Ann Arbor’s oldest photo opens a window onto the city’s turbulent early journalistic scene

The oldest known Ann Arbor photograph, this daguerreotype shows the staff of the Michigan Argus, the city’s Democratic weekly newspaper, circa 1850. Editor and publisher L. W. Cole (he was always referred to by his initials, even in his obituary) is in the center of the picture in black suit and top hat, surrounded by his youthful staff in rolled-up shirtsleeves.

When Cole came to Ann Arbor in 1838, he got his first job at the Michigan Argus. By the time this photo was taken, he was the paper’s co-owner and had already survived several politically motivated takeover bids.

Argus staff still in their work clothes. Only the editor, L.W. Cole, dressed for the photo putting on his suit and tall hat, circa 1850.

In the nineteenth century, newspapers existed to support a party or position, and both ownership and readership could change quickly with the political winds. It was largely by chance that this particular moment from the city’s journalistic history happened to be immortalized by an itinerant photographer.

“Most daguerreotypes were pictures of a single person,” says Cynthia Read-Miller of the Henry Ford Museum, where the Argus photo was part of an exhibit of early photography. “This one is rare because it shows a group of people and even rarer because it shows an occupation.

“Practical photography began with the daguerreotype, a process that formed a single image rather than the negatives and prints that are familiar to us today,” explains Read-Miller. Invented by Frenchman Louis Daguerre in 1839, the daguerreotype was popular from that date through the 1850s, when it was displaced by the glass-negative ambrotype.

Ann Arborites could have daguerreotype photos taken as early as 1842, when Charles Rood set up a studio for a few days in the Bank of Washtenaw building, which now houses the Wooden Spoon bookstore, at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Ann. (Unfortunately, none of Rood’s photos appear to have survived.) The Cole photo very likely was taken by another itinerant daguerreotypist, A. M. Noble. An advertisement for Noble’s curiously named “Not London Daguerrean Gallery” appeared prominently on the top left-hand corner of the front page of the Argus on June 4 and June 18, 1851. Possibly the picture was part, or all, of the payment for the ad.

If Noble had chosen instead to advertise in the State Journal, an entirely different scene might have come down to us. While the Argus supported Democratic politicians, the State Journal backed the Whigs, the other major party at the time.

The State Journal was the descendant of Ann Arbor’s first paper, the Western Emigrant. Started by Thomas Simpson in 1829, just five years after Ann Arbor was founded, the Emigrant tried to be fair and evenhanded. Simpson wrote that “it shall be the constant aim of the Editor . . . to exhibit impartial information relative to the merit and qualifications of candidates for important public offices.” He also vowed that “the columns of the Emigrant shall, so long as under my direction, be open to a full investigation of Free Masonry and Anti-Masonry.” This last statement was too much for John Allen, cofounder of Ann Arbor (with Elisha Rumsey), and Samuel Dexter, founder of Dexter Village, and after five issues they purchased the paper and ran it with an editorial policy of anti-Masonry (they objected to the group’s secrecy) and endorsement of temperance. After several changes in name and ownership, the Emigrant became in December 1834 the Michigan Whig and in September 1835 the State Journal.

Two months after the Michigan Whig debuted, in February 1835, Earl P. Gardiner founded the Michigan Argus to give local Democrats a voice. Gardiner, who was born in Connecticut in 1807, settled in Michigan after serving in the army at Fort Gratiot, now Port Huron. Gardiner’s office was in Lower Town on the north side of the Broadway Bridge, above G. and J. Beckley’s dry goods and boot store (today St. Vincent de Paul).

Cole joined Gardiner three years later. Born in Palmyra, New York, in 1812, Cole was only twenty-six when he arrived in Ann Arbor. The 1881 History of Washtenaw County, Michigan says that Cole “learned the printing trade at an early age,” which must mean he had gone through an apprenticeship in New York. Samuel B. McCracken, editor of the State Journal from 1845 to 1855, described in an 1891 paper in the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections how these early apprenticeships worked:
“The printer’s apprentice usually boarded with his master and slept in a bunk in the office. He was required to do the office chores, to cut and carry the wood for the use of the office, and to carry the papers in town, and in many cases he was required to cut the wood and do other chores at the house also. If in addition to this he did what was expected of him in the way of legitimate office work, he underwent a discipline not without its results in the formation of character. The mental discipline necessarily connected with his calling, the opportunities for reading, if improved, were supposed to fit him for the editor’s chair.”

Main Street, circa 1861. Note the Argus Printing Press sign on the roof of the building on the corner of Main and Huron.

The next year, 1839, the Argus temporarily stopped publishing, and the Democratic Herald became the party’s mouthpiece. In 1843 the Argus resumed publication under the ownership of E. R. Powell and Orrin Arnold, with Gardiner again as editor. But internecine warfare between the left and right wings of the party kept the paper’s management in a state of flux for the next three years. McCracken, writing a short history of the press in the Local News and Advertiser, a paper he started in 1857, explained, “Powell and Arnold got on very well for a few months, but being but boys, they had a flare-up and Powell quit. The office passed through various hands, alternating between Cole and Arnold, Cole and Bennett, changing so often that it’s doubtful whether a process issued after banking hours on one day would have been good against the existing firm on the next.”

McCracken continued, “The original diversion of the Argus from the true faith was not relished by many of the influential members of the Democratic party . . . who went by the common name of ‘old hunkers.’ ”

The “old hunkers” did eventually win out. On January 28, 1846, Gardiner returned to power, this time with Cole, who had bought shares in the paper, as a partner. They wrote in their premiere issue: “In defiance of numerous obstacles we have been enabled to revive the Michigan Argus and with that name for our caption we again unfurl the Democratic banner.” They went on to state that they supported “measures of Reform which we may deem advantageous to the people,” but “oppose measures which may be ostensibly brought forward under the specious garb of Reform, but are really designed only for hobbies [hobby horses], upon which unprincipled demagogues may ride into popular favor and ultimately into power.”

Cole and Gardiner located the new incarnation of the Argus in the upper village, “a few rods north of the Exchange.” Early Ann Arbor pictures show the Argus in an upstairs office on the corner of Huron and Main. Subscriptions to the four-page weekly were “$1.50 per annum, if paid in advance, $2.00 if not paid within six months, $2.50 if not paid at the expiration of the year.”

The fortunes of the Argus rose and fell with the political tides. The big issue dividing Michigan Democrats at the time was the structure of the court system and the selection of judges. Supporters of change locally included not only young people but notables such as state senators John Allen (who had set aside his anti-Masonic views to join the Democratic Party in 1839) and Samuel Denton, an abolitionist physician active in local affairs. The Argus and most local circuit judges, including William Fletcher (1836–1842), George Miles (1846–1850), and Edward Mundy (1848–1851), opposed the shift. Only Alpheus Felch, a circuit court judge from 1842 to 1845 and then governor from 1846 to 1847, supported it.

Looking back on this period in a letter quoted in the 1881 county history, Cole wrote, “The new series of the Argus began at the time with judicial reform, when the present circuit court system was completely set aside. I called it a ‘Judicial Revolution,’ which it was; and the Argus from the first issue, fought it until it was wiped out and dead. I suffered some for the course I pursued, but I was amply rewarded for my firmness afterward. The thing that was established was no ‘reform’; it was a senseless revolution. It took some nerve, I confess, to stand the pressure brought to bear upon me, and for several months my subscription list only numbered about 50. To see about 80 of my own party marching to the polls under the banner of ‘reform,’ instigated by Dr. Denton and John Allen, and vote against Judge Felch and the Democratic ticket, gave me serious thoughts of the course I was about to take . . . but good counsel, such as Judges Mundy, Miles, Fletcher, Wilson and others, and my own sense of what should be done, determined me to go ahead, and I did, to the end of the foolish thing.”

