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Dexter Area Museum

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

122 West Main Street

From healing souls to healing bodies

When Manchester physician Evelyn Eccles and her husband Tom Ellis bought the former Methodist church on Main Street in 1985, the building hadn't been used for thirteen years. Everything was still in place—the pews, the stained glass windows, and even the organ, still in working order, with bellows in the basement.

"It looked like they finished a service, then locked the door and left," recalls Eccles.

Today the building, built in 1837 and 1838, houses Eccles's family medical practice. She's kept the original stained glass, high ceilings, lights, and wainscoting. Some of the old pews are used as waiting benches. Eccles achieved this miracle of reuse by creating what she calls "a building within a building" All the offices were built away from the outside walls, so that the light from the stained glass pours in unimpeded.

"It's an old-time frame with joists into beams," explains Bob Lowery, who built an addition to the church in 1958. "It's made with oak timber, probably cut at the local sawmill." Emanuel Case's sawmill on the River Raisin, built in 1832, helped draw settlers to what is today the village of Manchester.

The church was originally built by the Presbyterians; Manchester's original settlers were of British descent, and the Presbyterian Church was the first religious group to organize in the village. Seventeen people attended the congregation's first meeting in December 1835 at the home of Dr. William Root. They began work or the church two years later.

The church played an important part in village life in the nineteenth century. A school occupied the building's basement, and the congregation sponsored speakers, such as a controversial antislavery lecturer. But membership dwindled as more churches were organized—Lutheran, Baptist, Universalist, and Roman Catholic. In 1893 the Presbyterians disbanded and sold the building to the Methodists, who had founded their local congregation in 1839. The few remaining members placed a memorial window in the front of the church. (It is still there, partially hidden by a display of medical pamphlets.)

The building served the Methodists well in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1904 they built a parsonage next door, and in 1928 they installed the organ and remodeled the rostrum, pulpit, and communion rail. But after wona War II, the congregation outgrew the building. In 1958 the Methodists built a two-story addition that linked the church and parsonage, and in 1965 they converted the parsonage into Sunday school rooms, moving the pastor to a new parsonage on Ann Arbor Hill. Still, soon after, the congregation decided they needed a new church.

"There was no parking," explains Lowery, especially on Sunday, when the Methodists had to compete with the congregations of nearby St. Mary's Catholic Church and Emanuel United Church of Christ. "The church needed work. It was cheaper to build a new one." Ground was broken on M-52 in 1971, and the first service was held there in 1972.

While the old church stood empty, the new addition was converted to offices and the old parsonage into apartments. Dr. Howard Parr bought the old organ but left it in the church until Eccles and Ellis bought the building. Before moving the organ (which is still in storage awaiting an interested buyer). Parr organized a meeting of the Manchester Area Historical Society in the old church so that people could get a last chance to hear it. Parr himself played hymns, and Historical Society members sang along.

—Grace Shackman

The Calico Cat

From Methodist church to Saline gift shop

A gift shop and a place of worship may seem to be totally opposite functions for a building. Yet the Calico Cat, located in Saline's former Methodist church, manages to an amazing extent to incorporate the church's atmosphere into a retail establishment. Light streams in through the stained glass windows, the original woodwork and sconces are found throughout, display shelves are made from the wood of old pocket doors and railings, and owner Marcia Duncan's office is in the mezzanine that once held the organ pipes.

The Calico Cat building was actually the fourth church built by the Saline Methodists, who trace their roots back to 1833. Their first two churches did not fare well. The original log structure on the corner of Henry and Lewis, built on land donated by Saline's founder, Orange Risdon, was hit by lightning during a service. Two parishioners were killed, and the church burned to the ground. The second church was built with ill-fired bricks that crumbled so badly it was called the "old mud church." After nine years, the members decided it was unsafe and had it torn down. Finally, in 1858, local carpenter Edwin Ford, who also built churches in Mooreville and Dixboro, built the Methodists a church on Ann Arbor Street just south of Michigan Avenue. This church, a white New England-style edifice with a tall spire, served the congregation until they outgrew it at the end of the century.

On June 13,1899, the Methodists laid the cornerstone for their fourth church on the same site. The congregation met in the opera house next door while the new building, designed by dark and Munger of Bay City, was under construction. The church was completed in November. Not even standing room remained for the first service.

William Davenport, the Saline banker who headed the building committee, lured organist Fannie Unterkircher from the Presbyterian church by offering to buy a new organ. The two went into Detroit, where Davenport bought a Vocalion for $1,200. Unterkircher served as the church's organist and choir director for the next thirty-four years.

