy retirement in Ann Arbor after earning his fortune in a number of business enterprises in Dexter. Born in 1823, the child of immigrants from New York State, he was raised on a farm in Livingston County and received only a basic education (elementary school and one year at Albion Academy in New York). He taught school for a year, then used his savings to buy a stock of notions and fancy goods, which he traveled around selling until he had enough money to set up a store, first in Pinckney, then Howell and Plainfield. He ended up in Dexter, then an important station on the Michigan Central line, where his many enterprises included a general store, four mills, a lumberyard, and a bank. Rice Beal's "retirement" in Ann Arbor lasted less than four years. In 1869, he could not resist the opportunity to buy Dr. Chase's printing business at the corner of Main and Miller, which included the publication of Dr. Chase's book of home remedies and a weekly newspaper, the Peninsular Courier and Family Visitant. Beal enjoyed using the paper's editorial page to explain his outspoken positions in numerous controversies, including a long-running quarrel with Dr. Chase after the former owner broke a pledge not to return to the publishing business. A Republican since the Civil War, Beal was active in the party, serving as a delegate to the conventions that nominated U. S. Grant and Rutherford Hayes. In 1880 he came close to being nominated as his party's candidate for governor. When Rice's son, Junius, graduated from the U-M in 1882, Rice decided to give retirement another try. He turned over the publishing business to his son, and started out on a trip around the country with his wife, Phoebe. He died just a year later, in 1883, while visiting Iowa Falls, Iowa. Junius Beal, born in 1860 in Port Huron, was actually Rice's nephew, but had been adopted by Rice at eleven months of age, when his mother died. Thanks to his father's extensive holdings, Junius could afford to spend much of his time with civic concerns, concentrating on education and on promoting modern infrastructure. He was one of the founders of the interurban streetcar line, lobbied for better roads, and owned the first telephone in town. An active Republican like his father, he served a term in the state house (1904), twenty years on the Ann Arbor School Board (1884-1904), and thirty-two years as a U-M regent (1907-1939), the longest anyone has ever served. He took part in the selection of four presidents, insisted that Hill Auditorium be built large enough to hold 5,000, and defended the building of the huge Michigan Stadium, arguing that the profit could help other students. When Beal's friend and fellow regent, William Clements, set up the Clements library in 1923 to house his collection of early American historical material, Beal donated some of his own collection of 2,000 rare antique books. More of his books were donated by his heirs, as was the Beal house's book-shaped carriage step, which now sits on the front lawn of the Clements. Because of Junius Beal's many connections with both the university and the town, the Beal house was a natural place for the two to meet. Loretta Edwards remembers that her grandparents entertained a variety of people, ranging from the Methodist minister (who came every Wednesday morning), business acquaintances, university benefactors such as William Cook and Charles Baird, and dignitaries who were receiving honorary degrees from the university. The Beal house was in limbo for three years after its sale in 1953, while the city and the school system tussled over whether the site should be used for a library or a new city hall. During the interim, in 1954, the newly formed Friends of the Library held their first sale in the remains of the Beal garden, selling books, records, picture frames, baked goods, and flowers. As an added attraction, they displayed the old electric car that many older residents remembered Mrs. Ella Beal driving around town. It had for many years been stored on blocks in the carriage house. The new library was designed by Alden Dow (also the architect of City Hall and the home of his sister and brother-in-law, Margaret and Harry Towsley) and opened for business on October 24, 1957. An addition was built in 1974. A second addition, which will add 43,000 square feet, and a renovation of the existing 53,000 square feet are in progress and will be done about Labor Day, 1991.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Left) Ella and Junius Beal posed in their carriage with son Travis and their coachman. (Top) Junius Beal in 1938. (Above) The same corner today.

From simple farmhouse to elegant urban hair salon

For more than a century, 512 South Main has mirrored downtown's changes. Originally a small brick house in a residential neighborhood, it was absorbed into the growing Main Street business district as Claude Brown's secondhand store and pawn shop in the 1930's. It's since grown and evolved - under a succession of owners - into a printing firm in the 1950's, an antiques shop in the 1970's, and an elegant hair salon today.

Gottlob Schumacher roomed in a house on the same block of Main in the 1920's. He remembers that at that time the area "was strictly residential, all the way up to William." Even the block north of William was sprinkled with houses, including Bertha Muehlig's home at 315, the Marchese house at 321, and Dr. Conrad Georg's home where the Quality Bar is now.

When Schumacher lived on Main Street, 512 was still owned by Conrad and Katrina Schneider, who had moved into it in about 1886. (The house was probably built in the 1860's.) Like so many Ann Arborites, Conrad Schneider was a German immigrant from the Stuttgart area. He earned his living as a painter, working out of his home. In an interview in the mid-1980's, his grandson, the late William Shadford, remembered him as "capable and industrious."

The Schneiders had five children, most of whom continued to live nearby after they grew up. Daughter Augusta married William Major Shadford and moved to 535 South Ashley, to a house almost directly behind her parents. Daughter Pauline lived just down the street in a house next to what is today Great Lakes Fitness & Cycling. Her son, Ed Ryan, is shown on his tricycle in the picture.

The building changed to a place of business in 1931, when Claude Brown moved his store there from Ann Street. Brown used the two main floors for his business, living in the walk-out basement with his wife, Leah, a cook at Delta Sigma Delta. Originally from Canada, Brown was a heavyset man, weighing about 250 pounds, who had lost an arm in a railway accident. At his store, Jim Fondren remembers, "you could get anything you wanted." Brown sold mostly used clothing, but also had furniture, household goods, jewelry, and even antiques.

Jim Crawford, who knew Brown as a fellow member of the black Elks, remembers the store as "jammed all up," with both floors filled and some of the merchandise, such as old washing machines, spilling outside. According to Crawford, "Brown knew what people wanted. He was always willing to sell, trade, or deal in some kind of way. He also operated sort of a pawn shop. He would give someone, say, ten dollars for something, and if they didn't later come back with twelve or fifteen dollars, he would sell it." During World War II Brown became adept at locating used appliances, like toasters, which were scarce because new ones weren't being made: their factories had been turned over to war production.