The judicial dispute was largely resolved by the new state constitution of 1850, and the Democratic rift was mended--much to the benefit of the erstwhile outcasts. By 1854 Argus subscriptions had risen from a low of fifty to a robust 1,800.

Cole and Gardiner stayed with their middle-of-the-road Democratic politics, even opposing what were then seen as “radical” efforts to abolish slavery nationally. For “the stability of our happy Union,” they urged “the North to avoid all action and language in reference to slavery which will unnecessarily irritate the South.”

Slavery may seem an unusual subject for a small-town paper, but in fact most of the Argus was devoted to state and federal politics. Even foreign news was given more coverage than local events, which were barely noted; at that time, because the town was so small (population 4,500 in 1850), it was assumed that everyone knew what was happening locally.

Weekly Michigan Argus, September 17, 1858.

After putting out the paper for eight and a half years, Cole and Gardiner sold it to Elihu Pond, best known today as the father of Irving and Allen Pond, the architects of the Michigan Union and Michigan League. Cole and Gardiner said little about the reasons for the change. Their parting editorial on June 29, 1854, said only, “Circumstances that need not be enumerated now indicate that the connection between ourselves and our patrons must be terminated.” They departed as they had arrived, as diehard Democrats: “Wishing prosperity to the party whose principles we have endeavored in a feeble manner to sustain and health and happiness to our numerous friends, we close this last set of public duties.”

Gardiner finished his career as a printer for the Ann Arbor Journal. He died in 1866. In the county history, Cole praised the partner “whose memory I shall always cherish with the kindliest feelings. . . He was the first to sign the Martha Washington [temperance] pledge in Ann Arbor, and so far as I know, he never in the least deviated from it. He died as he lived--an honest man, a Christian, and one of the best temperance men.”

Cole moved to Albion and established the Albion Mirror, which he published for the rest of his life, remaining a staunch Democrat. McCracken described Cole in 1891 as “one of the oldest newspaper men in the state actively engaged in the business.” Cole died three years later, in 1894, at age eighty-one, working until the end. According to his obituary, “his last editorial work [was] a few days before his last and fatal illness.”

From creamery to music

Two connected buildings at 722-726 Brooks, nestled at the back of a driveway in a residential neighborhood, are puzzling to people passing by unless they know it was once a family-run dairy. The front part was constructed in 1919 and the large part in back in 1940. Brothers-in-law Adolph Helber and Alfred Weber owned and operated the West Side Dairy for thirty-four years, delivering fresh dairy products to city residents until 1953.

Adolph Helber, born in 1886, grew up in a large family on a farm on Dexter Road in Scio Township. He left school in the seventh grade, not uncommon at the time, and worked as a hired farmhand until 1904, when he went to work delivering milk for Jake Wurster, a brother-in-law. Wurster's dairy was on the corner of Catherine and North Fifth Avenue.

When Helber started in the dairy business, milk was still sold "raw," or untreated, fresh from the cow. (Although pasteurization equipment, developed to kill milk-borne infections, was available in the 1890s, it hadn't yet been universally adopted.) The raw milk was stored in a big tank at the front of the horse-drawn delivery wagon and scooped out into a pitcher or milk can supplied by each customer on the route.

In 1912 Helber married Alma Weber, the sister of a fellow driver, Alfred Weber. The Weber family house was at 809 Brooks, then the last residential street off Miller. Alma and Alfred's father, Jacob, owned much of the land in the area. In 1914 the Helbers moved to 720 Brooks, and in 1919 Helber and Alfred Weber opened a dairy out of a small one-story cement-block building they built in the Helbers' backyard. Milk was supplied by Helber's brother Carl, who had stayed on the family farm, and also by the Seyfried and Hanselman farms.

Helber and Weber started their days at 4 a.m., feeding and harnessing the horses. They delivered milk in the morning and in the afternoon pasteurized and bottled it for the next day. Because neither the farmers nor the customers had good storage, the partners accepted and delivered milk seven days a week. Their only time off was Sunday afternoon. Their wives, Alma Helber and Rose Weber, ran the office, did the bookkeeping, handled over-the-counter sales, and helped with production.

In the days before cholesterol worries, dairies competed for the richest milk the farmer had. Before homogenization, customers could see at a glance how rich the milk was by the thickness of the cream on top. (Narrow-necked milk bottles were developed to exaggerate the visible cream.) The West Side Dairy made skim milk (or buttermilk) only as a by-product of butter making, selling it back to the farmers for a penny a gallon as feed for their pigs and chickens.

The West Side Dairy buildings in 1994.

As the number of their customers grew, Helber and Weber were able to hire help, giving priority to relatives. The delivery men included Eddie Weber, Alfred's brother, whose route included what is now known as the Old West Side; Leon Jedele, Rose Weber's brother; and Henry Grau, who was married to Alma's sister Clara. After relatives, neighbors were hired. The employee who probably lived the farthest away was Fred Yaeger, who walked to work every morning from his home on Pauline.

The family employees built houses in the neighborhood near their work. Alfred Weber's neighbor, Will Nimke of 827 Brooks, built him a house at 730 Brooks. Eddie Weber lived at 727 Gott, where he grew wonderful dahlias. When the Helbers' sons grew up, they lived in the neighborhood, too, Erwin at 706 Brooks and Ray at 725 Gott. Jacob Weber owned and rented other houses, one at the corner of Brooks and Summit and three others on Gott Street, right behind the dairy. Weber and Helber owned the house between their two houses and rented it to the Moon family. The Weber property also included a big field west of the house, where the horses sometimes grazed.

Making deliveries, the milkmen would walk along the sidewalk as the horses plodded alongside them in the street. Sam Schlecht, who helped out on the routes as a teenager, recalls that the horses "knew more about the route than the human beings." If milk was delivered on a dead-end street, the horses would turn around while the men delivered to the last houses. If the milkmen cut through a backyard to deliver milk on the next street over, the horses knew to meet them there. Schlecht remembers that at the end of the route, as they went down Chapin toward Miller, the horses would pick up their pace, eager to get home for their oats and hay. When Helber and Weber switched to trucks in 1934, the milkmen found them a mixed blessing. They no longer had to feed and harness the horses each morning, but their routes took them longer without the horses' help.

Deliveries were made every single day except Christmas and Thanksgiving. On the day before those holidays, the milkmen would go around twice, in case a customer had forgotten anything that morning. Henry Michelfelder, a relative of Leon Jedele's, remembered that if his family ran out of something during the day, they could call the dairy and it would be brought over.

The milk and cream delivered for sale by retail stores was very fresh, since every day the milkmen would take back any that wasn't sold. The day-old products were used to moisten the cottage cheese the dairy made. In the 1940's, when refrigeration had become common, the dairy scaled back to three deliveries a week. Marian Helber, Ray's wife, remembers that "people had a fit. They thought they needed fresh milk every day for their coffee or cereal."

Erwin and Ray Helber grew up working in the dairy part-time and summers. After graduating from Michigan State Normal College (now EMU), Ray worked bottling and also delivering. During World War II he left to work at King Seeley (he learned of the job opening because the plant was on his route) and ended up staying there until 1975, when he retired. Erwin stayed at the dairy, gradually taking over more of the responsibility from his father and uncle. In 1953, when the brothers-in-law retired and sold their business to United Dairies (later Sealtest), Erwin stayed with the new owners, eventually moving to Flint with Sealtest.

