Local artifacts in a century-old church building

Samuel Dexter's bed, clock, and rocking chair; Dr. William Wiley's tum-of-the-century medical instruments; a host of other historic Dexter artifacts—what better place to display them than an equally historic church?

Serendipitously, just as the Dexter Area Historical Society was organizing in the early 1970s and looking for a permanent location, St. Andrew's United Church of Christ decided to leave its 1883 edifice and build a new church. Now both have what they want: St. Andrew's has its modern church on Ann Arbor Street, while the historical society has its museum in the old church, which was moved to the back of the St. Andrew's parking lot, facing Inverness.

In the nineteenth century, many Germans immigrated to western Washtenaw County, mainly from the area around Stuttgart. Twenty-two of those families organized St. Andrew's in 1875 so they could hear the gospel preached in their own language. They held their first services at George Sill Hall, above Sill Hardware (now Hackney Ace Hardware).

After eight years, they built their first church, a simple wooden structure painted white both inside and out, with a tower and green shutters. Germans from congregations in Chelsea, Ann Arbor, and Manchester came to the dedication. They met at Sill Hall, formed a line, and proceeded to the new church, where they held a service, and then returned to the hall for a banquet.

The church added a wooden parish hall in 1927, and a brick one in 1959. A rough basement was dug in 1933 for a new furnace. But by 1971, the congregation was running out of room, and one comer of the church was sagging.

Meanwhile, Norma McAllister, a Dexter native and village history enthusiast, became concerned that a lot of local historical material was being lost. Together with Dexter High School teacher Frank Wilhelme and one of his students, Tom Morcom, she organized the first meeting of the Dexter Area Historical Society—the first local Historical society in Michigan—in July 1971.

"We didn't know how many would come. But they poured in. We had to keep getting more chairs," recalls McAllister. By the end of the evening, seventy-five people had signed up.

The society's main objective was to set up a museum for donated historic artifacts. St. Andrew's agreed to contribute its original church building and the 1927 parish hall. The historical society signed a seventy-five-year lease on the new site for the old church, and then raised money for the move. McAllister recalls that some members lent money to the society and were paid back with some of the profits from Dexter's 1974 sesquicentennial celebration.

St. Andrew's moved the church bell and altar into its new building but left everything else, including stained glass windows added in 1908 in memory of loved ones. The historical society maintains the old church's ambience. The onetime sanctuary now holds permanent and rotating exhibits about the Dexter area. There are historic photos of people, stores, churches, and houses in the vestibule, while the basement is used for farm tools and an electric railroad. The old parish hall is used for a gift shop and meeting space (the historical society meets on the first Thursday of the month). A small room off the larger area, originally a kitchen, is the genealogy room, run by Nancy Van Blaricum, who collects Dexter records—newspapers, census reports, church records, family histories.

"I'm glad the museum lasted," says McAllister. "It's important to keep this stuff."

—Grace Shackman

New owners are restoring the digs of Chelsea's most notorious figure—and villagers are pitching in.

For almost a century after Frank Glazier left Chelsea in 1910 to serve a term in Jackson State Prison, his huge house at 208 South Street went downhill. Despite Glazier's notoriety in local history, Chelsea residents did nothing to save it beyond occasional complaining.

Last January Todd and Janice Ortbring bought the twenty-one-room mansion, complete with tower, despite an eleven-page inspection report that mentioned termites, foundation cracks, and faulty wiring, among other problems. "We're probably crazy for doing it," says Todd Ortbring. "But we saw the opportunity to save a house that needed saving pretty darn quick." A lifelong resident of Chelsea, Ortbring appreciated Glazier's importance. His great-grandfather played in Glazier's band, and his grandfather owned the drugstore that Glazier had inherited from his father.

Glazier is without doubt the most important person in Chelsea's history after the founding Congdon brothers. In 1895 he started a company that manufactured cooking and heating stoves, and he was soon selling stoves worldwide. A civic leader, Glazier benefited Chelsea in countless ways—bringing electricity and water to town, providing jobs, and erecting landmark buildings that still define Chelsea, including the Clock Tower, the Welfare Building, the Methodist church, and a bank that is now 14A District Court. He was also a leader in state and local politics; in 1906 he was elected state treasurer and was being mentioned as a possible governor.

But at this peak of his prominence, his financial shenanigans were exposed: putting state money in his own bank, and taking out separate loans from banks all over the state using identical collateral from his stove company. Forced to resign as treasurer, Glazier spent two years in Jackson Prison before his sentence was reduce for good behavior. He spent the last ten years of his life at his cottage on Cavanaugh Lake.