Hollis Carr, in a paper presented to the church in 1988, remembered the organ, which had to be pumped by hand: "There was a large screen to the right of the organ behind which the man sat who did the pumping. During his idle moments he would peek around the edge of the screen, and other children and I in the pews would squirm to the outer end of the pews to get a glimpse of him." In 1929 the organ was replaced with a more modem, electric-powered one.

Carr's wife, Virginia, who joined the church in 1938 as a young bride and later became the church secretary, fondly remembered the study group she and Hollis were in with other young married couples. The group held monthly potlucks, she recalled in the paper, and one time there were six pots of baked beans and one cake. "We always closed the gathering by forming a circle, joining hands and singing 'Blest Be the Tie That Binds,'" she wrote. "To this day whenever I hear the hymn, I can close my eyes and see the group standing in a circle, most of whom are no longer with us except in memory."

When Virginia Carr joined the congregation, the church "was less than forty years old, but it appeared like an old church to me, and quite small." The congregation fought the space problem for the next fifty-some years, digging out more of the basement in 1949 and adding an education-fellowship hall in 1975. In the mid-1980s, the space crisis was again debated. Although some argued that the old church could be modernized and the overcrowding problem solved by holding two worship services, the majority opted to move. In 1990 the congregation took the church's 1,500-pound bell and two of the stained glass windows—the most religious ones, which wouldn't be appropriate in a building with a secular use—to a new building on the corner of Ann Arbor Street and Woodland Drive.

The city of Saline purchased the old church, planning to use it as a court facility. But the voters turned down a bond issue, and the city had to sell the building. Marcia Duncan, who had been in the gift shop business for fifteen years, saw the possibilities in the building and moved the Calico Cat there from its previous location on Michigan Avenue. Her family teases her about saying in the beginning that the place "just needs a little touch-up." Instead, renovation took nine months: solving a water problem in the basement, bracing the walls, tuck-pointing the brick, putting new floors in the basement and first level (where the floor slanted down to the altar), and installing new furnaces, wiring, air conditioning, and drywall.

"She kept the best parts," church historian Jack Livingstone says. "Someone familiar with the old church can walk in and recognize it."

—Grace Shackman

Photo Caption: The 1899 church served Saline's Methodists well for ninety-one years.

Memories of St. Mary's

The old parish school thrives as Chelsea’s arts center

A stairway to the sidewalk on Chelsea’s Congdon Street is all that’s left of old St. Mary Catholic Church. The church rectory and convent are now private homes. The parochial school building, however, still resonates with art and music, as it did in the days when Dominican sisters ran the place: it’s now the home of the Chelsea Center for the Arts.

St. Mary School was a center of activity from 1907 to 1972. Passersby at recess time could see children climbing on playground equipment, playing baseball in an empty field behind the church and rectory, and enjoying marbles and other games in an area blocked off by sawhorses on the street.

Ann Arbor’s Koch Brothers constructed the two-story brick school. Its first students were mostly descendants of Irish immigrants who had fled the potato famine and of Germans from Alsace-Lorraine who had come to avoid serving in Napoleon III’s army. Father William Considine, who started the school, was a good friend of Frank Glazier, Chelsea’s leading citizen. At Considine’s behest, Glazier, a Methodist, spoke at the school’s opening in January 1907.

The school had four classrooms on the first floor and an auditorium on the second. Originally it housed only grades 1 through 8, but in 1909 a two-year commercial course was added, which turned into a four-year high school in 1916. Six women enrolled in the first commercial course, and two students made up the first high school graduation class. During World War I classes were moved into the convent because there was not enough coal to heat the school.

The school’s auditorium included a stage, an orchestra area, and dressing rooms. The school regularly produced concerts, recitals, and plays. A 1917–1918 St. Mary’s musicale program listed thirty-two student numbers; the instruments included violins, cornet, bells, drums, and piano. Several times a year students put on plays or pageants, and not always on religious themes. The hall was also used for church and community functions and as a gym.

John Keusch, a 1927 graduate, recalls shooting baskets at recess, after school, and at night. Some parishioners complained about the cost of lighting the gym at night, but the parish priest at that time, Father Henry Van Dyke, was an ardent supporter of athletics. A former student remembers him watching a baseball game out his window. “The bell rang and they started to come in, but he called out that they should finish the game,” she recalls.

Keeping the gym open at night paid off. In 1923 a team composed mostly of St. Mary’s students won a state basketball championship. In 1925 an official St. Mary’s team won the class D title. The next year the team, with an added member from Chelsea High School, won a three-state tournament sponsored by the Ann Arbor YMCA. St. Mary’s also had an excellent girls’ basketball team that often accompanied the boys to out-of-town games and played against girls from the competing school.