Today the buildings looks similar from the outside but have totally new uses inside, mostly related to music. Four Davids (Orlin, Sutherland, Collins, Peramble) between them teach or repair guitar, violin, pianoforte, and piano. The neighborhood is also filled with evidence of the dairy for people who know where to look: a four-car garage (used for delivery trucks) at the corner of Summit and Brooks, a barn at 809 Brooks (later used for a construction business), and a big lot at 827 (now a big private garden). After the dairy moved out, tenants included a sugar packing manufacturer and a bookbinding operation. In 1964, Robert Noehren, a U-M organist and a pioneer in the organ revival movement, rented it for a pipe organ factory, presaging its present use. The field behind the Weber house is now the site of the Second Baptist Church.

[Photo caption from book]: The West Side Dairy in the mid-1930s. Left to right: Henry Grau, Alfred Weber, Eddie Weber, Adolph Helber, and Leon Jedele. All are related by blood or marriage. The dairy had just switched from horse-drawn milk wagons to trucks and was experimenting with various models-three different makes are visible.
“Courtesy Paul Helber”

Delivering coolness door to door

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bach School's new playground was once a West Side bar

Children playing on the Bach School playground probably have no idea that it was once the location of adult recreation. From 1901 to 1919, a beer distributorship and popular West Side drinking spot was located behind Jacob Dupper's home at what was then 439 Fifth Street, now the north end of the playground. In those pre-zoning days, he ran several businesses from out-buildings on the property. His barn was the Ann Arbor distributorship for Buckeye and Green Seal beers, both made by a Toledo brewery. And a small structure usually called "the shop" was the neighborhood bar.

The Dupper family lived at 439 Fifth Street, now the north end of the Bach School playground, and ran a beer distributorship from their barn.

The shop stood across the driveway from Dupper's house and farther back from the street. Neighborhood men came in the evening to share a companionable drink, to chat, and to play cards. Dupper's grandson, Henry Velker, from whom most of this information was obtained, remembers that the clientele came from all over the Old West Side, then still known as the city's Second Ward.

The building (also sometimes called "the caboose") was furnished with tables and a short bar. It had room for about thirty or forty people, who could buy beer, wine, or whiskey. Velker remembers that customers came in all seasons, although in the summer they usually came later in the evening after their chores were finished. In the winter, when darkness descended sooner, they came earlier and stayed longer.

The customers were all men. Erna Steinke Jahnke, who grew up on nearby Jefferson Street in the years that Dupper's business was in operation, says that she never heard of any women going there. Parents also discouraged their children from hanging around the neighborhood bar.

George Voelker delivered beer with the aid of a horse named Sam.

Jacob Dupper was born in 1860 in Bondorf, a small town thirty miles south of Stuttgart. According to Velker, Dupper learned the brewery and distributing business while still in Germany. When he moved to Ann Arbor in his twenties, his first job was working for the Northern Brewery on the north side of town.

In 1901, Dupper obtained the Ann Arbor franchise for Buckeye and Green Seal beers. Although there were two local breweries, many local residents disloyally claimed that the Toledo brands tasted better. Dupper kept them supplied, delivering the beer to stores, restaurants, fraternities, and private parties.

As a sideline, he also delivered ice. He had his own icehouse on the property, stocked with ice cut and shipped in from Whitmore Lake. The barn served as his beer warehouse and also housed the horses and wagons he used for deliveries.

The beer was shipped from Toledo, in both bottles and kegs, via the Ann Arbor Railroad and was unloaded at the Ashley Street station on a First Street spur of the tracks. From there it was taken by horse and wagon the five blocks to the Dupper house.

Fred Dupper behind the counter of his shop.

When Dupper died in 1907, his son, Fred Dupper, took over the business with his wife, Minnie. Fred Dupper's brother-in-law, George Voelker, who lived across the street, worked as a driver for the company. (George Voelker was Henry Velker's father. Velker changed the spelling of the name to more closely match the pronunciation.)

Though the shop and the distributorship closed with the beginning of Prohibition in 1919, the Duppers continued to live in the house for many years. Sam Schlecht, who lived on Fifth Street in the 1920's, remembers the painted ads for Buckeye Beer on the sides of Dupper's barn long after the beer itself had disappeared.

Fred Dupper died in the early 1940s. The house was used as a residence for about twenty more years, until it was torn down to make room for an expansion of the Bach School playground.

From hand-set type to desktop publishing in five generations

In 1933, when Adam Goetz moved Athens Press to 308 North Main Street, the technology he used was not much different than it had been in Gutenberg’s day. The simple brick-fronted building was essentially one big room. The printing press was in front, while in the back, Goetz stood at a desk setting lead type by hand, one letter at a time.

By then, Goetz had already been a printer for fifty years. Although he’d been a part-owner in the business since 1900 and sole proprietor since 1907, the 308 North Main shop was the first plant built specifically for his company. It would not be the last. Now known as Goetzcraft, Ann Arbor’s oldest job printer currently employs eighteen people at its 12,000-square-foot plant on the south side.

Born in Germany in 1866, Goetz came to the United States with his family at age five. At fifteen he began working in the print trade, no doubt learning on the job. He started at the Washtenaw Post, a German-language newspaper, then worked at the Register Publishing Company and the Inland Press before joining with three fellow workers to form Athens Press. The name came from their location, a room on the second floor of the Athens Theater on North Main.

The Athens Press took all sorts of small assignments. An early scrapbook passed down to Larry Goetz, Adam’s great-grandson, includes letterhead and business cards, party invitations, political literature, and jobs for the university. Those items are still familiar to job printers today, though many of the clients memorialized in the scrapbook, such as the Germania Club and the Ann Arbor Boat Company, are no longer in existence. There’s also not much demand anymore for such once-popular items as commemorative ribbons, restaurant meal tickets (bought in advance for a certain number of meals, they were often used by single men or immigrants here without their families), and advertising blotters (a common freebie when people wrote with pens dipped in ink).

The Athens Press second home was a storefront at 208 North Main.

In 1906, the press had to move because the theater was being remodeled and expanded (a process that included a name change to the Whitney). They ended up across the street and one block north, in a now-gone storefront at 208 North Main.

Larry Goetz was told by his great-aunt Hermina, that her father was often razzed by his partners for working too hard and earning all of the money. Athens Press’s original account book bears out her story. There are countless references to Goetz getting extra pay for working nights or on Sundays. Not surprisingly, soon after the move, Goetz was able to buy out his two remaining partners, Clyde Kerr and Alfred Schairer. Both men opened their own printing companies; Schairer teamed up with Oswald Mayer to form Mayer-Schairer office supply store (they got out of printing in the 1950s).

Adam and Pauline Goetz’s children, Herbert and Hermina, helped in the shop from an early age, pulling their red metal wagon down Main to make deliveries. Adam was happiest working in the back setting type, so when Herbert got old enough to work full-time, he took over the business end, talking to customers and doing the books.

After 1938 the shop sent out big typesetting jobs to Ben Burkhart, who had one of the city’s only Linotype machines in his shop on the other side of the alley in what had been the City Garage. The Linotype, named for its ability to set a full line of type at a time, was very expensive and hard to operate, but Burkhart had taught himself to use it by fooling around with one while a student at Ann Arbor High. Much like computer companies do today, in the 1920s, manufacturers would sell typesetting machines to schools at very reasonable prices so that students could learn how to operate them. Burkhart, who is still in business today, thinks he is now the last working Linotype operator in the Midwest.

Herbert Goetz was interested in modernizing the business, but his dad refused to retire. As he always had, Adam Goetz continued to set type by hand, chewing tobacco as he worked (he sent his grandson, John, to buy it for him at the cigar store on Huron). Finally, in 1943, Herbert threatened to enlist in the army unless his dad let him buy the business. It was an empty threat (Herbert had a health condition that made him ineligible), but his father finally agreed to sell. Adam Goetz never retired, however, continuing to work until two months before he died at age seventy-seven. According to his obituary, he had been the oldest living member of the typographical union, which he’d joined in 1885.