Even today, reactions to Glazier are mixed. Some condemn him. Others excuse him by saying that what he did was common practice in those days and that he was being squeezed by the nationwide financial panic of 1907.

Glazier's house was divided into four apartments. For a long time it still looked beautiful from the outside; in the 1970s, however, an owner put up an ugly concrete-block addition for a fifth apartment, totally obscuring the elegant wraparound porch held up by fluted pillars.

The Ortbrings aim to make the house a single-family home again. Years of use as apartments obscured its original functions; it now appears that the house is actually two houses pushed together. The Ortbrings found a treasure trove of elements in a basement room—front porch columns, wooden doors with metal hardware, leaded glass windows, banisters, wooden benches, and two boxes of wooden pieces for the disassembled parquet floor—that are all elements of the puzzle.

Exactly when Glazier built his house is not clear. In 1895 a photo of it as a smaller house without a tower appeared in the Chelsea Headlight, a publication of the Michigan Central Railroad. Graffiti in the tower, written by Glazier's daughter Dorothy, are dated 1899. Ortbring believes the front was added to the back, but others say the back, the tower, and the front porch might have been the additions.

The Ortbrings have assembled a group of experts to help them, such as builder Bob Chizek and Chelsea architect Scott McElrath. Their strategy is to first replace the roof and paint the exterior. They plan to attack the inside apartment by apartment. The Ortbrings are living in the second-floor rear apartment and renting out three units while working on the apartment below them, which contains the original dining room. Taking off paneling and dropped ceilings, they found pocket doors, parquet floors, ceiling moldings, and a fireplace.

Restoring a house is almost like living with an original tenant. Todd Ortbring pictures the dining room as it was in Glazier's time. "Glazier was a man who liked to eat," he says. "The dining room would have been the most important room in the house, the site of many parties." Ortbring also imagines many meetings of civic and business leaders there. "They'd close the doors, smoke cigars, eat, and plot."

The Ortbrings hope to be done with their restoration by the time their sons, eight-year-old Blake and seven-year-old Grant, graduate from high school. They haven't ruled out someday turning it into a bed-and-breakfast or renting out a part of it.

Lots of Chelsea residents have offered to help in various ways, with information, labor, and even money. Recently the Ortbrings hosted a community open house. The huge turnout on a rainy day suggests that the people of Chelsea are prepared to forgive, or at least forget, Frank Glazier's misdeeds and celebrate all that he brought to the village.

—Grace Shackman

Photo Caption: Todd and Janice Ortbring, with builder Bob Chizek (right), are restoring the Glazier home, which has changed a lot since 1895.

Building Manchester

Jeff Schaffer was still in his twenties in 1976 when Manchester's village president, David Little, recruited him to join the village council.

"He knew a lot about construction," recalls Little. "He was a young guy, but so was I."

At the time, Manchester was building two bridges and overhauling its sewer and water systems. Schaffer worked at Wolverine Pipe Line, a company that pipes gas from Texas, and Little wanted the benefit of his experience.

At the next election. Little stepped down as village president. Schaffer succeeded him, staying two terms. During Schaffer's time in Manchester government, the village separated its storm and sanitary sewers, upgraded its sewage treatment plant, built a water tower, and added new fire hydrants.

Last March Schaffer was again elected village president, twenty years after his first stint. Today Manchester's main issue is growth—another good project for a man who takes pride, as Little puts it, in "physical acheivements."

Schaffer has lived in the Manchester area all his life, except for a brief stay in Ypsilanti while he attended Cleary College. His grandfather owned a dairy farm west of town at Austin and Sharon Hollow roads, and also co-owned a lumber yard where the Manchester Township Hall now stands. Schaffer says he grew up to value community service after seeing how his grandfather was always willing to help his neighbors.

"He'd say to someone who lost a barn and couldn't afford a new one, 'Don't worry, we'll give you the lumber,'" Schaffer recalls.

In the years between his two stints as village president, Schaffer served on Manchester's school board, and he and his wife, Connie, raised two children, Dawn and William. After twenty-seven years at Wolverine Pipe Line, he is now in charge of above-ground maintenance on Wolverine's systems from Kalamazoo to Detroit to Toledo.

Although Schaffer is a grandfather, he's still slender and still blond. He wears jeans, a T-shirt, and cowboy boots to work and treats colleagues and customers with small-town politeness—he addresses people as "ma'am" and "sir." His style, both as a boss and as a village leader, is to work as part of a team. "I encourage people on council to talk," he says.