These victories, especially the 1925 championship, were remembered and celebrated for decades. When Rich Wood attended St. Mary’s in the 1950s, the winning teams’ pictures were still hanging prominently on the wall, and students knew which classmates’ fathers had participated.

The 1925 basketball triumph was especially memorable, since it came on the heels of a fire that destroyed the school on February 6. Keusch recalls, “I had been there that evening practicing basketball until nine or ten. I was woken up at one when the fire whistle blew.” He rushed over from his house. “The volunteer fire department all came out, but they couldn’t save the building,” he remembers. All that was left was the foundation and some walls.

After the fire, classes moved to the church, with groups gathering in separate corners. The younger students sat on the kneelers and used the seats of the pews as desks. The basketball team practiced and played games in the Glazier Stove Company Welfare Building’s unheated second-floor gym.

Within two days of the fire, farmers came with teams of horses, pushed down the walls, and cleaned up the debris. Detroit architect William DesRosiers designed a new building, which was constructed by Detroit builder George Talbot, who had a summer place at Cavanaugh Lake. Keusch, then fifteen, worked as a mason’s assistant that summer. By November the building was ready for use.

The new school was built on the same foundation but had only one floor. An auditorium was added to the side of the building. It was named after one of St. Mary’s first graduates, Herbert McKune, who was killed in World War I. (McKune also gave his name to Chelsea’s American Legion post.)

The basement served the social functions of the hall. It had a full kitchen where food was prepared for Altar Society dinners, fish fries in Lent, and other events. At Thanksgiving “feather parties,” parishioners played keno to win live turkeys and chickens.

In 1934, in the midst of the Depression, the high school closed. Four seniors graduated that June, and the next year the rest went to the public high school. A student recalls that the move was traumatic: “We couldn’t remember not to stand up when the teacher called on us. We were trained to stand up and say ‘No, Sister,’ ‘Yes, Sister.’ The kids made fun of us and did things like put gum on our seats.”

Pat Dietz, who went to elementary school at St. Mary’s in the late 1930s, recalls that she was petrified attending the public high school. “It was a whole new challenge,” she says. “St. Mary’s was so much smaller.” But she found the sisters had prepared her well, especially in math, penmanship, and grammar. A generation later, in the late 1960s, her son Todd Ortbring also found he was ahead academically, especially in subjects that were conducive to rote learning, but public school was “a major cultural shock. The girls wore miniskirts and the boys bell-bottoms, and they all talked about music, drugs, and sex.”

In the 1960s, as nuns became scarcer, lay teachers were increasingly employed at St. Mary’s School. In 1968 seventh and eighth grades were discontinued, and in 1972 the school closed. One sister stayed on to teach religious education, and the hall continued to be used for functions such as wakes.

In 1998 Jeff and Kathleen Daniels bought the school to use the hall as rehearsal space for the Purple Rose Theater. Since they didn’t need the rest of the building, they sold it to the Chelsea Center for the Arts for $1. The center, founded in 1994, offers adults’ and children’s art and music classes as well as revolving art shows. A nonprofit group, it raises most of its funds at an annual autumn jubilee.

“It was one of my life’s blessings that I was able to attend the school under the Dominican sisters,” says Keusch, adding, “They would be proud of the present use of the school building.”

Gardens of Stone

Old graveyards unlock the secrets of forgotten communities.

Washtenaw County is dotted with small rural nineteenth-century graveyards, often of startling beauty. Their stone markers, sometimes in rows but often clustered around trees or bushes, record the passage from birth to death; the more elaborate stones are also decorated with symbolic images such as weeping willows or open Bibles.

Some cemeteries are well maintained by townships, churches, or private groups, and are easy to find. Others, abandoned and overgrown, are harder to locate but worth the effort. Broken gravestones, tilted or lying on the ground with bushes and grass growing around and over them, contrast with thriving remnants of flowers planted more than a century ago. The decrepitude gives even more credence to the “life is fleeting” message of cemeteries and adds to their eerie beauty.

But local cemeteries are more than places for admiration and contemplation. Just as individual graves contain the mortal remains of people who once lived, these cemeteries are the remains of dead communities--villages, churches, or clusters of farm families—that long ago were centers of local life.

In the nineteenth century, mill towns dotted the Huron and Raisin rivers. Most of them died out after steam power replaced waterpower. In 1874 the town of River Raisin, at Clinton and Braun roads in Bridgewater Township, had a post office, railroad station, sawmill, gristmill, and cider mill. All that remains today is the Bridgewater Town Hall Cemetery, bounded on the south by a cornfield and on the north by the 1882 township hall. The hall replaced one built in 1856, which the township board mandated be made available for “moral and scientific lectures, and for funerals.”