In 1944 Herbert Goetz changed the name of the Athens Press to Goetzcraft, since by then it had been thirty-six years since the business had been in the Athens Theater. Five years later he built a new, larger building across the street, at 307 North Main, adding new machinery and doubling the staff to about ten people. While his father never changed his way of working, Herbert kept up with the evolving industry. In the 1950s, the company bought its own Linotype machine and, when they came out, photo offset printing presses.

Like his father and grandfather, John Goetz started working at the press at a young age, coming in after school when he was a student at Slauson Junior High. He started out sweeping, feeding hand-fed presses, and baling. As soon as he got his driver’s license he was sent on deliveries, and he came to work full-time when he graduated from high school.

Since his dad had a firm control on the business end, John concentrated more on the machinery, learning how to run and repair the presses, bindery, and--especially challenging--the Linotype. Herbert retired more gracefully than his father had, moving to Florida in 1962, and leaving John in charge. A workaholic like the rest of the family, Herbert opened a liquor store there, where he worked the rest of his life.

John’s son Larry, like the previous three generations of Goetz men, started working at a young age, riding his bike to the shop after school to help out. Although he studied printing at Ferris, he says he really learned on the job. He joined the company full-time in 1971, in time for the next printing revolution: computer typesetting. His father, guessing this was the way to go, invited his foreman and wife to dinner, and over a good meal that his wife, Evelyn, had cooked, suggested that Evelyn and the foreman’s wife work together to find out whether photo composition (a then-new technique for setting type on film) could replace the Linotype. “It drove us nuts, but we mastered it,” Evelyn recalls. Goetzcraft was the first printer in Ann Arbor to offer the new technology.

Five times faster than the Linotype, photo composition “was the hottest thing in town,” John recalls. “Other machines became obsolete while people still owed money on them.” By the mid-1980s, Goetzcraft sold its Linotype to a man in Charlevoix for $3,000. According to John, “It was a fraction of what we paid, but we were lucky to get that.” By then, Goetzcraft was already moving into desktop publishing.

Since 1979, Goetzcraft has been located in the Ann Arbor Industrial Park at 975 Phoenix Drive. They do fancier work than Adam Goetz could have ever imagined: brochures, catalogs, and posters, printed in an array of colors. But one thing hasn’t changed. The family continues to make up about half of the workforce. Larry Goetz, now president, is assisted either full- or part-time by ten family members: his father and mother, John and Evelyn Goetz; his wife, Paulette; his sisters, Julie Trevino and Lee Ann Haynes; his brothers-in-law, Jeff Haynes and Jeff Swanson; and his three children, Britton, Bryan, and Brooke.

The original plant that Adam Goetz built at 308 North Main became a dry-cleaning business after Goetzcraft left. Eureka Cleaners is now owned by Steve Hur, who also owns College Cleaners on North University. Like Adam Goetz, Steve Hur is an immigrant, and his craft, too, runs in the family: He bought the business from his sister, who originally had bought it from their brother.

[Photo caption from book]: The Athens Press was named for its original location upstairs in the Athens Theater.

[Photo caption from book]: In 1933 the press finally got a building of its own at 308 N. Main, now Eureka Cleaners

[Photo caption from book]: The press moved across the street, to 307 N. Main, in 1949. “Courtesy Larry and Paulette Goetz”

It was the forerunner of Hush Puppies shoes

In the late nineteenth century, Henry Krause was one of the city’s biggest taxpayers. The leather-making factory he built on Second Street stood into the 21st century and his name lives on in Krause Street nearby. But his real claim to fame is that his Ann Arbor tannery was the forerunner of Hush Puppies shoes.

Krause was born in Treffurth, Prussia, in 1820, to a family who had been tanners for two centuries. He learned the trade from his father and traveled over the greater part of Germany on foot as a Handwerkebursche—a journeyman—before immigrating to America at age twenty-four. Krause worked briefly in New York and in Liverpool, Ohio, before coming to Ann Arbor in 1845. With its large German population and several tanneries, Ann Arbor was a natural choice for an immigrant with his skills.

Krause’s first Ann Arbor job was with Emanuel Mann, who also had been born in Germany and learned tanning from his father. The next year Krause went to work for another German tanner, C. Kusterer, whom he soon bought out. In 1850 he moved the business to Second Street between Liberty and William, where he built a wood frame tannery next to a tributary of Allen Creek.

A source of water was essential for a tannery. Tanners soaked hides in water to clean them, then in a solution of water and lime to loosen the hair, and finally in water and tannin to preserve and soften the leather. The tannin came from oak bark, and in addition to water for soaking, early tanneries used water to power the mills that ground the bark.

Krause prospered, and in 1868 replaced his wooden tannery with a brick one, 30 by 120 feet. A separate storehouse held 225 cords of oak bark, and a third building housed a steam engine for grinding it. By now, Krause was selling leather throughout the state, principally for harnesses. His factory used 7,000 hides a year and its annual sales were about $45,000.

Three other nearby tanneries competed with Krause. The Weil Brothers’ tannery was on the southwest corner of First and Huron, on land that was once the home of Elisha Rumsey, Ann Arbor’s co-founder. The five Weil brothers, Jacob, Solomon, Moses, Leopold, and Marcus, were the nucleus of Ann Arbor’s earliest Jewish community, but they moved on to bigger cities in the 1870’s. Jacob Heinzmann, another German immigrant, set up a tannery in 1851 on the corner of William and Third, on the same Allen Creek tributary as Krause’s. (Its site is now a parking lot for the Argus Building.) On the other side of the tributary, also on Third but closer to Liberty, Christian Duttenhofer, a former Weil Brothers’ employee, started his own tannery in the 1860’s. Duttenhofer’s was probably a smaller operation, since the address was also his home.

Krause also built up a retail operation. In 1849 he built the first brick building on the block of Main Street south of Washington, adding to it in 1861. (In the nineteenth century, most businesses were still clustered around the courthouse to the north.) Besides selling his leather there, he made shoes and boots.

Tannery building shortly before it was torn down.

Krause married Catherine Hirth in 1846, just a year after he arrived in Ann Arbor. As his business prospered, they were able to move to a seventeen-room house on the corner of Third and Liberty, now the location of St. Paul’s. (They used the house as a parsonage and school before razing it in 1929 to make room for the church.) The Krause property ran well north of their home down to Washington and west to what is today a U-M parking lot.

In 1881 the Krause tannery was incorporated with $40,000 in capital and was subsequently outfitted with new equipment. But by then, Krause and Heinzmann were the only tanners left in town. Local tanners were probably beginning to feel the competition of large industrial tanners with lower prices and national distribution. Wildlife in Michigan was also becoming scarce, and both Krause and Heinzmann included in their ads offers to buy pelts. Krause’s ad claimed that he paid “more for hides and pelts, furs and tallow than any other man in the state.” He also began selling other brands besides his own custom-made shoes.

Krause was a respected tanner. In 1850, early in his career, he won a first place at the Michigan State Fair. The Ann Arbor Register Weekly said of Krause at the time of his death in 1893, “As a tanner of superior leather he had a wide reputation,” adding, “Although meeting with financial reverses in later years his integrity was unquestioned.”

The City Directory hints at the rest of the story. Krause seems to have given up control of the company in the 1881 incorporation, apparently the price he paid for the capital to finance the tannery’s final renovation. Beginning that year, others are named as the company’s officers, while Krause is identified only as the plant superintendent. The Krause tannery disappears entirely from the directory in 1888. In the 1890 directory, Henry Krause is listed as a clerk for Samuel Krause, his son, at the Main Street store.