In the last twenty years, Manchester has changed in many ways. There is no longer any active farming within the village limits. A few new industries have moved in. A village manager, Jeff Wallace, now runs day-to-day operations.

But Manchester is still a small town, and Schaffer says he appreciates the values that come with that—"the closeness, the willingness to be a good neighbor."

Still, he says, growth is a fact of life. Two housing projects are being built in the village, the homes and condos of Manchester Woods and the River Ridge apartments. Several other housing and light industry projects are in the discussion stage. "I'm not adverse to growth," explains Schaffer, "but we need to control growth, shape it so it's a good deal."

Appropriately, Schaffer uses a construction metaphor to describe his work as village president. "I keep laying the bricks in the foundation," he says. "It'll be here when we're long gone."

—Grace Shackman

The state's oldest Manchester has the oldest township library in continuous use in the state of Michigan. Established in 1838, just two years after the township was organized, it has been located for the last sixty-four years in an 1860s-era house on the village square. During the first years of the library, township clerk Marcus Carter Jr. kept the collection at his house. On Saturdays, from 2 to 4 p.m., people could borrow books stored in a case that sat on a black walnut table. (The library still has the table, now used as a computer stand.) The library continued under the care of succeeding township clerks for the rest of the century. Manchester thrived as a commercial center in the nineteenth century, assuring a living standard that gave women time to organize literary societies. By the turn of the century, they included the History, Saturday, Shakespeare, and 20th Century clubs. (The last two still meet.) The club ladies—whom Manchester historian Howard Parr describes as "a combo of high caliber, literary, educated-minded people"—decided Manchester should have an independent library with a trained librarian; they began organizing to make it happen. In 1906 the first librarian was hired: a Miss B. M. Brighton. In 1909 the library moved to the second floor of the Conklin building, near the comer of M-52 and Main Street. It later moved downstairs in the same building, and then to the Mahrle building (now the Whistle Stop restaurant), on Adrian Street. "I remember that library," recalls ninety-one-year-old Glenn Lehr. "I'd read every book in it by the time I was fourteen. It was a long building and dark inside. There was a pot-bellied stove in the back." When the rent on the Mahrle building was raised in 1934, the ladies of the literary societies decided it was time to buy permanent quarters. They bought the Lynch house, a handsome cube-style Italianate in a perfect location on the town square. It had been built around 1867 for James Lynch, doctor and druggist, by his father-in-law Junius Short. Descendants of the family sold the house for the reasonable price of $1,200 because they believed the library was a worthwhile project. The $15 monthly mortgage payments were less than the rent the library had been paying. The whole community pitched in to clean, paint, build shelves, and put in a chimney so central heat could be added. The federal Works Progress Administration paid for some of the materials and labor, the Boy Scouts moved the books to the new location, and local churches put on a benefit play. Shortly after the move, Jane Palmer, who had been librarian from 1909 to 1918, returned to her old job. She stayed on until she retired in 1958 at the age of seventy-eight. "She was gingham as well as satin," says Parr. "She was a farm woman, helped with the threshing, but was practical and erudite." Palmer converted the upstairs of the library into an apartment and moved in. Many of the perennial flowers she planted on the grounds still bloom today. When the library opened, only the west side of the downstairs was used. Today the whole building is filled with the library's 14,000 books, plus magazines and videos. Palmer's old kitchen upstairs is now the office of the library director, Dorothy Davies. "It's reached the point," says Davies, "that every time we get something new, we have to get rid of something." Eventually, citizens will have to decide whether to add onto the building or erect a new one.

Elisha Congdon's mansion has been at the center of life in Chelsea for 137 years McKune Memorial Library isn't as famous as Chelsea's clock tower, but historically it may be even more significant. Built in 1860 in a commanding position atop a hill on the town's main thoroughfare, the Italianate mansion was the last home of Chelsea's founder, Elisha Congdon. Congdon served as Chelsea's first postmaster, as village president, and as its representative in the state legislature. Congdon came to the area in 1832 and purchased 160 acres on the east side of what would become Chelsea's Main Street. His brother, James Congdon, bought 300 acres on the west side of the street. Elisha Congdon built a log house for his family, which his daughter Emily Congdon Ames later remembered as "just a shanty." When it burned down in 1849, he built a larger frame house on the site. In 1850, Congdon offered the Michigan Central Railroad free land to build a railroad station on his property. The railroad accepted his offer, and soon farmers and tradesmen from the surrounding areas started coming to Chelsea to make deliveries, pick up purchases, and get their mail at Congdon's post office. The Congdon brothers platted their farmland into village lots, and before long, businesses in the nearby settlements moved to Chelsea.