When the Elks Pratt Lodge was going through lean years and could not afford a permanent meeting place, Brown let them use his store on Sundays. Crawford remembers that they would "just move the junk back and find chairs to sit on." Although a shrewd businessman, Brown was generous to his fellow Elks, giving clothes and other items to families in need.

After Brown, 512 South Main was owned by Bernadine and Frank Sprague, who also lived on the premises. The Spragues made two additions to the building: they doubled the size of the original narrow house and added onto the basement, which is above ground in the back. Bernadine Sprague ran a printing business called "Letterart" in the building. It advertised services ranging from "expert mimeography" to special mailings. For a while a wig shop rented some of the premises, as did various offices.

In 1967, Richard and Sandra Russell opened an antiques business at 512. They named their store the Old Brick after the building, but later changed it to the Yankee Trader. The Russells made one more change, adding a second story atop the outside portion of the basement.

In 1983 Russell left the antiques business to concentrate on his career as a general contractor. Since then, Laky and Kim Michaelides have used the building for their hair salon.

Laky, who was raised in Israel by Greek parents, speaks Greek, Hebrew, French, and Arabic as well as English. In 1988, the Michaelideses remodeled the outside of the building, restoring a first-floor window that had been replaced by a door, painting the building gray, adding an awning, and landscaping both front and back. They received a Pride of Ownership award from the Board of Realtors for their efforts. Now they are remodeling the inside, in Laky's words, "to keep abreast with styles of the time, to give what clients expect from a classic place."

The biggest recent change in the building was beyond the Michaelideses' control. A couple of years ago, Ideal Auto Body turned a parking lot next to Laky's into a new office--and chose a startling post-modern style to do it in. The result is one of the most jarring architectural juxtapositions in town: a series of shiny metallic steps that appear to march up the sober brick building's north wall.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Downtown stopped at William Street when Ed Ryan (top left) posed in front of his grandparents Conrad and Katrina Schneider's house soon after the turn of the century. Even after the building was converted to business use during the Depression, several successive owners lived upstairs--including Bernadine and Frank Sprague, who more than doubled its size (top right) by the 1950's. The building is now Laky and Kim Michaelides's hair salon.

Conclusive proof that newer isn't always better

Just two weeks after he and Elisha Rumsey founded Ann Arbor in 1824, John Allen offered the state government free land for a courthouse. Though the site, at the corner of" "Huron" and "Main" on the partners' map, was uncleared wilderness, the state accepted, and designated Ann Arbor as the county seat. Allen had gambled (correctly, it turned out) that by giving up a small part of his 480-acre plot to get the county seat, he would be able to sell the remaining land for more. (The same ploy would later be used with similar success by the Ann Arbor Land Company to convince the University of Michigan to locate here.)

The courthouse was built a decade later by John Bryan, an early settler of Ypsilanti, at a cost of $5,350. It was a two-story building of brown-painted brick. On top was a cupola with a bell. The courtroom was upstairs, and the downstairs was rented to lawyers. Smaller one-story structures flanked the courthouse - one for the county clerk, the other for the register of deeds.

The courthouse square was surrounded by a white picket fence with a gate and turnstyle at each corner. There was a hitching rail on the corner of Huron and Fourth where people left their horses while they did business inside.

From the beginning, the courthouse and its surrounding square were the center of Ann Arbor's community life. Public events were held in the upstairs courtroom, and the grounds were used for larger gatherings. In 1860, summoned by the courthouse bell, citizens heard a city official standing on the courthouse steps read a telegram announcing that Fort Sumter had been fired on.

By the end of the Civil War it was obvious that Washtenaw County had outgrown its courthouse. Voters turned down the first request to fund a new one, in 1866. Put to the voters a second time in 1877, a funding measure passed, thanks partly to a fire in the sheriff's office that scared people: a similar fire in the courthouse, they realized, could have wiped out all the county's legal records.

The new courthouse, designed by G. W. Bunting, cost $88,000, and was far more ostentatious than the modest structure of 1834. Perched in the middle of the square, surrounded by a grassy lawn full of shade trees, the red brick building trimmed with limestone stood three stories high and was topped with a seven-story clock tower. There were smaller towers at each corner and a statue of Justice above each of the four entrances.

The inside of the courthouse was as splendid as the outside. According to Milo Ryan's autobiography View of a Universe, "all of the four doors entered into the same central lobby. From there grand staircases ascended between carved railings, of some dark wood deep-hued with stain and, probably, dust. On the main floor very tall doors opened into vast high-ceilinged offices, their walls lined with shelves of large books."

The new courthouse, like the original, was a center of community events. Memorial Day parades started there. Fourth of July programs were held on the grounds, and summer band concerts. Visiting celebrities, including William Jennings Bryan, spoke from the courthouse steps. When no events were scheduled, workers ate lunch there, children played around the war memorial on the lawn, and others exchanged gossip on warm summer evenings.

The second courthouse served the county for over seventy years. But like the first, it eventually became too small as Washtenaw County continued to grow. Micki Crawford, recently retired as chief deputy county clerk, remembers that when she began work for the county in 1950, the nineteenth-century courthouse was crowded, unsafe, and inefficient. "It may have been beautiful, but it was no joy to work in," she recalls. Clerk's forms were stored in the hallway. Records were kept under the stairs. Rats and mice were a problem. And most seriously, it was no longer felt to be safe from fire. The seven-story clock tower had been removed in 1948 because there were fears it might topple. The Main Street entrance was closed because the steps were in such bad shape.

County residents and officials offered various solutions. One was to build the new courthouse on the site of the County Infirmary (now County Farm Park), or at Vets Park. Most residents, though, wanted the courthouse to stay in the center of town, near the title companies and law offices. What really cinched the decision to put the new courthouse on the same downtown site was the discovery that under the terms of the original grant, if the courthouse land was sold for another use, the proceeds would go to John Allen's heirs, not to the county.

In the whole debate, no one seems to have mentioned the possibility of keeping the 1877 courthouse and renovating it. But in the age before preservation became a common cause, replacement seemed the only option. Mayor William Brown, speaking in favor of a new courthouse, demonstrated the assumptions of the era perfectly: "The present courthouse was built before the turn of the century. Need I say more?"