The store closed a few years later, ending the Krause family’s fifty years in the leather business in Ann Arbor. But by then, another of Henry and Catherine’s sons (they had seven children) was flourishing in western Michigan. In 1883, G. Adolph Krause, known as G. A., had bought a leather shop in Grand Rapids in partnership with his mother’s brother, Fred Hirth, also a tanner. In 1901 the Hirth-Krause Company, as it was then known, moved to Rockford, a small community close to Grand Rapids, and expanded their tanning and manufacturing. G. A.’s sons, Victor and Otto, and his grandson Adolph continued in the firm. Today the company is Wolverine World Wide, Inc., the world’s largest tanner of pigskin and the makers of Hush Puppies, the shoes with the sad-eyed basset hound trademark. Henry Krause’s 1850 award from the Michigan State Fair is prominently reproduced in the company’s official history.

Meanwhile, the Krause tannery building in Ann Arbor continued to be used as a factory, first to manufacture brass goods, then car accessories, vapor lamps, and windshields. In 1925 the newly formed King Seeley Company moved in to begin manufacture of gas gauges, using the tannery building but adding a modern factory in front of it. Purchased by Chrysler in 1968, it became GT products in 1982, manufacturer of diesel governors and fuel vapor valves, and ended its life as Eaton Corporation. The tannery building was razed in 2005 to make room for an adaptive reuse condo project in the newer factory building.

Argiero's restaurant was once one of the Midwest's busiest co-ops

Argiero's, the cozy Italian restaurant on the corner of Detroit and Catherine streets, was from 1936 to 1939 the site of a social experiment: a co-op gas station and grocery store. They were run by the Ann Arbor Co-operative Society, a group that organized during the Depression to seek alternatives to capitalism to distribute the necessities of life.

The co-op was started by a small group meeting in the Hill Street living room of Harold Gray, the millionaire idealist who started the Utopian Saline Valley Farms. Their first project, in 1933, was to purchase coal in bulk, thus eliminating the middleman. At the time, coal was a necessity of life, since it was used to heat most homes. Neil Staebler, who with his father, Edward, ran the Staebler and Son Oil Company, was very sympathetic to their cause. (He later became chair of the Michigan Democratic Party and served a term in Congress.) Staebler helped arrange for the co-op to buy coal by the train carload. One of the founding members, William Kemnitz, an attorney who had lost his job at a Detroit bank during the infamous bank holiday, served as the co-op staff person, calling all the members and taking their coal orders by phone. At about the same time, the group also began buying food in bulk.

In 1936, the co-op expanded into a full-time enterprise. Neil Staebler rented the group his Detroit Street gas station, as well as the brick barn behind it on Fifth Avenue. Bill Kemnitz became general manager, with his office in the gas station. Kemnitz's three sons, Bill Jr., Milt, and Walt, all worked there as gas station attendants at various times. Walt, then in high school, remembers his salary was 29 cents an hour. Milt, now an artist well known for his pictures of local scenes, painted the sign, the first in a long career.

The co-op grocery store was set up next door in the old barn, which dated to 1887. An extensive remodeling included installing indoor plumbing and adding plate glass show windows to the Fifth Avenue side. The goal of the grocery store, according to manager Abe Rosenkrantz, was "honest consumer value." Rosenkrantz, who had worked in retail as manager of an office supply business before coming to EMU as a student, walked a tightrope, trying to offer the best products available, such as oranges without coloring, while keeping prices competitive with the chain stores, which could afford a low profit margin.

Employees posed proudly outside the Ann Arbor Co-Operative Society's gas station in the late 1930. (I. to r.) Milt Kemnitz, Zilpha Olson, Bill Kemnitz Jr., Bill Kemnitz Sr., and Winifred Proctor.

Charter co-op member Helen McCluskey chaired the board of directors' store committee, leading tasting sessions where prospective store items, such as canned peas, were opened and sampled, with the group voting on which brand they thought best.

Rosenkrantz says that to the casual consumer "the store looked like other supermarkets of the day except for labels they wouldn't recognize." He says in some ways the store was like a Meijer, in that it also offered nonfood products such as aspirin (Consumers Union had recently reported that Bayer was no better than off-brand aspirins) and some appliances. In 1937, the group also started a credit union.

Members felt they had a personal stake in the co-op. Says Bill Kemnitz Jr., "Everyone who bought owned the place. There were not many dissatisfied customers. If there were, we would work it out to everyone's satisfaction." Mary Hathaway, daughter of members A. K. and Angelyn Stevens, remembers, "It was our store. We felt very proprietary. Even as a small child you sense where your parents feel connected."

The Ann Arbor co-op soon became the second largest in the Midwest, with Chicago's the only bigger one. In 1939, pressed by a shortage of parking, needing more room, and wanting its own building, the organization moved to 637 South Main Street. It stayed there until 1955, when a Kroger opened across the street and put the co-op out of business.

The Detroit Street gas station reverted to a for-profit station during World War II. In the late 1940's and 1950's, it and the store buildings housed a used-car dealership. In 1965 Tony Argiero bought both buildings; he rented the gas station to a fish market and the store to an air-conditioning shop. In 1977, Argiero decided to use the buildings himself for an Italian restaurant he would run with his wife, Rosa. Tony had met Rosa in 1960, on a visit to his mother's village, Castelsilano, in the southern Italian province of Calabria. Rosa, obviously an authentic Italian cook, got her professional start cooking at Perry Nursery School.

Tony and Rosa enclosed the overhanging drive-in part of the gas station and built an addition on the back. They later put an addition on the west side. In 1985, they sold the restaurant to their four children. Amelia dropped out after two years, but today sons Sam, Carmin, and Michael still run it.

The Ann Arbor Co-operative Society still exists. Though it no longer has a gas station or a grocery store, its credit union is still thriving as part of the Huron River Area Credit Union, located on West Stadium. Member number 2 on the membership list is Helen McCluskey.

From humble garage to elegant office

Many buildings are changed as new uses are found for them, but the building at 109-113 Catherine has gone through a more dramatic transformation than most. The simple tile block structure was built around 1918, and in its first four years was used as an auto livery, junk store, agricultural implement store, and harness factory. In 1922 it became the City Garage, and for the next forty years, it bore the stamp of its energetic, promotion-minded owner, Ed Kuhn. Kuhn's own life was rife with career changes—he was variously a policeman, a mechanic, the owner of a taxi service, a restaurateur, and a mail contractor—and he found uses every bit as varied for his building.

Ed Kuhn was born in Ann Arbor in 1882. According to his son, Bob, and his widow, Josephine, he was an inveterate tinkerer who became involved with automobiles early in his career. In 1910, he joined the Ann Arbor Police Department, where he was the first police officer to drive a patrol car. He pursued and caught up with Robert W. Kempfert, whom he suspected of surpassing the ten-mile-per-hour speed limit. The case never got to court because the chief of police, Frank Pardon, refused to believe that the REO Kempfert was driving could surpass eight miles an hour.

In 1917, Kuhn left the department to become a partner at the City Garage, then at 300 North Main. He kept the name when five years later he bought the building next door at 109-113 Catherine. Kuhn evidently had a taste for promotion; the motto on his business letterhead was "Comes In All Shot/Goes Out 'Red Hot.' " The City Garage offered "general automobile repairing and storing" as well as oils and supplies and tire and tube repairing. Kuhn also operated a Dodge taxi service out of the shop. In 1927 he remodeled the building, adding a second story to be used as living quarters.

During the Depression, Kuhn started to diversify. He began in 1935 by leasing some of his garage space to the post office to store their vehicles. He also worked out a contract with them to deliver mail to the Ann Arbor and New York Central railroad stations and to make special runs to the Ann Arbor Airport to pick up and deliver the airmail that was transported in open cockpit planes.