Elisha Congdon died just seven years after building his mansion. By the time this drawing was made in 1874, Timothy McKune had turned it into a hotel.

With that stroke, Elisha Congdon assured Chelsea's future—and his own. In 1860, he moved the frame house to make way for his mansion. Unnerved by the fire that had destroyed his first home, he said that this brick house should be as "strong as a fortress and immune to devastation." Said to be a copy of the Martha Washington house in Ann Arbor, Congdon's new home featured all the fancy accoutrements one would expect in an elegant house of that era: a parlor with a fireplace, carved woodwork, and a back staircase for servants. Congdon lived there until he died in 1867 at the age of sixty-seven. In 1870, Timothy McKune, an Irish immigrant, farmer, and businessman, bought the Congdon house and converted it to a fashionable inn called the McKune House. Just two blocks from the railroad station, it served train passengers as well as stagecoach travelers. When McKune died in 1909, his son, Edward, took over the inn. But the business had passed its peak by then: with the growing popularity of automobiles, people could travel farther in a day and still make it home by evening. The hotel served fewer overnight guests and became something closer to a rooming house. Carol Kempf remembers passing by the McKune House in the 1930s and seeing men who looked like bums hanging out on the long front porch that the McKunes had added. Meanwhile, in 1932, the Chelsea Child Study Club had founded a village library, starting off with 22 donated books and 100 borrowed from the state library. Originally run by volunteers, the library hired staff after the passage of a 1938 millage, but it still lacked a permanent home. In its first fifteen years, the library moved four times—from one donated space downtown to another—ending up in 1946 on the second floor of the municipal building. When the Friends of the Chelsea Library were organized in 1949, one of their first objectives was to find a better location. Their search ended in 1956, when Edward McKune's widow, Katherine Staffan McKune, offered to bequeath the house to the organization in memory of her family. Childless and with strong ties to Chelsea (her family founded the Staffan Funeral Parlor), she wanted to leave the house for the village's use. The house was run-down when the organization received it in 1958—some said it needed more work than it was worth. But with various organizations and hundreds of people donating money, materials, and labor, the house was ready for occupancy by 1959. Other than the east wing, which was added in 1961, the exterior looks much like it did during Congdon's occupancy. The McKunes' long porch has been removed and replaced by a porch more like the original. Inside, the basic room layout remains the same, although shelves and tables have replaced the nineteenth-century family furniture. In addition to Chelsea, the McKune Library serves residents of Dexter and Sylvan townships, and the library district may expand to include Lima and Lyndon townships. New challenges include making the library handicapped accessible, increasing parking, and creating more space, either by adding to the building or constructing a new one. Those concerned about retaining Chelsea's heritage hope that any additions do not obscure the original house—and that an equally suitable use can be found for the building if the library moves elsewhere.

It was Frank Glazier's memorial to his father

"It would be a notable building in many a city of much larger size," wrote Samuel Beakes in 1906 of the Chelsea Savings Bank building. Constructed in 1901 by Frank Glazier, the building on the corner of Main and South streets is now the District 14-A Courthouse.

Glazier built the impressive fieldstone temple as a memorial to his father, George, from whom he inherited the bank. Frank Glazier left a wonderful architectural heritage in Chelsea, including the bank, the red-brick stove factory with its clock tower, the employee welfare building next door (until recently home of the Chelsea Standard), and the First United Methodist Church.

His enterprises collapsed abruptly during the depression of 1907. The Farmers and Mechanics Bank was organized the next year to fill the void, and in 1927, the new bank moved into Glazier's building, which in the interval had housed the local offices of the Portland Cement Company.

During the Great Depression, the Farmers and Mechanics Bank merged with the Kempf Bank to form Chelsea State Bank, which remained in the Glazier building. Renovations covered up many of the original elegant details, and the ceiling was lowered to cut heating expenses.

The bank used only the building's first floor. There were storerooms upstairs, where township treasurers sometimes set up temporary collection offices at tax time. The basement was completely unfinished—just a dirt floor covered with planks.

"There was an opening in front of the bank for night deposits," recalls long-time bank employee Margaret O'Dell. The money went down to the basement. In the morning, the men would go down to get it. It was too creepy in the basement for us."

In 1968, the Chelsea State Bank moved to a modern facility at Main and Orchard, which had more room and a drive-up window. The bank donated its old building to the county to use as a courthouse.

At first, the court, too, used just the first floor. But by the late 1980s, the building was overcrowded, and the county needed to make a change. Chelsea residents wanted the court to slay in the historic bank, and although county officials agreed, they said they could afford only to modernize the building, not restore it.