Again, it took two elections for the voters to approve the necessary funds. Voted down in 1950, the new courthouse was approved in 1955. The final plan, designed by architect Ralph Gerganoff of Ypsilanti, cleverly addressed the problems of parking and having to move twice, which had worried proponents of the other sites. The new courthouse would be built around three sides of the existing one, which would continue functioning until the new one was finished. Then the old would be torn down and that space used for parking.

The project worked as envisioned. Helen Rice, who was working at the courthouse at the time, remembers, "I could open my window and reach out about twelve inches and touch the new building." Much of the move was effected by employees handing materials out the old windows into the new.

Today, many lament the passing of the old courthouse, both for its architecture and for the sense of community fostered by the green around it. When the Downtown Landmarks Commission finished their work in 1988, they unanimously agreed to use Milt Kemnitz's portrait of the 1877 courthouse on the cover of their report. Commission chair Susan Wineberg explains, "It's the one that got away."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The courthouses of 1834 (above) and 1877 (left). To avoid moving twice, the current courthouse (bottom) was built on the old one's lawn in the 1950's.

Keeping up with the changing Ann Arbor funeral

Muehlig Funeral Chapel's 1928 move to the corner of Fourth Avenue and William was a milestone in the changing funeral practices of Ann Arbor. When Florian C. Muehlig began making caskets as a sideline to his furniture business in 1852, "families took care of their own, even burying them on their own property," says Dave Hamel, who today is co-owner of the firm with Neil Bidwell and Florian's great-grandson, Bob Muehlig. "Now it has evolved to have others handle it."

Over its first seventy years, the business slowly changed from what was primarily a furniture shop into a full-time undertaking service. But retired Muehlig's partner Fred Rogers recalls that as late as 1921, when he started in the business, "it was impossible to get [a bereaved family] to let you take the body to the funeral parlor." Muehlig's staff had to make house calls to do embalming, and helped out with funerals that were usually held either at home or at the deceased's church.

That pattern changed, Rogers says, "all of a sudden. People got different ideas - they found it more convenient to have the body in the funeral home, less confusion, no people coming into the house." It was for this reason, just seven years after Rogers started, that Muehlig's owners left their upstairs quarters on Main Street to open a bigger, more accessible full-service chapel in the spacious and imposing Lynds house at 403 South Fourth Avenue. Expanded and remodeled several times in the years since, Muehlig's is, at age 138, both the oldest funeral home in Michigan and the oldest business in Ann Arbor.

Florian C. Muehlig, born in 1810 in Rossbach, Bavaria, was a cabinetmaker who came to Ann Arbor in 1840. He began making caskets as an offshoot of the furniture, lumber, and upholstery business he opened in 1847. This combination of services was common in those days - wooden coffins took the same materials and skills used in making furniture. By 1868, his services had expanded, and funerals became an important part of Muehlig's business. A full-page ad in the city directory that year promised "Metalic burial cases and coffins. A good hearse, always in attendance. Persons wishing their friends laid out can call on us night or day, free of charge."

The original Muehlig's was on the second floor of a frame building in the 200 block of South Main, about where the Full Moon now stands. It stayed in this location during Florian's day and that of his son, John, who inherited the business when his father died. When Florian J., son of John Muehlig, inherited the business in 1897, he moved it a block south to 307 South Main, above what is now the Manikas Sirloin House.

Muehlig's used two floors in their new location. Fred Rogers slept on the third floor from 1921, when he began working, until his marriage in 1926. Rogers would go to homes to embalm the bodies as soon as people died, even if it was the middle of the night. He would return later to dress the corpse and lay it in the casket, which he would bring back with him. He and the rest of the Muehlig's staff would continue to help the family, not just with the funeral and the burial, but by arranging flowers, bringing extra chairs for the many callers, and helping to set up the prayer services that were often held in the home before the funeral.

An important part of the job, then as now, was transporting the body, to the church if the funeral was held there, or directly to the cemetery if the funeral was at home. The hearses, sometimes called "death wagons," were stored in a barn and garage behind the houses of Florian and his sister, Bertie. In those days of high infant mortality, the fleet included a white carriage used just for children. Around 1918 Muehlig's switched to motorized vehicles, although they continued using horse-drawn carriages in bad weather for a few more years.

Although most funerals were held in churches or private homes, Muehlig's did have a small chapel that was used occasionally. Its second-floor location was cumbersome, however. The body would be delivered at the back of the Main Street building, taken to the second floor by a rope elevator housed in a small building also used as a car wash, and then carried over to the chapel on a tramway built to connect the two structures. After the funeral, the body would be taken back the same way, loaded in the hearse, and then driven via an alley to Main Street, while the family waited out in front.

When Florian J. died in 1926, his widow sold the business to five partners -- her two brothers-in-law, Ernest and Edward Muehlig; Fred Rogers; and two other employees, Roland Schmid and Emma Graf. The first thing the new owners did was to look for a new location better suited to holding funerals on the premises. In 1928 they found what they were looking for just a block away: the old Lynds house, an 1884 brick Queen Anne that had been designed and constructed by local builder John Gates for Joseph Jacobs, a men's clothier. Jacobs later sold it to Dr. J. B. Lynds, who used it as a private hospital until he died in the 1918 flu epidemic. His sister, Eleanor, then took it over, running it as a rooming house for "business women."

The Muehlig partners remodeled and enlarged their new quarters, adding office space on the Fourth Avenue side, a porte cochere on the William Street side for funeral exits, and a large garage accessible from both sides. Further remodeling was done in 1951 and 1964, and the parking lot was enlarged over the years by moving or tearing down several homes. (One home moved from the neighborhood stands today at 259 Crest.)

The tradition of ownership by a mixture of employees and family members has continued to this day, retiring partners selling their shares to employees who are familiar with the business. The present owners, including Bob Muehlig, the son of Edward, started as employees.

Not much has changed in the sixty years that Muehlig's has occupied the Fourth Avenue house. Bob Muehlig, who has been with the company since 1934, finds the biggest change is in the number of cremations. About 8 percent when he started, it has recently leveled off at about 40 percent. Other than that, it's rare for families to modify funeral services as freely as they do weddings, for example. But, says Neil Bidwell, there is "more participation in the planning of the service by the survivors than in the past." Occasionally a family will write their own eulogy or add poems or music. And from time to time, a family member may actually make the casket.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Muehlig Funeral Chapel today (above) and in the early 1940's (top).