In 1936, Kuhn turned part of the front of the building into a small restaurant, which he named "Bob's Lunch" after his son. He himself was the manager and dishwasher. Josephine waited tables, with her sister, Helen Roy. Bob Kuhn was the all-around helper. One of his jobs was delivering meals, by foot, to people who could not get away from their jobs. Bob's Lunch had its own matchbooks that urged people to come "for a light lunch" of "tasty . . . toasted sandwiches" and bragged about the "delicious coffee."

In the 1920s and 1930s, Catherine Street was closer to the nub of downtown Ann Arbor than it is today. Lunchtime customers were mainly people who worked in the area as employees of the post office across the street, the Ann Arbor Dairy next door, the White Swan Laundry, Godfrey Moving and Storage (until recently the Workbench), and nearby stores on Main Street, as well as customers from Hickey's Service Station, the City Garage's successor at 300 N. Main. Farmers' Market days would bring additional diners.

By 1939, Kuhn had given up the garage operation entirely. He rented the remaining street frontage to Charles J. Morgan for a barbershop known as Charlie's. It remained in operation until 1970 and then the space was occupied for a few years by Marti's Card and Candy Shoppe, run by Bob Kuhn's wife, Bobbie, and daughter, Marti. The rear garage area was successively rented to Ben Burkhardt Typesetting, Stern's Printing Service, Ann Arbor Glass, Wolverine Glass, Arbor Lite, and Hohlenkamp Plumbing. In the front of the building, Kuhn continued running Bob's Lunch until 1946. Kuhn retired after the war, but continued to keep busy. He was a deputy sheriff and a member of the Ann Arbor Elks. He died in 1959.

The restaurant was run by others under various names until 1975, when the whole building was transformed into the Cafe Creole. The cafe's owner removed the wooden siding and cedar-shake awning that had been added in the 1960s and covered the front and sides of the building with a putty-colored coat of stucco. After working more than a year on the transformation, they opened in 1979, only to close two years later and replaced in 1983 by Lovejoy-Tiffany Travel. Since 1991 the building has been occupied by Q Ltd, a design and communications firm, further expanding the diversity of one modest building.

Though it was overshadowed locally by the Michigan Central, the little Ann Arbor Railroad once carried the city’s name all across lower Michigan

A century ago, railroads were Ann Arbor’s lifeline. Just about everyone who came to the city, and virtually everything they needed to live here, arrived by train. Though most of those passengers and goods were carried by the Michigan Central Railroad, the route more closely identified with the city elsewhere in the state was its namesake, the little Ann Arbor Railroad.

The Michigan Central ran east-west, linking Ann Arbor to the big-city worlds of New York and Chicago. Known affectionately as “the Annie,” the Ann Arbor Railroad ran south to Toledo and northwest to Frankfort, Michigan, stopping along the way at small towns such as Whitmore Lake and Owosso.

Horse-drawn carriages met trains coming in to the station in this 1896 view. The Old West Side, discernable in the background, was still sparsely settled.

Ann Arbor’s two train stations, built just three years apart, testified to the Annie’s junior status. In 1886, the Michigan Central spent $33,000 to build a grand station on Depot Street. As the Gandy Dancer restaurant, the elaborate stone building remains an Ann Arbor landmark to this day. By comparison, the Ann Arbor Railroad spent only $4,400 to build its new station in 1889. Today, few people even realize that the Doughty-Law Montessori School at 416 South Ashley Street was once one of the gateways to the city.

Though modest, the Ashley Street station possessed a simple elegance. The waiting room had a fireplace, detailed woodwork, and pew-like wooden benches on wrought-iron frames. A telegraph operator and a stationmaster, both wearing green eyeshades, sat in a bay window overlooking the tracks, where they could see trains coming and going. Originally, a baggage shed stood to the south of the station, across an open stretch of platform; the two buildings were connected in the 1920s.

Until the station was built, Ashley Street was known as East Second Street. Even today many people are puzzled that Ann Arbor has Fourth and Fifth streets, on the Old West Side, and Fourth and Fifth avenues, downtown. But the original names were even more bewildering: the avenues were also called streets, and the only way to tell them apart was to specify “east” or “west.” The new name eliminated the confusion with West Second Street, just two blocks away, while simultaneously recognizing the Ann Arbor Railroad’s builder, “Big Jim” Ashley.

Born in 1822, Jim Ashley was a flamboyant character with strong opinions. He was described by Henry Riggs, a chief engineer of the Annie who went on to become dean of the U-M’s Engineering School, as “a very large man, probably six feet tall and very heavy. His abundant white hair was worn long, down nearly to his coat collar in the style affected by Henry Ward Beecher." Like Beecher, Ashley was a passionate abolitionist. He was elected to Congress from his home state of Ohio in 1858 and helped to guide the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, through Congress in 1865.

After serving five terms, Ashley was defeated for reelection because he had supported the attempt to impeach president Andrew Johnson. Fortunately, he had ties to Ulysses Grant, who was elected president the same year. Grant appointed Ashley governor of the Montana Territory. He was known as “Governor Ashley” for the rest of his life, long after he retired from politics and returned to Toledo to invest in the burgeoning railroad industry.

Ashley’s inspiration to build a railroad north into Michigan came after he discovered that the only way he could visit his sons attending the U-M was to travel via Detroit. Even before the Civil War, some people in Ann Arbor had tried to create a north-south railroad that would compete with the Michigan Central, but the attempt had folded before any track was laid. Ashley bought up the stock in the defunct company, gaining control of the right-of-way it had acquired to the city. Then he turned around and resold stock to Ann Arbor business leaders to raise funds for construction.

The new railroad reached Ann Arbor at noon on May 16, 1878. After the workmen laid the track across South State Street, they were escorted by a band and a procession of citizens to Hill’s Opera House, where the Reform Club served them a temperance supper--Ashley, a deeply religious man, strongly opposed drinking. (During his tenure as president of the railroad, he also insisted that no trains run on Sundays.)

The railroad passed west of downtown along Allen’s Creek. Chosen because it was relatively flat, the route also turned out to be a good source of freight traffic because many factories had located along the creek to take advantage of its water. The tracks crossed the Michigan Central near Main Street, then spanned the Huron River on a wooden bridge (replaced twice since) and continued north toward Whitmore Lake.

The Ann Arbor Railroad crosses the Huron River at Argo Dam.

Over the next decade, Ashley gradually kept building northwest, town by town. For all of his show of religious piety, Ashley was no more scrupulous than other capitalists of the freewheeling Gilded Age. He once hijacked a shipment of rails being transported on the Annie for his own use and was briefly jailed before he paid for them. Other lawsuits filed against his business to collect unpaid bills were fought out in the courts clear into the twentieth century. And he sometimes resorted to quasi-legal shenanigans to secure right-of-ways. In one case, when a property owner refused to sell, Ashley sent him a notice to appear in court in another city--then built the tracks while he was out of town.

In a talk given to the Washtenaw Historical Society, Dan McClary, who has done extensive research on the railroad, commented that “except for Ann Arbor, [Ashley] missed every major city in the state. The reason he did was Toledo was a major port. They shipped a lot of commodities down there and he was tapping into Michigan’s products, especially grain, produce, livestock and timber.”

Finally, in 1892, at the age of seventy, Ashley purchased a small local line that connected the Ann Arbor Railroad to Lake Michigan at Frankfort. Such a move wasn’t the dead end it seemed. The resourceful Ashley had picked Frankfort for its excellent harbor, and he had already cut deals with railroads across the lake in Wisconsin and in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He launched the world’s first open-water rail ferry service, hauling loaded freight cars back and forth across the lake. To attract even more traffic to Frankfort, he built a large tourist hotel, the Royal Frontenac, which drew vacationers from as far away as southern Ohio and Chicago.