Like all the old cemeteries, the Bridgewater Town Hall Cemetery stands on high ground, and many of the graves are grouped around trees. A patch of irises is planted in the back. Nineteenth-century mourners put a lot of work into making gravesites pretty, since family members frequently visited. Families usually bought cemetery plots in a large group; the family name is often marked on a pillar or stele, surrounded by lower markers for individual graves.

At the Bridgewater Town Hall Cemetery, local veterans groups have marked the grave of Ebenezer Annabil, who died in 1842 at age eighty-six. Annabil served as a sergeant and seaman in the Revolutionary War. Veterans groups also mark Civil War vets’ graves, which are numerous in these nineteenth-century graveyards.

The settlement of Hudson Mills, on the Huron River north of Dexter, also had a cluster of mills--flour, saw, pulp, plaster, and cider--as well as a general store and a hotel big enough to host dances. Nothing remains of this town but a few remnants of the millrace and crumbling foundations on the west side of Hudson Mills Metropark, and the Hudson Cemetery on Dexter-Pinckney Road just south of North Territorial. The graves of David and Betsy Dudley are placed prominently in the front of the burial ground, facing the road. The Dudleys, farmers who came to Michigan from New York in 1829, sold the land to Dexter Township in 1841 for use as a cemetery.

Hudson Mills and other early cemeteries are filled with sandstone markers, which were inexpensive and easy to engrave. The full dates of birth and death are usually inscribed, along with the age at death. If there is a symbolic picture on top, it is often balanced with a Bible verse on the bottom, such as “She has done what she could—Mark 14:8” or “It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead—2 Maccabees 12:45.” On most old stones these quotations, small and often in script, are almost impossible to read, because the material eroded so easily.

In the early nineteenth century granite had to be imported from Scotland and was too expensive for general use. By the 1880s, however, it was being quarried in Vermont, and ordinary families could afford it. People wanted granite headstones for their durability, but they were harder to engrave, especially with the tools then available, so the inscriptions usually were limited to the name and the years of birth and death. If there are no granite markers in a cemetery, it probably was not used after the 1870s.

Hudson has the usual array of nineteenth-century decorations on its sandstone markers. The weeping willow is the most common motif, followed by various religious themes--Bibles, fingers pointing to heaven, hands clasped in prayer. None of these small country graveyards, however, features the kind of grand sculptural markers--such as angels, lambs (for children who died), or tree stumps (for people cut down in midlife)--that are sometimes found in larger nineteenth-century cemeteries. Perhaps the people in these rural areas couldn’t afford the larger carvings or thought them too ostentatious.

At the back of Hudson Cemetery is the grave of Benjamin Chamberlain, a local farmer and son of David Chamberlain, a millwright and mill owner. Although the Chamberlain family is still in the area, Benjamin is the only one buried there. Welton Chamberlain, his grandson, explains, “My grandmother bought ten grave lots at Forest Lawn in Dexter when it was the moxie thing to do--be buried in a well-kept cemetery. She died in 1909. She always planned to move her husband there but didn’t.”

Chamberlain’s grandmother’s concern about the upkeep of the Hudson cemetery was well founded. “The Howards, who lived on the corner, used to mow and go in and trim,” Chamberlain explains. “They had family there.” The Chamberlains also kept up the place, but after World War II other families died out or moved away, and the cemetery fell into disrepair. About four years ago, at the prompting of the Pinckney Historical Society, the township began mowing the site again, and the county historical society also helps keep it trimmed.

Unfortunately, the cemetery at Scio Village gets no such attention, even though the village, between Ann Arbor and Dexter on the Huron River at Zeeb Road, was much bigger than Hudson or River Raisin. Laid out in 1835 by Samuel Foster, at its peak it had mills, a post office, grocery and hardware stores, a copper shop, a blacksmith, a saloon, a brewery, and a wagon repair shop. It was also a stop on the Michigan Central Railroad. Foster’s brother, Ted, coedited the Signal of Liberty, an abolitionist newspaper published in Ann Arbor, and ran a station of the Underground Railroad in Scio Village, helping escaped slaves reach Canada. But after Scio’s main mill burned in 1896, the community died out, with the post office closing in 1901.

Scio’s cemetery is on Huron River Drive at the western edge of the area where the town once stood. When members of the Genealogical Society of Washtenaw County first surveyed it in 1971, the graveyard was still easy to locate from the road, and they found thirty-one stones, although there were probably more than that originally.

Today the cemetery is so overgrown that it took me three tries to find it. Finally, following a small, unpromising path, I came to a circle of daylilies, a plant often used at cemeteries because of its easy maintenance and longevity. Continuing on the path, I finally found one stele lying on its side and a stone pedestal that must have been the foundation of another tombstone.