The neighborhood has changed more than the clothing

In his sixty-three years at Fiegel's Men's and Boys' Wear, as an employee and then as owner, Herbert Sager has seen almost no change in the merchandise. When pressed, he can come up with only one discontinued item: spats, worn to protect shoes during the winter. But while the stock has remained the same, the downtown area around Fiegel's has changed dramatically since Sager first began working there in 1926. Of the other stores in the immediate area, only one, Wilkinson's luggage shop, survives. Fiegel's original neighbors, the Orpheum and Wuerth theaters, have long gone, casualties of the television era.

The store now known as Fiegel's was started by J. Fred Wuerth in 1900, in a building he erected at 322 South Main, one store south of the present Fiegel's. In 1914 Wuerth built the Orpheum theater next door at 326 South Main (now Gratzi). In 1918 he added a second theater, the Wuerth, perpendicular to the Orpheum, running behind the clothing store.

After the theaters were built, Wuerth became more interested in his real estate than in the day-to-day operations of his clothing store. In the early 1920's he approached Albert Fiegel, who had been a partner in another clothing store, to buy his business.

Fiegel had begun his career in men's clothing in 1891, when he was only eighteen. His family had wanted him to be a minister, but when his father, John Fiegel, was killed in a tragic horse accident that horrified the whole town, the owners of Wadham, Ryan and Reule, a clothing store on the corner of Main and Washington (where Kiddie Land is now), asked him if he would like to come work for them.

Fiegel did well in the business, eventually earning enough money to buy in as a partner; the store was renamed Reule, Conlin and Fiegel. Unfortunately, Fiegel's success came at the expense of his health. According to his daughter, Gertrude Fiegel, he sold his interest after doctors advised him that he would live longer if he stopped working in such an old building. After returning to the family farm to work and recuperate, he reentered the clothing business and was working in the men's department at Mack's Department Store when he was approached by Wuerth.

After working in the store to see if it suited him, Fiegel bought Wuerth's business in 1927. He renamed it Fiegel's and added to the logo "since 1891" - the year he had entered the clothing business.

Herb Sager began working at Wuerth's the year before Fiegel bought it. He had been a regular customer, and one Saturday evening he walked in and asked then-manager Edwin Staeb for a job. Only twenty-six, Sager had already worked at a variety of jobs, including bottling milk at the Ann Arbor Dairy, working the machinery at American Broach, and selling Maytag washing machines door to door. He applied at the men's store, he recalls, looking to "get in something definite and stay."

Fiegel and Sager had a lot in common. Both were raised on farms, Sage four miles south of Chelsea (Sager Road is named after his family), Fiegel in Pittsfield Township. Both ended their formal education with graduation from the local one-room school. Both were good dressers. According to Gertrude Fiegel, "Dad always liked clothes. When he was a young man he was pretty dapper."

Sager admits to the same taste. "I used to have clothes made to measure. I always had nice clothes--at least I thought they were." And like Fiegel, Sager was hard-working; starting as a lowly sales clerk, he, too, was eventually able to buy into the business.

When Sager started work at Fiegel's, many of the customers still came to town by horse and buggy and hitched their vehicles outside the store. The store stayed open to 9 p.m. Saturday to accommodate farmers who could not come to town until they had finished working in the fields.

During the Depression, Sager and Fiegel ran the store by themselves: there wasn't enough business to pay any other salaries. Fiegel did the bookkeeping (he had taken night school courses to learn accounting), while Sager waited on customers and did the janitorial chores. With hard work, they survived the Depression, a time when many stores, including the fabulous Mack Department Store, went under.

Sager began buying shares in the store in 1936. Albert Fiegel was then sixty-three, and he announced that as soon as he had sold more than 50 percent of the shares, he would sell out completely. This occurred in 1941 when Sager and two other Fiegel employees, John Andress and Paul Jedele, became the new owners. They renamed the store Sager, Andress and Jedele, but when they put up their new sign, business dropped significantly. After a few months, they changed the name back to Fiegel's, which it has remained ever since. Jedele left after World War II to run a store by himself in Niles, Michigan, while Andress retired in the early 1970's. Today, two of Sager's sons, Dave and Doug, have joined him in the business.

Fiegel's thrived in the late 1940's and into the 1950's. Business at the two theaters helped draw crowds. Dave Sager remembers that when movies like "The Red Shoes" were showing, students would stand in line all the way down the block to Liberty; every one, of course, would spend some time standing in front of Fiegel's display windows.

In the late 1950's business dropped. The two theaters closed in 1956, and newly opened shopping malls lured customers away. But business picked up again in the 1960's as Fiegel's got new neighbors and moved next door to a more convenient and commodious space that was formerly the Wuerth theater arcade. The new store also had the great advantage of a back entrance; in the old location all deliveries had to be made through the front door.

All three buildings are still owned by Wuerth heirs. When Faber's Fabric (which took over the Orpheum theater space), and later Fiegel's and Apollo Music (which took Fiegel's old spot), were remodeled inside, their outsides were covered by the metal grillwork popular in the 1960's. Faber's grillwork has been removed, revealing the original Orpheum exterior.

At age eighty-nine, Herb Sager comes in to work every day. He's still keenly interested in everything that goes on at the store. Although Ann Arbor has grown exponentially since he began in the business, he even now knows a large number of his customers by name. Looking around his store, Sager sums it up in his matter-of-fact way: "It hasn't changed too much."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Top) By the time this photo was taken in the 1960's, Faber's Fabrics had taken over and modernized the adjacent Orpheum Theater. (Above) Fiegel's itself has since moved north, into what was once the Wuerth Theater arcade.