Chelsea's citizens made up the difference. The Historic Courthouse Group raised money from lawyers, judges, court employees, governmental units, and interested citizens. For a year, while the restoration was in progress, the court met nearby at the Sylvan Township Hall. "Everybody put themselves out," recalls Diana Newman, who was active in the endeavor.

The restoration work revealed the original interior: marble walls and floors, carved burr oak woodwork, leaded glass, and ornate plaster work. Taking down the ceiling tiles, restorers discovered a dome that poured light into the middle room.

"We had to push up and down, we had to make all three floors useable," says Tom Freeman, director of facilities for the county. Workers dug out the basement to provide more headroom and poured cement floors. Offices replaced the former storerooms upstairs.

Meanwhile, the Chelsea State Bank continues to flourish. In an age when most small banks are swallowed up by larger ones, Chelsea is lucky to still have a locally based financial institution. "We have been a successful bank and see no reason to sell," explains bank president John Mann. "Our board of directors [is] committed to remaining an independent community bank."

The bank's headquarters are now on the corner of Old US-12 and M-52; the in-town bank building serves as a branch. Keeping its history in mind, the bank has converted the branch building into a modern version of the courthouse—complete with pillars and a red tile roof.

—Grace Shackman

Photo Caption: The Chelsea Savings Bank failed abruptly in 1907.

A hands-on historian Wayne Clements, president of the Saline Area Historical Society, has mobilized the community to save Orange Risdon's livery barn, open the Depot Museum and acquire a caboose for it, and buy and restore the Rentschler farm. It's quite a series of accomplishments for a quiet, unassuming man who in his younger years did not even seem interested in history. Recently, at Clements's fifty-year high school reunion, his old homeroom teacher pointed out that irony. But for Clements, history comes alive when it's about the community around him instead of the faraway and long ago. "I didn't know King George, but I know Alberta Rogers and the Brassows," he says. Clements still lives in the Textile Road farmhouse where he grew up. He attended the Lodi Plains one-room school and graduated as salutatorian from Saline Union School. He went to Michigan State University, where he majored in agricultural engineering. Saline Township supervisor Bob Cook was his roommate. "Even his family kept old things," Cook recalls. "Wayne had a little old twenty-two [rifle] that went back to his grandfather." At MSU Clements met his wife, Jane, from Grosse Pointe Woods. (They have one grown daughter, Penny.) For nineteen years, he was away from Saline. He served a stint in the army, including a year in Korea; worked as a research engineer in Ford's agricultural division in Birmingham; and later moved to South Bend, Indiana, to work for Wheelabrator. He returned to Saline twenty-five years ago to be nearer his aging parents. He found work with an industrial cleaning franchise, Captain Clean, which he now owns. In 1987 Alberta Rogers, then president of the historical society, recruited Clements to join. "He was involved from the word go," she recalls. He started out with mechanical work, putting a donated, Saline-made windmill back together. More hands-on jobs followed: two showcase homes that needed considerable work. He also found and mapped all the former one-room school sites in the Saline school district. He became the historical society's president in 1990. When a livery barn that had been owned by Saline founder Orange Risdon was about to be torn down, Clements organized the society to save the structure. He launched an ongoing partnership between historic preservationists and the city government, getting permission to relocate the livery near the old railroad depot. That led to the project of turning the depot into a museum. The partnership with the city continues today with the purchase and historic restoration of the Rentschler farm. Clements has worked to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved in the historical society's projects. He cut back on boring business meetings, replaced the traditional slate of officers with a team, and doesn't insist that volunteers join the society. He says he has no patience with groups that just sit around and talk. "It attracts people when we have things to do," he says. Clements's leadership style impresses former mayor Rick Kuss. "He listens," Kuss says. "He takes everybody's ideas and tries to bring his ideas and everyone else's together so we can move forward. And he doesn't get involved in politics. "Saline is a mixture of new, been-here-awhile, and old-timers," says Kuss. "Wayne bridges that gap." • That seems to be one of Clements's main goals. History is "a common thread that keeps us together," he says, adding that a hands-on project "gets people interested who do not have roots in Saline." Clements is excited about his current project: he and Saline High history teacher Jim Cameron are developing a curriculum of local history classes that will be held at the Depot Museum and the Rentschler Farm Museum. "I like to tell the kids, 'Someday you'll take my place, or be mayor or superintendent of schools, and you need to understand how we got there.'" —Grace Shackman

Setting the clock back a century

Enthusiastic and knowledgeable volunteers are transforming the Rentschler farm on the edge of Saline into a teaching tool. They're restoring the house to show how a farm family lived at the beginning of the century, bringing in livestock to demonstrate the working of the farm, and re-creating a kitchen garden to teach children how to grow plants—all with the unusual advantage of having the last owner of the farm nearby to answer questions.