Closer to home, Ann Arborites often took the Annie to Whitmore Lake to spend the day at the beach, or to attend dances at the town’s two major hotels. Families who owned summer places in the area could get off at Whitmore Lake or Lakeland (near Zukey Lake, which connects to the Huron River chain of lakes) and transfer to a commercial launch that would take them right to their cottages. Vacation traffic was so heavy that in the summer, the railroad scheduled eight trains a day between Ann Arbor and Whitmore Lake, dubbing the run the “Ping-Pong Special.”

Passengers also rode the train south to Ohio. George Koch remembers as a boy taking the train to Toledo, back when “you really were traveling when you’d go fifty or sixty miles from home.” People often came by train when they were referred to University Hospital for complex medical problems--it was fairly common to see patients taken off the train on a stretcher. And as Ashley had hoped, U-M students from Ohio used the Annie to get to school. Football Saturdays were an especially busy time for the railroad; when Michigan played Ohio State, the line carried fans from all over the Midwest.

Football fans--and everybody else--began to drive their own cars in the 1910s and 1920s. But while passenger traffic on the railroad gradually declined, freight service took up the slack. In Ann Arbor, the track was lined with businesses that relied on it for deliveries of coal (from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee), lumber (from up north), or block ice (from the same lakes where people vacationed). Other firms used the railroad to ship their finished products, including organs, furniture, and flour.

The busiest shippers had their own rail sidings, where freight cars could be parked off the main track for loading and unloading. Cars bound for these sidings would be delivered to the railroad’s roundhouse behind Ferry Field, then delivered by a small switch engine the next day. All other cars were dropped at the freight house at William and First streets (now a parking lot) to be unloaded.

To get the best price on shipping, George Koch remembers that several construction companies would order building supplies together. Paul Lohr recalls that farm implement companies would send a single shipment destined for retail outlets in several towns; the owners would all go down together and help one another load their trucks. The late Frank Braatz recalled that he once ordered a Sears kit house that was delivered to the freight house on several cars; he went down with a horse-drawn wagon to pick it up.

One of Ashley’s original goals had been to make Toledo more of a rival to Detroit, and to some extent, he succeeded. Enough Ann Arborites were interested in what was happening in Toledo to provide a customer base for the Toledo Blade. In the late 1920s, Sam Schlecht used to meet the train from Toledo to pick up bundles of the paper, which he then delivered to the Ann Arbor drugstores and cigar stores that sold them. Before Prohibition, the Annie also delivered two Toledo-brewed beers, Buckeye and Green Seal. Distributor Fred Dupper would go down to the freight house with his horse and wagon to pick up the beer, along with the ice to keep it cold.
In the 1940s, the Annie carried oranges from Florida. A group of local investors owned an orange grove there and would sell their crop from a boxcar parked near the Ann Arbor Implement Company on First Street. They built a little orange-painted shed near the tracks to store leftover fruit for later sale.

The railroad also had spin-off effects on the local economy. For instance, train engineers provided jeweler John Eibler with extra business by coming in at regular intervals to have their watches cleaned and calibrated. Eibler’s grandson, also John Eibler, worked at the store and remembers the watches as “big, heavy things.” He explains, “By law they had to be cleaned regularly, whether they needed it or not, like airplanes today.”

The station in 1997 as the Doughty-Law Montessori School.

Passenger service enjoyed a reprieve during World War II, when railroads were used extensively to transport troops. The Annie’s last passenger train ran in 1950. Freight traffic also declined after the war, as more and more shippers switched to trucks.

America’s railroads went through a wave of bankruptcies and reorganizations in the 1960s and 1970s. The former Michigan Central eventually emerged as part of Conrail, the government-backed freight line; Amtrak also uses the east-west track to carry six daily passenger trains between Detroit and Chicago.

The Ann Arbor Railroad ended up in the hands of the state government. The state still owns the northern section, which now runs only as far as Yuma, near Cadillac. In the 1980s, however, a private company bought the track from Ann Arbor to Toledo. The reconstituted Ann Arbor Railroad currently runs two daily freight trains carrying auto parts, finished autos, sand, cement, grain, lumber, produce, and agricultural products. By 1997, the only Ann Arbor stops were at Fingerle Lumber and Burt Forest Products, on Felch Street.

When passenger service ended, the Ashley Street station stood empty for a few years, then was used for short periods by various businesses: a beer distributor, a teenage nightclub, a counter shop. None lasted very long. In 1984, teacher Lyn Law bought the building for her Montessori school. Law did a sensitive remodeling, keeping the best parts of the waiting room and also restoring the original bay window. The school is now owned by Sherry Doughty, who operates under the name Doughty-Law. Doughty has done more work on the building, carefully preserving the original look.

Not all of the Annie stations fared as well. Don Wilson, of the Ann Arbor Technical and Historical Association, says at one time every town along the route had a station, but that today there are only a handful left. A few others also have found new uses: the one at Shepherd is now a museum, while Mount Pleasant’s is a microbrewery and restaurant. The advantages of saving an old building are apparent at the Doughty-Law Montessori School, where the children enjoy the railroad motif inside, while outside they climb on a slide made from an old caboose.

Michigan captured in its infancy The U-M’s Clements Library recently received a very rare 1825 map: one of the few remaining copies of Orange Risdon’s map of southeast Michigan. “It is the first map of Michigan that shows serious surveying and settlement,” explains Brian Leigh Dunnigan, the library’s curator of maps. Risdon, best known in this area as the founder of Saline, is also famous in Michigan history as the chief surveyor of the Detroit-Chicago Road, now US-12. Though Risdon’s surveys were done under government contract, the map was a private venture. Risdon drew it himself and paid to have it published, planning to sell copies to pioneers trying to pick out places to settle. Unfortunately for him, a former employee came out with a competing map and grabbed most of the market. But though it failed to make its creator rich, Risdon’s map today gives us a wealth of information about what our area looked like just one year after Ann Arbor was founded.

Map of the Surveyed Part of the Territory of Michigan, 1825.