After almost a century in eclipse, epitaphs are making a comeback

When immigrant stonemason Vincel Arnet started work at Lockridge Monuments in Ypsilanti in 1887, most Washtenaw County gravestones were made of limestone sent by wagon from Bedford, Indiana. The soft stone was easily carved, and a trip to any of the area's older cemeteries reveals wonderful examples of monuments decorated with symbolic pictures, such as lambs for dead children, weeping willows signifying sadness, or tree stumps marking people who died in the prime of life. Some include epitaphs, often long ones; like James Warble's 1861 stone in Stony Creek Cemetery in Augusta Township:

Sleep on dear Father
Thy toils and cares are o'er
It was God that called thee home
Where we shall meet to part no more

Even the simpler stones often include information such as the place of death, close relatives, or the deceased's age down to the day.

Unfortunately, these beautiful stones are prey to the elements; the wear over the years makes the engravings harder to discern. Vincel Arnet arrived from Pilsen, Bohemia, at the end of an era. In 1889, granite, a harder, much longer-lasting stone, began to be mined in Barre, Vermont, and later in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Elberton, Georgia. Previously the only granite available was from Scotland, and shipping costs made it too expensive for general use.

Larry Arnet, Vincel's great-grandson and the owner of Arnet's Monuments on Jackson Road, has become an expert in gravestones, both from his own involvement in the industry and from listening to stories about his family's eighty-five-year-old business. People readily switched to granite for its durability, he says, although it had the drawback of being much more expensive to engrave since it was so hard. Arnet estimates that engraving limestone was about 7 percent of the final cost of the stone, while engraving granite reached about 25 percent. The expense meant that people not only stopped putting symbolic pictures and extra information on gravestones, but sometimes even reduced the engraving to the name and the years of birth and death, omitting the day and the month.

The advent of the automobile and the subsequent scattering of families around the county also affected the burial business. In the nineteenth century, people would buy cemetery lots in groups of eight, twelve, or even sixteen, intending that the mortal remains of the entire family would lie together. Often they identified the area with a big central monument bearing the family name, which they surrounded with smaller stones for each family member.. But as this century progressed and families dispersed, people switched to buying only one or two lots at a time.

The Arnet Monument Company (originally Zachmann and Arnet - Gus Zachmann was a partner for a few years) opened during the switch from limestone to granite and shortly before the rise of the automobile. Founder Joseph L. Arnet, Vincel's son and Larry's grandfather, followed his father and trained to be a stonemason, apprenticing in Flint. In 1904, at the age of twenty-five, he started his own business in Ann Arbor, using the $25 insurance proceeds he received when his father died. His first shop was simply an open lot on the corner of Main and Ann, most recently the site of the Salvation Army Store and now a temporary county park. Says Larry Arnet, "In those days they worked outside. They didn't feel they had to have air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter."

According to family stories, there were six monument companies in Ann Arbor when Joseph Arnet started in business. After two years there were only two, the other four having joined Arnet. The business was given a good start when it received as its third commission a $5,000 stone - 200 times the $25 average at the time. An unmarried schoolteacher died without heirs and, not wanting her money to go to the state, designated that her entire estate be used for a burial stone. Arnet spent a year carving an 8 by 10 foot monument and decorating it with acanthus leaves. (It's in York Cemetery, at the corner of Platt and Judd roads in York Township.)

In 1917 Joseph Arnet finally gave his workers a break from Michigan's inclement climate by moving to an inside location at 208 West Huron, most recently the Whiffletree Restaurant. Up until the restaurant's 1988 fire, Larry Arnet says, it was still possible to see the beams that had held the chain falls used to lift stone in his grandfather's day.

Joseph's son, Frederick, began working in the family business after graduating from the U-M in 1931 with a degree in architecture. He took over completely in 1937 after Joseph suffered a debilitating stroke. Under Frederick's leadership, the company branched into producing architectural features, such as stone facings and copings around walls, a natural outgrowth of his architectural training.

In need of more space for the expanding business that Frederick was bringing in, Arnet's moved in 1933 to 924-936 North Main, the building that now houses Robey Tire.

Larry Arnet grew up in the business, watching his father and grandfather work at the various locations and helping when he was old enough. But when he came of age, he had doubts about whether he wanted to follow the course laid out for him. Frederick Arnet, thinking he would need to sell the business, attempted to shrink it to a manageable size. He moved it in 1960 to a smaller location, 218 Chapin, across from West Park, now the New Hope Baptist Church. But Larry relented and took over the business in 1965. Following the trend of heavy industries leaving downtown for cheaper, more accessible space on the edge of town, he moved Arnet's to its present location at 4495 Jackson Road in 1970. He has since been joined in the business by his son Steve, daughter Carol Bondie, and son-in-law Jim Moomey.

Larry Arnet is a warm jovial man, and it's obvious that his original reluctance has turned into an enormous enthusiasm for the profession. Although he admits the trend is to spend less on funerals and gravestones, Larry Arnet says there is also increased awareness of the importance of formally recognizing a loved one's death and of the comfort that comes from knowing where the physical remains lie. He says a rise in family feeling among young people has led to an increase in requests for memorials with special carvings, symbols, and epitaphs.

Fortunately, technical improvements in the industry now allow more designs and information to be put on granite stones, despite their hardness, at a reasonable cost. Computer-generated stencils are used for sandblasting, and skilled artisans can etch the designs into the stone with a vibrating diamond-tipped pen.

Larry Arnet has worked on unusual gravestones, including those for stunt pilot William Barber and his wife, Elaine, which when viewed together form an airplane, and a monument that resembles a space capsule. Erected at the Jackson Space Center, it honors Roger Chafee and Gregory Jarvis, the two Michigan astronauts who died in the line of duty.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: After three moves, current owner Larry Arnet (in suit) carries on the monument trade with son-in-law Jim Moomey, son Steve, and daughter Caryl Bondie.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: From 1904 to 1917, founder Joseph Arnet (in vest) and his crew worked outdoors at the corner of Main and Ann.