The farm is on Michigan Avenue, just east of the Ford plant. It was built in 1906 by Matthew Rentschler on 216 acres that his brother, Emanuel, had bought two years earlier. The land would eventually be farmed by three generations of Rentschlers.

The last was Warren Rentschler, who lived on the farm almost all his life. "We had sheep and chickens, sold eggs at the door, had pigs; we grew corn, hay, wheat, oats," Rentschler says. "We sold hay to the horse trade."

As the city of Saline crept up to the farm, Rentschler gradually split parcels off and sold them, starting with a field for the Ford plant in the 1960s. A few years ago, then-mayor Rick Kuss heard that Rentschler was about to sell the last of his farm to Farmer Jack for a shopping center. Kuss talked to him about selling the house and outbuildings to the city instead.

Rentschler was delighted with the idea. In spring 1998 the city of Saline bought Rentschler's property at a discount, and the Saline Area Historical Society went to work at the farm right away.

The restoration of the house's interior is being organized by Janet Swope, antiques dealer, teacher of antiques classes, organizer of the Saline Antiques Fair, and former owner of the Pineapple House. Swope's plan is to restore the home to the way it looked between 1900 and 1930. "We may have some older things," she says. "People inherit things. But we'll have nothing newer than 1930."

Her goal is to "restore it to what a farmhouse would be like—not real affluent, middle class, but nice." This winter she hopes to finish the downstairs rooms: the master bedroom, dining room, and parlor. If time allows, she and her fellow volunteers will also work on the hired man's room upstairs. The master bedroom will be decorated with a historic Saline wallpaper design, found in the Bondie house on Maple, that's being reproduced by the Thibaut wallpaper company. Next spring, Saline resident and former county clerk Bob Harrison plans to re-create the front porch, using a 1910 photo for guidance.

Cathy Andrews, master gardener and historic furniture restorer, created a kitchen garden with help from area schoolkids. She laid out the beds in long, narrow rows, as the Rentschlers would have in the 1930s, and planted vegetable and flower species common for that period, such as a tasty, pinkish beefsteak tomato and a very red variety developed at Rutgers University that was considered good for canning. She kept the rhubarb and horseradish she found at the farm.

Rick Kuss and Jeff Hess, among others, are tending the animals already housed in the outbuildings. Roosters, ducks, and pigeons were donated from Animal Rescue, while Domino's Farms provided two miniature goats. A local farmer gave two piglets, which have since grown big enough to knock Kuss down. "I liked them better when they were babies," he jokes.

Wayne Clements, president of the historical society, bought two lambs for the farm at the 4-H fair. Others followed his example and began donating their prize lambs to the farm to save them from slaughter.

Today, Warren Rentschler lives on the north side of Saline. What does he think of what's happening at his old farm?

"I like it fine," he says. "They'll preserve it. Who wouldn't want that? My granddad and dad worked so hard to keep it up, and I spent a bit of time too."

—Grace Shackman

Photo Caption: Elizabeth and Emanuel Rentschler with their children. Alma, Alvin, & Herman, in front of their farmhouse around 1910.

Setting history right

When Gerald O'Connor, physician for the University of Michigan football team, died in 2004, his wife, Margaret, buried him in the Lodi Township Cemetery, near their farm. Never one to do anything halfway, she special-ordered a casket from Texas with a horse design.

Dr. O'Connor's good friend Don Canham, U-M athletic director from 1968 to 1988, also lived in Lodi Township. One day, driving by the graveyard at the corner of Ann Arbor-Saline and Textile roads, he mentioned to his wife, Peg, that he too would like to be buried there. He died the next year and was laid to rest near his friend in the newest section at the back of the cemetery.

On her visits, Peg Canham often looked at the older headstones. She saw that a lot of children under twelve died in the 1840s and 1850s. She also noticed that men often outlived several wives, who probably died in childbirth. "I began to wonder who they were," she says.

Margaret O'Connor noticed Canham's frequent visits to the cemetery and burgeoning interest in history. The two women knew each other through their husbands but had not been particularly close. "Our husbands were like rock stars," explains Canham. O'Connor adds, "They did all the talking. They were bigger than life."

O'Connor, however, had her own list of accomplishments. She had served as a Lodi Township trustee, county commissioner, and state representative. A few years before her husband died, someone asked O'Connor a question about township history that she couldn't answer. Research yielded little. "I went to the township board and they didn't have any information either," she says. "They said, 'You have a job.'"