If an early community included a church, its cemetery stood a much better chance of being preserved. Rogers Corner, at Fletcher and Waters roads, and Rowes Corner, at M-52 and Pleasant Lake Road, today consist of nothing more than a few farmhouses. Yet graves are still well maintained in the church cemeteries there. That’s because the settlements’ respective churches--Zion Lutheran in Rogers Corner and Sharon United Methodist in Rowes Corner--both have active congregations today.

Of course, not all nineteenth-century churches in the area made it to the next century--much less this one. Roman Catholics in Manchester, Dexter, and Chelsea all trace their places of worship to country churches that no longer exist, although the cemeteries attached to these churches are still there.

In 1839 Germans in Freedom Township founded St. Francis, the first Catholic congregation in western Washtenaw County. They built a log church at Schneider and Hieber roads, and Catholics from the area, including Manchester, came to services in buggies. In 1858 the congregation built a brick church about a mile south on Bethel Church Road near Koebbe; it was used until 1911, when the congregation merged with St. Mary’s in Manchester.

The cemetery for the first St. Francis is overgrown and unused, with scattered tombstones, many fallen on the ground. Crosses are the only decorations on these stones. The site is reverting to forest, but the ground cover of myrtle, another common cemetery plant, still thrives.

The second St. Francis Cemetery, maintained and sometimes used by St. Mary’s, is in better shape. A wrought iron fence, with grapevines climbing it (see cover photo), surrounds the site. Inside are plantings of hosta, rose of Sharon, and lilac. The German ancestry of the founders is obvious from the names on the mostly granite tombstones, such as Dettling, Friedel, Schneider, and Fritz. The church was razed in 1933, but the Italianate rectory next to the cemetery is still there, now a private home.

Dexter’s Catholic church, St. Joseph, originally stood at Quigley and Dexter Townhall roads, five miles northwest of the village. The first burial at its churchyard was in 1839, a year before the church itself was built. The tombstones bear mainly Irish names, such as Haggerty, McEntee, Reilly, and O’Connor. James Gallagher’s stone says he was born in Sligo, Ireland.

When the original church burned down in 1856, the congregation moved its services to Dexter and after 1870 stopped using the old cemetery. A marker at the site explains: “Time, neglect, and vandalism took its toll until 1980, when parishioners reclaimed and restored this sacred place. Unable to locate the original gravesites, the monuments were gathered into the present arrangement to preserve them and honor the memory of our ancestors.” The stones were laid flat and embedded into two cross-shaped concrete slabs, one at each end of the cemetery, with groups of steles planted in the middle of each.

Another former churchyard survives as a municipal graveyard. Two miles west of Sharon United Methodist Church, another Methodist church once stood at the corner of Pleasant Lake and Sylvan roads. After a tornado destroyed its building in 1917, the congregation decided to join the Methodist congregation in Manchester. The Sharon Township Hall across the street was also destroyed, so the township bought the church property, including its cemetery, and built a new hall there.

Both the township hall and the cemetery are still in use. Near the cemetery entrance is a Civil War monument honoring Abraham Lincoln and twenty-four Washtenaw County men who died in that war.

Many farmers saw no need to use anyone else’s cemetery, preferring to bury family members on plots at the backs of their farms. Sometimes neighbors used the space, too. One example is the Popkins Cemetery in Scio Township, on the old Popkins farm on Pratt Road near Honey Creek. One of the earliest cemeteries in the township, it is now almost entirely overgrown.

The Phelps family had a plot at the corner of Baker and Marshall roads south of Dexter. Alexander and Margaret Phelps came from Connecticut in 1831 with their two grown sons, Norman and Amos, and all bought farms near each other. The cemetery in the back of Norman’s farm was the burial spot not just for the family but for other early Dexter residents as well. Dexter historian Norma McAllister recalls, “Dexter people used to be buried there. Then people with families there were told to move them to Forest Lawn, that it was no longer going to be kept up.” Most of the site is filled with trees and forest undergrowth, but a few graves remain in derelict condition, along with some myrtle and lilies of the valley.

The Scadin family of Webster Township had better luck with its cemetery at Webster Church and Farrell roads. It stayed in the family until 1967, when the last Scadin, named Will, died and left the farm to Webster United Church of Christ. Today the church maintains the Scadin Cemetery on the northeast corner of the intersection, along with its own cemetery on the southeast corner.