Even Frank Lloyd Wright approved Most church groups that need to relocate either buy a church building abandoned by another congregation or build a new church. But in 1946, when the Ann Arbor Unitarian Universalists left their handsome stone church at the corner of State and Huron, they moved to a house on Washtenaw. According to the church's current minister, Ken Phifer, using houses is not uncommon among Unitarian congregations; he could name five other examples immediately. "The Unitarians don't worry about following any architectural standard," he says. "Every building and every community is different." He links this to the Unitarian belief that "individuals follow their own path." The Unitarians bought the house at 1917 Washtenaw from Dr. Dean Myers, a prominent eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist. Built in 1917 (by coincidence, the year matches its address on Washtenaw), the Swiss chalet-style house was one of the most elegant on a street of distinctive homes. It was well built of sturdy fieldstone and was the pride of its builders, Weinberg and Kurtz. (For years, a picture of the house was featured on the construction firm's checks.) The front entry area was flanked by a formal living room on the west and a library and dining room on the east. Sun rooms on each side were entered through French doors. Next to the dining room was the butler's pantry and beyond that the kitchen and cook's pantry. The bedrooms on the second floor had adjacent sleeping porches over the sun rooms. On the third floor were luxurious guest quarters and a maid's apartment with sitting room and bathroom. In the basement, besides the usual storerooms and laundry room, there was a billiard room with wooden pillars and a fireplace. Myers, who was widowed when the house was built, moved in with his daughter, Dorothy, and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Owens. He was then forty-three years old and at the peak of his career as an innovative eye surgeon. He was also active in community affairs, serving on city council and the school board and as chair of the county Democratic party. An avid golfer, Myers helped lay out the first nine holes of the Barton Hills golf course and was the first player to make a hole-in-one there. For the first six years in the house, Myers got by with day help, but in 1923, when he married Eleanor Sheldon, the housekeeper at Betsy Barbour, he decided it would be better to have a live-in maid. On the recommendation of friends, he sponsored a seventeen-year-old immigrant girl from Swabia in southern Germany. Carolina Schumacher (she married Gottlob Schumacher in 1930) cooked, washed, and ironed for the family. Mrs. Schumacher still remembers her first day. She had to enter through the back door because Washtenaw was being paved and was covered with straw. She remembers Dr. Myers as "nice looking, tall and bald headed, always smiling." (He used to say, she recalls, that "you can't have brains and hair too.") The house was grandly furnished, with oriental rugs throughout and a grand piano in the living room. Before dinner, Myers liked to sing, accompanied by Dorothy at the piano. The Myerses entertained frequently, often other well-known local doctors, like Albert Furstenberg and R. Bishop Canfield, and sometimes visiting out-of-town doctors. Mrs. Schumacher left the Myerses' employ when she and her husband started the Old German restaurant. After Mrs. Owens's death and Dorothy's decision to move in with a friend, Dr. and Mrs. Myers stayed in the big house until 1946, when they moved to Hildene Manor, the gracious Tudor-style apartment building at 2220 Washtenaw. Dr. Myers died in 1955 and his wife a few years later. The Ann Arbor Unitarians had been in their church at State and Huron since 1883, and the decision to move was a difficult one. Parishioners--including the children of Jabez Sunderland, the minister under whom the church had been built--realized the historic value of the old building, both architecturally and as a repository of memories. But it had deteriorated, inside and out, and the costs of repair far exceeded the church's resources. The Depression and then World War II had depleted the membership; when Ed Redman took over the ministry in 1943, there were sixteen contributing member families. Don Campbell, then the church treasurer, says that the old church "was like a barn--cold, hard to heat, dirty." Services were held in the library, which was easier to heat, because it was rare for more than thirty-five people to show up. Ironically, it was Redman's success in bringing the membership back up that sounded the death knell for the old church. He attracted young families, many with children, and soon the church could not provide the needed Sunday School space, even spreading out to the parsonage next door on State Street. When, in 1945, the Grace Bible Church offered the Unitarians $65,000 for the old building, they accepted the offer and began to search in earnest for a new home. The following year they bought the Myers house for $46,000. On February 3, 1946, Redman gave his last sermon in the old church. It was entitled "Sixty-Four Glorious Years.'' After a few months in Lane Hall, he delivered the premiere sermon in the Myerses' former living room, calling it "Birth of a New Age." The house took on an entirely new identity. Church social events were held in the old dining room, while the Sunday School met in the second- and third-floor bedrooms. The Redmans had planned to live in a parsonage on Packard, but they found the house too small (Redman and his wife, Annette, had five children) and preferred to live closer to the action. A parsonage addition was built at the back of the house, one floor in 1948 and a second in 1955. By the fall of 1951, it was obvious that the church was outgrowing its house. Redman, in his recollections published by the church in 1988, wrote, "The worship services could not be contained in the original living room space of the chalet. John Shepard had installed storm windows in the side porch, and it was quite fully occupied except in the most severe weather. The entry hallway provided additional seating space extending all the way into the original sun room. And the main stairway was also often occupied!" The church began collecting money for an addition, receiving pledges for $40,000. George Brigham, a prominent architect on the U-M faculty and a church member, was hired to design the addition with an auditorium upstairs and a social hall and kitchen downstairs. According to Redman's memoir, Brigham's charge was "safeguarding the architectural integrity of the existing chalet and the design of additions, which would pick up on the theme of the chalet to create a total facility blending in a unified way with its landscape." Redman continues proudly: "That the goal was substantially achieved by Professor Brigham was attested when the renowned Unitarian architectural master Frank Lloyd Wright expressed one of his rare approvals by exclaiming, 'That's good!' " Today the church stands as completed in 1956, except for a change in the roof line to make the building easier to heat. The section that was the Myers house is used for offices: dining room for main office, master bedroom for minister's study, Mrs. Owens's bedroom for the religious education director's office. The sun room off the living room is the library. The National Organization for Women rents an office on the second floor, and the old parsonage is often rented during the week by preschool groups. The carriage house where the Schumachers lived is now home to a Salvadoran refugee family sponsored by the church. The Unitarian Universalist church continues to thrive in the space, with a membership of 416, not counting children. Phifer, who fell in love with the building the moment he saw it, says, "I never heard anyone say anything but praiseworthy about it." Grace Bible eventually outgrew the old church at State and Huron, moving to an ambitious new complex on South Maple Road. The building sat vacant and deteriorating for several years until it was finally restored as the offices of Hobbs and Black architects. It was an ideal solution: Hobbs and Black got a showpiece office, and the building a proud, well-heeled tenant. "It's beautiful, but it cost an arm and a leg," Don Campbell says of the restoration. "The church didn't have that kind of money."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The Unitarians' additions have been so subtly done that today's expansive church (above) looks surprisingly unaltered from its days as a private home (right).