O'Connor began poring over old township minutes and budgets, plat maps, and other records. She discovered that Lodi Township was named after an area near New York's Finger Lakes and was established in 1834, three years before Michigan became a state. She learned that Ann Arbor-Saline Road was originally a plank road and charged a toll of a penny per horse.

O'Connor enlisted Canham to join her history project. She took her to the deserted 1867 Lodi Township Hall on Pleasant Lake Road near Zeeb. The third-oldest township hall in the state, it had been abandoned in 1986 for a new hall farther east on Pleasant Lake Road.

In the back of the hall is the dais where the township officials met, behind a railing and in front of an American flag. Five polling booths line the west side of the hall, each with a writing desk that pulls down. The potbellied stove has been sold, but you can still see where the chimney was. According to the deed, which O'Connor had come across in her research, the township paid $40 for the eighth-of-an-acre parcel. The restroom was an outhouse in back. The hall didn't even have electricity until the 1930s, this modernization having been voted down several times.

O'Connor and Canham organized an architectural charrette to brainstorm ideas on future uses of the hall. They invited anyone who might he interested, including Lodi Township's board and planning commission and Eastern Michigan University historic preservation students and their professors. The volunteer advisors came up with plenty of suggestions for new uses: flower museum, wedding hall, even a place to leach government.

The EMU students estimated it would cost about $60,000 to restore the hall. The biggest expense would be shoring up the buckling back wall. Space for parking would be a problem if the building were redesigned for public use.

Shortly after the two women began working on the old Township Hall, O'Connor suggested they also work on the cemetery. The fence was about to fall down, many of the stones were tipped over, moles had taken over sections, and weeds were everywhere.

The Lodi graveyard predates the hall by forty years. According to the Chapman publishing company's 1881 History of Washtenaw County, "The first deaths recorded are those of Miss Betsy Howe, daughter of Orrin, who died in 1827. About the same time, Mr. Howe's hired man was consigned to mother earth. Their graves formed the nucleus of Lodi Plains cemetery." (Old maps show the "plains" in the southeast section.)

The Howe family were among the first settlers in Lodi in 1825. They purchased land in sections 23 and 24, and buried their dead in the back of section 24. It became a community graveyard in 1831 with the burial of Bazzila Goodrich. Today, anyone who has been a township resident can be buried there.

The Howe family graves are in the southwest corner of the cemetery, in a roped-off area with a big stele in the middle. Orrin Howe was the first township postmaster and justice of the peace. He was a state legislator and a member of the state constitutional convention. Other early township settlers buried near the Howe plot include Gilbert Alien, who, according to the Chapman history, was me "first temperance apostle in the town," and two of the first elders of the Presbyterian church, Mather Marvin and Horace Booth.

Professor Rufus Nutting, who in 1847 started an academy across the road from the cemetery, is also buried there. His school's main aim was to prepare students for the University of Michigan. "It was one of the best schools of its type anywhere in the Midwest," says Robert Lane, a Saline historian. "It was also unusual in that it was about forty percent women."

Also in the cemetery is Captain John Lowry, whose farm was just north of it. Lowry, like Howe, was a state legislator. A strong abolitionist, he was involved in the Underground Railroad. As the Chapman history reported, "The oppressed bloodhound-hunted children of our common father often found rest and comfort in Capt. L.'s well-stored house, where much money and clothing were given to supply the wants of the escaped slaves."

The gravestones in the older part of the cemetery are sandstone. Most of these markers are inscribed with the complete dates of birth and death, age of the deceased in years and months, and other things such as birthplace, spouses' names, Bible verses, poems, or short sayings such as "Asleep in Jesus" or "Not dead but sleepeth." Many stones have carved images, the most common being weeping willows but also Bibles, fingers pointing to heaven, or clasped hands.

The early settlers chose sandstone because it was easy to carve—but it also easily weathered, and over time the markings have eroded. The lightweight stones also fall over easily, and can end up covered and hidden by grass.

Markers on the newer graves, north and east of the oldest part, are mostly made of granite. These heavier stones last longer, but they're more expensive to carve and usually have less written on them. An unmarked area along the north fence is believed to have been the potter's field, where poor people who couldn't afford markers were buried.