“Cemeteries are a peaceful place to visit,” says McAllister. Anyone who has spent time poking around old graveyards will agree with that. One warning: if you go cemetery prowling, wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt to protect yourself from poison ivy and burrs. A very useful guide is the Genealogical Society of Washtenaw County’s Directory of Cemeteries of Washtenaw County, Michigan, a booklet listing more than 100 cemeteries, complete with maps. It’s available through the society’s website, www.hvcn.org/info/gswc/.

David Byrd Chapel

The stone which the builders rejected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Old West Side Story

The Germans in Ann Arbor

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

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

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

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

German pioneers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peasants and political refugees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A missionary from Basel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Settling the Old West Side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A German society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decline and rebirth

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's another regeneration."


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

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

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

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

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

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

A venerable building, an activist congregation

With its steep slate roof, stone walls, and pointed stained-glass windows, St. Andrew’s Episcopal was designed to look like a church out of the Middle Ages--you could almost picture Martin Luther nailing his theses to its heavy wooden doors. Standing at the northeast corner of Division and Catherine, it’s the city’s oldest operating church and its finest jewel of Gothic Revival architecture.

St. Andrew’s Parish was organized in 1827, just three years after Ann Arbor was founded. Its first meeting place was the home of Hannah Gibbs Clark, a widow who lived on the northwest corner of Ashley and Liberty. In 1839 the congregation dedicated its first building, at Division and Lawrence (then called “Bowery”). Nestled among original burr oak trees, it was a simple wooden church, painted white.

That building survived two near catastrophes in its first year--confiscation by the sheriff for nonpayment of bills (two members quickly made up the arrears) and a fire--and St. Andrew’s continued to grow. After the Civil War, members decided to build a larger church on land they owned to the south, the present location.

To design it they hired Gordon Lloyd, Michigan’s premier Gothic Revival architect. Lloyd was born in England in 1832, moved with his family to Quebec, and returned home at age sixteen to apprentice under his uncle, Ewan Christian (1814–
1895), an eminent English architect who specialized in designing and restoring churches. Gothic Revival, sometimes called Neo-Gothic, was at its peak in England at that time, and Lloyd was steeped in it during his ten years there.

Photograph St. Andrew's Episcopal Church at 306 N Division St

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, begun in 1868, is Ann Arbor's oldest church.

Setting up his own architectural practice in Detroit, Lloyd designed churches and other buildings all over the Midwest, primarily in the Gothic Revival style. “I don’t know through whose influence the vestry of that day was led to employ Mr. Lloyd; but to that person, whoever he or she may have been, St. Andrew’s Parish and the city of Ann Arbor owe an everlasting debt of gratitude,” wrote Henry Tatlock, the church’s rector from 1889 to 1922.

Despite the eminence of the architect, however, the congregation’s fund-raising campaign came up short. Deciding to start with just the nave, the main section of the church that contained the pews and altar, they laid the cornerstone in 1868. Silas Douglass, a professor in the U-M medical school who had overseen construction of several university buildings, did the same job for the church. The contractor was church member James Morwick, who also built the Lloyd-designed entrance to Forest Hill Cemetery.

The walls were made of local stone, mainly granite, with stained-glass windows in geometric designs made by Friedrick of Brooklyn, New York. Inside, the pews were made of butternut and walnut. Those original pews are still in use, complete with the dividers that once separated one family’s rented section from another’s.

The nave was finished in 1869; the rest of the present church complex was built as money allowed over the next eighty years. The old wooden church was used for a chapel and Sunday school until 1880, when the congregation built a new chapel east of the nave and a new rectory on the site of the old church. The bell tower rose in 1903, paid for by a bequest from member Love Root Palmer. “Mrs. Palmer told me that she intended to bequeath to the parish a sufficient sum of money to build the tower after [her] death,” Tatlock wrote, “regretting that she was not able to do without the income of the amount involved, so as to have the tower built while she was still alive. It was suggested to her that it was highly desirable that the tower should be designed by Mr. Lloyd, who at that time was still active in his profession.” Palmer commissioned Lloyd to design the tower while she was still living--a fortunate decision, since the architect died only a year after she did.

The last major change came in 1950, when the rectory was torn down to make room for a parish hall. Finances precluded building in the same style as the church, so the congregation decided on a more modern building. U-M architecture professors Ralph Hammett and Frederick O’Dell, using stones from the rectory, designed a building that blends well with the church. They also designed very modern-looking stained glass for the parish hall chapel.

Over the years, much of the original geometric stained glass in the nave has been replaced by representational memorial windows. Eleven of these are the work of Willett Stained Glass Studio of Philadelphia, a company founded in 1898 and still in business. “Willett’s does an excellent job of personalizing stained glass,” says Barbara Krueger, an expert on Michigan stained glass. Most of the new windows portray religious figures; four windows depict composers, honoring a choirmaster and other parishioners who had special connections to music. The bottom sections are filled with personal images: a schoolteacher is shown reading to children, and an athlete’s memorial features a baseball mitt and golf clubs. Carolers sing out on one window in remembrance of the organizer of the church’s Christmas sing, and no fewer than five dogs help memorialize their masters.