The stately and prestigious Women's City Club started as a simple farmhouse.

In its 100-plus years, 1830 Washtenaw has changed in harmony with the street it faces. Built when Washtenaw was a dirt country road, it was first a simple, boxy farmhouse. When Washtenaw became a fashionable address, the house was ingeniously transformed into an imposing home for a wealthy physician. As the Women's City Club since 1951, it has continued to evolve, expanding physically and adapting socially as it moves to encompass the needs of career women as well as club women. It provides meeting space for seventeen member clubs and 900 individual members, to whom its dining room, lounges, and library are an ideal place to hang out, entertain guests, or, in the case of the increasing number of professional women members, meet with clients.

The house was built by Evart Scott, who moved to Ann Arbor from Ohio in 1868 to attend the U-M. Scott completed only two years of college, but stayed in town to become a successful businessman, civic activist, and farmer. He was president of the Ann Arbor Agricultural Co., which ran a mill at Argo dam, and a member of the school board, the public works board, and the board of Forest Hills Cemetery.

Scott moved into the house on Washtenaw in 1886, a few years after starting an orchard and nursery on what was then a thirty-acre plot just outside the city limits. He planted elm trees along his 1,000-foot Washtenaw frontage (from present-day Ferdon all the way to Austin) and named it "Elm Fruit Farm."

In 1915, after the city had annexed the area, Scott sold the bulk of his farmland to Charles Spooner. Spooner subdivided it into building lots and, in collaboration with architect Fiske Kimball, built the elegant homes that still grace the neighborhood. Reminders of the land's earlier owner can be found in the street names Scottwood and Austin (the name of Scott's father, brother, and son) and in a few ancient fruit trees, most of them pear, found in the neighborhood.

Two years after selling the land, Scott moved to a smaller house at 1930 Washtenaw, on the eastern edge of his property. He sold the big house and three acres of land to Dr. R. Bishop Canfield, a professor in the medical school who was returning to town after wartime duty in the U.S. Medical Corps.

Canfield hired architect Lewis J. Boynton to turn the forty-year-old farmhouse into something more suitable for its increasingly prestigious address. Boynton succeeded in transforming the simple box into an impressive house in the then fashionable Dutch colonial revival style. He replaced the old-fashioned wraparound porch with small extensions on each end of the house. Then he added a massive sloping roof that came down over the porches and allowed the attic windows to peek through as dormers. The finishing touch was a delicate front entrance porch with slender Ionic columns.

Canfield was one of the nation's leading specialists in ear, nose, and throat problems. He and his wife, Leila, a nurse from Colorado, had one child, a redheaded adopted daughter, Barbara. Alva Sink, a longtime member of the Women's City Club, knew the Canfield family well. For three of the years that she was a student at the U-M in the early 1920's, she ran a private school on their third floor, teaching Barbara and five other children of prominent families, including Jane Burton, daughter of the U-M president. Mrs. Sink remembers the Canfield house as "beautiful," and says that the interior "looked much as it does today." She recalls that Mrs. Canfield's help included a cook, maid, and yardman.

Canfield died in 1932, at age fifty-eight, when his car ran into a tree near the present site of Arborland. He was returning home after driving his wife and daughter and Dr. and Mrs. A. C. Furstenberg (he would later become dean of the medical school) to Detroit to catch a train to New York, where all but Mrs. Canfield were to sail for Europe. Mrs. Canfield hurried home as soon as she received news of her husband's death. Unfortunately, the Furstenbergs and Barbara had already sailed. Informed by ship's radio, they could do nothing but sail on to Gilbraltar, where they boarded a ship returning to the U.S.

Mrs. Canfield continued to live in the house until her death almost twenty years later. When the house went on the market in 1950, a group of local women were looking for a location for a women's club. Up to then, many groups had met on campus, especially in the Women's League, but increased enrollment at the U-M after World War II made university space harder to obtain.

By then, too, Washtenaw's big houses weren't quite so desirable as they'd been: few postwar families could afford servants to care for rambling buildings and grounds, and the street's increasingly heavy traffic was a worry for children. (Washtenaw at that time was part of Route 23, which went through town.) To the chagrin of residents, some houses were being taken over by fraternities, sororities, and other institutional users like the First Unitarian Church, which had recently bought and remodeled a former home down the block.

There was opposition to the conversion of the Canfield home, but the proponents were capable, well-connected, and hardworking women. When critics said the house was not strong enough to hold the weight of large gatherings, member Elsie White had her husband, Dr. Albert White, head of engineering research at the U-M, arranged to have the house checked. Free financial advice was given by Earl Cress of Ann Arbor Trust, while the Roscoe Bonisteels, Sr. and Jr., donated legal advice.

The key hurdle of changing the residential zoning was solved after the group negotiated an agreement with the six nearest neighbors that they would tell the city council they had no objections to the club as long as there were no exits from the rear onto Norway.

After Barbara Canfield, by then married and living in Chicago, accepted the City Club's offer of $45,000 in January of 1951, the group went to work raising money. Margaret Towsley, secretary of the founding group, sent letters to all the women's clubs in town asking them to join and also to encourage at least a quarter of their group to enroll as individual members. Twenty-one clubs and 600 individual members responded, and by June 20, 1951, the final papers were signed. Supplementing membership fees with fund-raising activities, the group managed to pay the entire mortgage within five years. Just six years later, architect Ralph Hammett was hired to design a modern addition to house a large dining room, auditorium, office, main lobby, and lounge.

Today, women's clubs in many cities have lost members or completely ceased to exist due to the large number of women working outside the home. So far, the Ann Arbor club has maintained itself well. Though membership has fallen by about 200 women from its peak in 1970, the club is actively recruiting younger members with more evening programs, more events open to men, and a deferred membership payment plan for daughters of members. (The membership initiation fee is $200 and annual dues are $175.) Some of the younger members are housewives deferring careers to raise children, but many are career women - real estate agents, lawyers, and accountants. Says club archivist Ruth Whitaker, "It provides a forum for women doing volunteer work to touch base with people in the work world." Club president Greta Smith adds, "It's a good way to meet people if you're new in the area."