The main path leads to a grass-covered stone mausoleum built in 1875. Mausoleums, common in old cemeteries, were used to store bodies while the ground was frozen. They were usually built into hills, but because Lodi Cemetery is on flat land, a hill had to be formed and concrete poured around it as a base for the stones. Canham and O'Connor started the cemetery project by working on weekends to clean up brush and debris. Vines covering headstones had to be carefully removed by hand. They soon found a third volunteer—Wayne Clements, president of the Saline Area Historical Society, whose wife, Jane, is buried in the cemetery. Working with Clements, the two women formed the tax-exempt Lodi Township Historic Preservation Group, a subsidiary of the Saline society. They're working through the group to raise money for fixing up the cemetery and eventually restoring the old Township Hall.

The fence was the first priority, since it's what everyone driving by sees. They were told that replacing it would cost $60,000, but O'Connor found a man who would sandblast off the rust and repaint it for $22,000, saving the original fence. The two widows each put in $1,000, as did longtime Lodi resident Margaret Brusher, and the township paid the rest.

Canham got Clements to help her work on the smaller gravestones, digging up fallen ones and putting them upright. The larger ones needed professional attention. The preservation group has raised money to pay for cleaning and raising some of these stones and for repairing the mausoleum, now used to store the sexton's tools.

The work of Canham, O'Connor, and Clements is making the cemetery a pleasanter place. As soon as Canham began visiting the cemetery regularly, she began doing things to improve its looks, like painting the water pump, planting flowers in front, and putting in benches. There's talk about eventually putting up a gazebo or picnic table. Picnicking in a graveyard was common in the nineteenth century, when cemeteries functioned more like public parks. Thanks to the volunteers, Lodi's cemetery is once again becoming a retreat for the living.

—Grace Shackman

Photo Captions:

After their well-known husbands died. Peg Canham and Margaret O'Connor decided to spruce up their burial grounds.

A barn next to the Broadway Bridge is being turned into luxury apartments.

!n the past few years apartments or condos have been built in an old department store on Main, a battered National Guard armory on Ann, and even a former church on Fourth Avenue. But the most remarkable tribute to Ann Arborites' sudden desire to live downtown may be Mike Kessler's project to build apartments in a barn on the comer of Depot and Beakes—just a few feet away from the constant traffic of the Broadway Bridge.

The barn was built by the Ann Arbor Gas Light Company to house its delivery wagons and horses, probably in 1907. (The wagons hauled coke, a coal gasification by-product that the company sold as a home heating fuel.) After the first natural gas pipeline reached the city in 1937, the barn was used for maintenance operations. James 0. Morrison, who worked in the barn in the 1950s, recalls that he and his coworkers unofficially dubbed it the "Ditch Digging Department," since their main job was to hand-dig ditches for gas lines and gas mains. "It was home away from home," Morrison recalls. "We were paid there. We reported there. If it rained we stood in there."

In the mid-1950s the maintenance crews moved out, and the building was used for storage. In 1969 it was sold to activist Charles Thomas, whose Black Economic Development League (BEDL) had been raising money from churches by demanding reparations for past injustices against blacks. He used the money to offer courses for black youths in such upcoming technologies as computers, TV and radio production, solar heating, and photography. In 1973 architect David Byrd and his students built a modem cinder-block building to serve as BEDL's headquarters; the barn was again used for storage.

BEDL's programs petered out as Thomas's health failed. When he died in 1994 both the BEDL building and the barn went to his heirs, who rented and then sold the property to Realtor Thomas Stachler. Stachler found evidences of Thomas's paranoia about government spying, including wire-laced security windows and lead-lined walls. Last March he sold the property to Mark Pfaff, a sales rep for Allied Enterprises, which makes electromechanical and electronic components.

Pfaff has moved his sales office into the front of the new building and has rented the rest of the space to several other businesses. He sold the barn to Mike Kessler, a carpenter, who has also worked as a teacher and in sales. Although Pfaff had inquiries about the barn from people wanting to set up a wine bar, an art studio, or a flower shop, he says he chose to sell it to Kessler because "I didn't want to lose the barn-ness." Says Kessler, "I want to maintain the rustic feel of it all."

Working with architect J. D. Phillips, Kessler is carving out three apartments. Two will be mirror images, using the first floor for a bedroom, studio, and bath and the second floor for a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. Kessler is leaving the beams exposed and keeping the original wood to "keep the feel of the barn."

The urban barn is just a stone's throw from two heavily traveled streets and the busy Norfolk & Southern railroad tracks, not to mention a bridge that's about to be torn down and rebuilt. But all that doesn't scare Kessler and his wife, Serena—they plan to make their own home in an efficiency apartment in the former barn loft. "You can see the river valley, " he says of
the view. "You can see the train making a curve at Main Street."

Photo Captions:

Home on the range: the former gas company barn on Depot in midconversion.