The most intriguing window in the collection is a lovely angel that may be a genuine Tiffany. Although it is not found in Tiffany records, Mark Hildebrandt, author of The Windows of St. Andrew’s, which is being published in celebration of the congregation’s 175th anniversary, says it may have been transferred from another site. But Krueger cautions, “There were more than a dozen East Coast studios doing that kind of work.”

Besides gracing Ann Arbor with a beautiful building, St. Andrew’s has fed the aesthetic appetites of the community with music and plays. Reuben Kempf, of Kempf House fame, was organist and choir director from 1895 to 1928. He organized a famous boys’ choir, recruiting talent citywide. Veteran local radio host Ted Heusel, a church member who recognizes a good theater space when he sees one, has produced A Man for All Seasons and Murder in the Cathedral in the nave, as well as a rendering of the stations of the cross in which readings were interspersed with dance. One of the dancers in the late 1970s was U-M student Madonna Ciccone.

St. Andrew’s has also developed a reputation for community activism. Many of Ann Arbor’s mayors have been St. Andrew’s members, including Silas Douglass and Ebenezer Wells in the nineteenth century and Cecil Creal and Sam Eldersveld in the twentieth. Henry Lewis, minister from 1922 to 1961, was leading picketers around City Hall to urge city council to enact a fair housing ordinance at the same time that Mayor Creal was senior churchwarden. “They’d have pitched battles during the week but come together on Sunday,” recalls longtime member Barbara Becker.

St. Andrew’s was the first local church to react to the growing problem of homelessness caused by releasing people from mental hospitals. In 1982 the congregation began a breakfast program that is still in operation. “It started as a Monday-through-Friday program until we realized most people eat breakfast seven days a week,” recalls church member Pat Lang. The church’s efforts to also provide homeless people with a place to sleep helped lead to the organization of Ann Arbor’s Shelter Association.

In 2000 St. Andrew’s became the first church in the area to have a staff person dedicated to welcoming and affirming the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities. The Oasis Ministry, as it is called, originated in New Jersey, where rector John Nieman served before coming to Ann Arbor in 1997. “We all are created in the image of God,” says Oasis coordinator Kate Runyon. “We all have gifts to share with one another.”

As part of the congregation’s 175th anniversary celebration, St. Andrew’s and the Washtenaw County Historical Society will jointly sponsor tours of the church and surrounding historic neighborhood from 2 to 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 27. See Events for details.

First Congregational Church

Many Ann Arborites today consider the First Congregational Church, on the corner of State and William, one of the most beautiful buildings in town. But the 1872 structure was lucky to survive the improving impulse of the early twentieth century. In 1924, a disdainful visitor wrote that it was “as inadequate, shabby, and disreputable as any church I have seen in such a [prominent] location.” Twice the congregation voted to replace it with a bigger, more modern structure, but the first plan was derailed by World War I, the second by the Depression. The delays gave the congregation time to realize what a gem they had. Today, in spite of limited parking and high maintenance costs, the Congregationalists are committed to staying in their historic church.

The church was designed by Gordon Lloyd, “one of the most prominent Gothic church architects of his time,” according to his great-granddaughter, Anne Upton, who lives in Ann Arbor. Other local examples of Lloyd’s work are St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Harris Hall, and the entrance to Forest Hill Cemetery. Around the state, his commissions included the Whitney home in Detroit (now the restaurant of the same name) and churches as far afield as Marquette.

Gothic Revival architecture, with its steep roofs and tall pointed windows, was rarely used for Congregational churches. The denomination traces its origins to the Pilgrims, and its prototypical church in New England was a simple wooden structure with a tall steeple. Lloyd made some concessions to this history in his design. “It’s simpler, more open, not typical Gothic Revival,” says retired assistant minister Dorothy Lenz.

Photograph of 608 East William Street, home of the First Congregational Church

First Congregational Church.

Although many of Ann Arbor’s early settlers came from New England, the Congregational church was not organized until 1847, more than twenty years after the town was founded. Under an agreement called the “plan of union,” the Congregationalists had originally deferred to the Presbyterians in organizing churches west of the Hudson River. But in 1847, forty-eight members left the First Presbyterian Church to start First Congregational. According to the Presbyterians’ history, the group that branched off “preferred the Congregational form of government [each church governs itself], they didn’t care for the recent revival, and they were more ardent in their antislavery feelings” than the Presbyterians’ current minister.