Most importantly, enthusiasm is still high. Elsie White describes the club as "a great blessing to the community," while Sink says, "It's the best thing Ann Arbor ever did for women - or rather, that they did for themselves."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Built 103 years ago as a plain farmhouse, 1830 Washtenaw was gentrified in 1917 with a total revamping in the Dutch colonial revival style (left). As homes on the street began giving way to institutions, the Women's City Club bought the house in 1951 and added a big modern wing eleven years later.

Its huge Huron Street factory is now a haven for low-budget arts groups.

The factory building at 408 West Washington, now the home of numerous arts groups, including the Performance Network, was from 1919 to 1963 the headquarters of American Broach, a pioneer machine-tool maker. American Broach flourished during the heyday of the U.S. auto industry, supplying broaches (specialized metal-cutting tools) and broaching machines to the Big Three auto companies, their suppliers, and farm machinery manufacturers. At its peak during World War II, American Broach employed 500 people and ran around the clock making equipment for munitions factories. Unlike many of its competitors, it weathered the long decline of the U.S. auto industry, and it still survives, on a smaller scale, in a modern factory on Jackson Road.

Broaching is a method of machining in which a series of rotating cutting teeth are used to shape an edge or an opening in a piece of metal. Invented in the mid-nineteenth century, broaching was improved by J. L. Lapointe, who created a faster and more accurate broaching machine at his factory in New London, Connecticut, in 1901.

American Broach was founded by Lapointe's son, Francis, who is often called the father of modern broaching. According to John Podesta, chief engineer under Francis Lapointe and later general manager of American Broach, "Lapointe had a genius for knowing and inventing tools. He could throw out ideas as fast as you could catch them."

Francis Lapointe was a practical businessman, too. He was one of the first to appreciate the usefulness of broaching to the newly emerging automobile industry. In 1919, accompanied by about six skilled employees, he left his father's broaching company and moved to the Midwest to be closer to potential customers and to take advantage of the good labor market. With the help of the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce, he found land on Huron Street just west of the railroad overpass, where he built a small factory on the eastern edge of the property.

Lapointe's optimism was vindicated. Driven by the burgeoning growth of the auto companies and their suppliers, American Broach grew rapidly over the next two decades. Lapointe added sections to the factory until it reached Third Street, then built a wing stretching to Washington. During World War II, he built a second wing on the western edge of the property, parallel to the railroad tracks.

Just as it shared in the prosperity of the auto industry, however, American Broach was touched by its labor problems. In 1937, Francis Lapointe sold the business to an Illinois-based machine-tool company, Sundstrand, but stayed on as general manager. Later the same year, American Broach had the distinction of hosting Ann Arbor's first sit-down strike. The immediate cause was the refusal of management to grant a nickel-an-hour raise.

Inspired by the successful sit-down strike in Flint's GM plant earlier that year, a group of workers locked the shop doors from the inside at 10:01 a.m. on Tuesday, August 3. Then they pulled the main switch, stopping all the electric machinery. Since the shop was on the first floor, food was easily delivered to the strikers through the windows on Huron Street. Management continued working in the second-story offices, entering and leaving by outside stairways.

Strike supporters picketed in front of the Washington Street parking lot. Sophie Reuther, who, along with her husband, Vie Reuther, was the UAW organizer assigned to Ann Arbor, took an unintentional ride on the hood of a car that drove through the human barrier the picketers had formed. Tacks were then strewn on the driveway, causing several flat tires. But no irreversible harm was done, and after thirty-six hours, the strikers were persuaded to leave the building by Ann Arbor mayor Walter Sandier, who sneaked in a back door to tell them that Michigan governor Frank Murphy had agreed to mediate the dispute. The strikers returned to work after both sides agreed to collective bargaining.

American Broach's finest hour was during World War II. Working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the factory built broaching machines and broaching tools needed to "rifle" guns and artillery. Rifling creates grooves inside a gun barrel so that the bullet spins when fired, giving it greater accuracy and distance.

John Podesta remembers accompanying Lapointe on a trip to the Springfield Arsenal in Massachusetts, early in the war. On the way home, the two men sat up all night in their Pullman sleeper designing a faster broaching method. When they ran out of paper, they drew on the cardboard their shirts had been wrapped in. When they arrived back in Ann Arbor the next morning, they were, ready to begin producing machines that could rifle a gun barrel in one hour instead of the six hours it had taken.

After the war, the broaching business waned. In 1946, Lapointe left American Broach to start a new company in Kentucky. Podesta took over as general manager until 1957, when Sundstrand moved the broaching-machine business to their headquarters in Rockford, Illinois. In 1961, two employees, Harold Holly and Everett Vreeland (whose father was one of the six men Lapointe had brought from Connecticut in 1919), bought the broaching-tool division. In 1963 they moved it to Jackson Road, where it still thrives, now under the ownership of Ed Kohmeyer.

After American Broach left West Washington Street, the huge building was partitioned off and rented to a number of businesses, including Bonavia Bedding Co., Seyfried Printers, the Breast Cancer Detection Center, Sears Roebuck's advertising office, Sycor, and Ann Arbor Circuits. By 1980 it was down to a couple of tenants, and the owners renamed it "The Technology Center" in hopes of attracting electronics companies.

Instead, they found an important tenant in the Performance Network, which in turn attracted a number of the small artists and arts groups--including dancers, musicians, and painters--that make up an important (if poorly paid) segment of Ann Arbor's current economy. The complex is now home to more than 100 groups, many of whom, in the words of one of the owners, Dan Hussey, "couldn't find any other place to be, either because of the cost or because of what they are doing."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: American Broach thrived during the golden age of Michigan's auto industry, growing from half a dozen people in 1919 to 500 workers during World War II. This early 1940s photo includes Ev Vreeland (fourth from left in the front row), who later became an owner of the company. The woman at far left is plant nurse Leanna Delhey, mother of the longtime county prosecutor.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The J. Parker Copley Dance Company rehearses at the Broach's former west side factory. The sprawling complex is now rented to over 100 small tenants, including ^musicians, painters, and the Performance Network theater.