The new group purchased land at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington (now Bank of Ann Arbor), meeting at the county courthouse until their church was built. They remained strongly antislavery. In 1861, they hosted controversial abolitionist Wendell Phillips at a time when other churches refused to let him speak for fear that protesters would do physical violence to their buildings.

In 1876 the Congregationalists moved to their current location on William and State. (They sold their original building to Zion Lutheran Church, which itself had recently broken off from Bethlehem Evangelical Church.) At the time, State Street was still a dirt road, and although the university was across the street, the neighborhood was mainly residential. Most parishioners walked to services. Judge Thomas Cooley, a U-M law professor who also served on the state supreme court, lived right down the street on a site where the Michigan Union now stands.

Like Cooley, many of the church members were important in the development of the university or the town; the church’s form of self-government and tolerance of personal beliefs appealed to people who enjoyed dialogue and new ideas. Other prominent members included opera house owner George Hill, physician and hospital owner Reuben Peterson, and U-M presidents James Angell and Marion Burton. Walter S. Perry, the superintendent of Ann Arbor schools, headed the church’s Sunday school program.

This high-powered congregation hired challenging thinkers as ministers. The most famous in this century was Lloyd C. Douglas, minister from 1915 to 1921, who went on to become a nationally famous religious novelist. Many of his books were made into movies, including The Magnificent Obsession, The Green Light, and The Robe.

After leaving Ann Arbor, Douglas went on to preach in Montreal before his success as a writer allowed him to retire from the pulpit. “He always enjoyed being a celebrity,” says Ray Detter, who wrote his 1975 doctoral dissertation on the minister. Douglas eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he hobnobbed with actors who starred in his films, among them Arthur Treacher.

After his wife died in 1944, Douglas moved to Las Vegas to live with one of his daughters. “He described Las Vegas as a place where ‘the Ten Commandments are viewed as a forthright insult to the freedom of the human spirit--a hell of a place for an elderly prophet to end his days,’ ” Detter recalls. Not long before his death, Douglas wrote to a friend, “The happiest years of my life were spent in the Congregational Church of Ann Arbor.”

Douglas died in 1951 and today is memorialized in a chapel named after him. Before his death, his daughters contributed money to the church to build the chapel, part of an addition organized by Leonard Parr, minister from 1937 to 1957. Parr, a scholarly man who also wrote hymns, appreciated the beauty of the church building and developed plans to adapt it to the needs of the congregation. In 1941 the church underwent a major renovation, including the addition of more stained-glass windows (there were only two originally) and the removal of the side balconies. In 1953 the new wing was added. Designed by U-M architecture professor Ralph Hammett, it includes the Lloyd C. Douglas Chapel, Pilgrim Hall, and Mayflower Lounge, as well as offices and classrooms.

Near the end of Parr’s ministry, the church faced the big question of whether to join the United Church of Christ, a new denomination formed by the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Church. After much discussion, the Ann Arbor congregation voted in 1956 to remain separate. Today they are part of a national association of Congregational churches but remain free to make their own decisions.

In 1965, minister Terry Smith came to Ann Arbor. A former basketball player at Ohio State, he attracted parishioners involved in U-M athletics, including Fritz Seyferth, Gus Stager, Bill Frieder, Newt Loken, Johnny Orr, Bob Ufer, and Lloyd Carr. Smith, who retired last year and still gives the invocation at U-M athletic department events, was the longest-serving minister in the church’s history.

Most of the changes in the church’s more than 150-year history reflect larger changes in town. Few members still live near enough to walk to church, and the congregation has become more diverse in race and ethnicity. Says present minister Bob Livingston, “It’s impressive, coming as I do from Grand Rapids where it is more homogeneous.”

But many things have been constant over the years. An emphasis on good music is one. From 1890 to 1895, the church employed Reuben Kempf, one of the best musicians in town, as choirmaster. Today, Marilyn Mason, world-famous organist, provides music, and Willis Patterson, associate dean of the U-M music school, is choir director.

Probably the most consistent element in the history of the First Congregational Church is its tolerance of a wide variety of views. Longtime church member Louise Allen says, “You can have your own thoughts. Religion isn’t thrust at you.” According to Smith, “It’s a thoughtful congregation. When I was preaching, I knew they were thinking. They were responsive, they’d talk to you afterwards.”

Smith’s description of the congregation parallels comments written by Calvin Olin Davis in his 1947 history: “members were often bluntly outspoken in their judgments and often wearisomely stubborn in their convictions . . . but [they believed] that all men are of equal worth in the sight of God and that each one is entitled to the full and free expression of his thoughts and feelings.”