Officially called “Map of the Surveyed Part of the Territory of Michigan,” it measures forty-three by twenty-nine inches. It shows the area from Toledo north to Saginaw Bay and includes Washtenaw County and a corner of Jackson County. Surveyors hired by the federal government started working in southeast Michigan when it was still a territory in 1818, since precise demarcation was a necessary prelude to selling the land. They divided the state into counties, the counties into six-mile-square townships, and the townships into square-mile (640-acre) sections. The grid allowed buyers, when they went to the land office to buy land, to clearly identify their purchase. Although a few intrepid settlers came earlier, serious settlement in Washtenaw County did not begin until the 1820s. Ypsilanti was founded in 1823 or 1825, depending on how the city is defined. Ann Arbor, Dexter, and Dixboro were all founded in 1824. The Risdon map, although strictly a factual document, reveals two historic transitions, one long past at the time it was published, the other still to come. The long, narrow lots Risdon mapped along the rivers in Detroit and Monroe were legacies of the French who were the state’s first white inhabitants. “They all had access to the water,” explains Dunnigan. Risdon’s map also shows Toledo, then called Port Lawrence, as part of Michigan. Though it was indeed within Michigan Territory as defined by Congress, Ohio made a strong claim, and the issue was further muddied by years of contested surveys. The conflict briefly turned violent in the “Toledo War” of 1835 and would not finally be settled until 1836, when Michigan accepted a federal ultimatum to cede the city to Ohio in exchange for the Upper Peninsula. The handful of roads shown all lead from Detroit to surrounding towns: one to Saginaw (now Woodward Avenue) and one to Port Huron (now Gratiot Avenue), as well as the road to present-day Chicago. Tepees mark the location of Indian settlements, but there are none in Washtenaw County (the closest ones are in Macon and Wyandotte). Near Detroit, Hamtramck has already been established; Dearborn also is there, but not under that name—Risdon calls it “Bucklin.” The Washtenaw County shown on the map is larger than it is today, because it includes two townships that are now part of Jackson County. Ann Arbor is spelled “Ann Arbour,” which is how founders John Allen and Elisha Rumsey spelled it when they platted their 640-acre parcel the year before. Dixboro is also spelled the old-fashioned way, “Dixborough.” All of the county’s townships, with the exception of present-day Lyndon Township, are sectioned off, but none is yet named. The map contains practical information for would-be settlers, such as the location of inns and where to register land purchases. In Washtenaw County, the only inn outside of the towns was labeled Sutton, in today’s Northfield Township. Settlers had to go to Detroit to buy property in Washtenaw County, except for those acquiring land in the southern tier of townships—today’s Manchester, Bridgewater, Saline, York, and Augusta—who were directed to Monroe. Only five settlements are shown in Washtenaw County: besides Ann Arbour, Dixborough, and Dexter there are Ypsilanti and Woodruff’s Grove. Showing the last two as separate places adds fuel to a continuing debate between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti over which was settled first. It is clear that Ann Arbor was founded in 1824 and Ypsilanti in 1825—but Woodruff’s Grove was founded in 1823, and it was later absorbed by Ypsilanti. Saline is not shown on the map; by the time Risdon drew it he had bought the land for his own settlement, but he would not get around to laying out the town until 1832. The only marking is a salt spring nearby. Orange Risdon was particularly well qualified to make this map, being both a trained surveyor and an early Michigan settler. Risdon was born in 1786 in Vermont and moved with his family to Saratoga County, in eastern New York, when he was three. He attended local schools until age thirteen. Afterward, according to the 1881 Chapman History of Washtenaw County, Michigan, “he was dependent on his own efforts.” Risdon studied surveying under a Mr. Rice of Ballston Spa, New York. In 1807, when he was twenty-one, Risdon got a job assisting the noted surveyor Elisha Johnson, who had a contract to survey 100,000 acres in the new counties of Allegany and Genesee. “His duty was to carry the chain, for which he was to receive $16 per month, but scarcely a week had passed when his skill in surveying was discovered, and with the consent of the land agent, the work was divided, and his wages increased to about five times the amount of the first stipulation,” says the county history. Two years later Risdon was hired to assist in laying out the infant cities of Lockport, Brockport, and Buffalo. During the War of 1812 he worked for the federal government as an assistant surveyor. After the war he met Sally Newland, and the couple married in 1816. Risdon bought land with his earnings, eventually owning 1,000 acres on New York’s Genesee River. Risdon resolved to move to Michigan Territory after suffering losses in the 1817 commercial crisis, but he did not arrive in Michigan until 1823, when he spent a month traveling on foot through Washtenaw and other nearby counties. He returned the next year, this time spending four months on a 2,000-mile exploring trip on horseback with Samuel Dexter. After their trip Dexter bought land on Mill Creek, just off the Huron River, and began the work of establishing the village that bears his name. Risdon bought 160 acres on the Saline River and the Indian trail that would soon become the Detroit-Chicago Road, land that would later be the nucleus of the city of Saline. How Risdon and Dexter met is lost to history. They could have known each other from New York, since Risdon’s parents still lived in Sarasota County and Dexter resided in Athens, two counties south, or they may have met while traveling. Their backgrounds were very different: Risdon was six years older and had been supporting himself since he was thirteen, while Dexter had both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Harvard. (Dexter’s father had served in the cabinets of both Adams and Jefferson.) But both have gone down in history as town founders who went well beyond land speculation and worked to improve their towns. They both offered free land to any church wishing to get established, and they were both abolitionists who were rumored to be part of the Underground Railroad. It is easy to imagine that they discussed these issues during their long hours of travel together. Risdon’s reputation as a surveyor followed him to Michigan, and in the same year he bought his land he was hired to direct a survey for a road connecting Detroit and Pontiac. In fall 1824, when he must have been almost done surveying for the season, he began work on his map. From his two exploring trips, plus his surveying work, Risdon would have known much of the area firsthand, and for the rest he could rely on work done on earlier surveys. Risdon advertised in the Detroit Gazette on October 1, 1824, seeking advance subscriptions to pay for the cost of producing the map. He promised that “the work will be put into the hands of the engraver as soon as a sufficient number of subscribers is obtained to warrant the expense of publication.” The ad pitched the map as useful to emigrants and explorers: “The first thing necessary to an immigrant is a general knowledge of the surveyed portion of the territory, of the course of its streams and the relative situation of its different parts. The publisher, having spent some time in exploring that junction of the territory embraced in his map, will be enabled to locate the most important Indian paths, which as they were made by those who were acquainted with every part of the country will be an important guide in the future location of our roads.” Risdon promised that the map also would include Indian reservations and villages and would “embrace the lines of counties, townships, and sections, regularly numbered according to the surveys.” Although the mapping of Michigan had been going on for six years, settlement had been slow, both because Michigan was off the beaten path (easterners going west overland were more likely to pass through Ohio and Indiana) and because the territory was rumored to be all swamp. The first problem would be solved a year later when the Erie Canal opened, making it easy for easterners to reach Buffalo, where they could board a Lake Erie steamboat for Detroit. Risdon addressed the swamp story head-on in his ad: “The country which was formerly believed to be uninhabitable excepting on the river and lake shores, abounds in lands of the most fertile and healthy description.” Even the climate, he claimed, “is particularly adapted to our eastern constitution.” The maps were to be “engraved in an elegant style and published on Super Royal paper.” Risdon offered his map in three formats: in two sheets that could be stored flat in a drawer, for $2.50; cut into twenty-four sections and pasted on linen--so that the map could be folded without losing detail--and supplied with a leather carrying case, for $3; or varnished on rollers, perfect for land agents and lawyers who would be consulting it in their offices, also for $3. The Clements Library’s copy is of the last type. The next year, 1825, Risdon started the job for which he is most famous: chief surveyor for the great military road from Detroit to Chicago, today known as Michigan Avenue or US-12. Work on the survey no doubt showed him features to include on the map but left him little time to work on it. He hired a helper named John Farmer, finished the map, and sent it to Rawdon, Clark, and Company in Albany, New York. On November 13 he paid them $400 for engraving the two copper plates. Five weeks later he paid to have 472 copies printed. After printing, each copy was hand painted. By the time they were ready to deliver, however, winter had shut down shipping on Lake Erie. Risdon’s subscribers had to wait until May 1826 for an announcement in the Detroit Gazette that their copies were ready. That delay proved fatal to the map’s commercial prospects. Later in the summer of 1826, Farmer published his own rival map. It was basically the same as Risdon’s but with added details that had been learned in the interim. Farmer’s map, being more up to date, overshadowed his employer’s. “It was bad luck that Orange didn’t get the map in time to get it promptly to the subscribers,” says Brian Dunnigan. By examining both maps, Dunnigan can tell that Farmer had probably done most of the hand coloring on Risdon’s map. “John Farmer dominates after this--he becomes ‘the’ Michigan map-maker,” says Dunnigan. “He is probably the best-known Michigan mapmaker of the nineteenth century.” Risdon moved on from the failure of his map, earning a good living as a surveyor. He surveyed at least seventy-five townships and the city of Saginaw, and he reexamined or resurveyed forty-five more townships. He continued working for the government until 1856, when he was seventy. By then his own village was well established. In 1829 Risdon had returned to his property south of Ann Arbor and built a twelve-room house on a hill overlooking his Detroit-Chicago Road. He brought his family out from New York and began building up his new town. His house was used as Saline’s first inn, post office, general store, and polling place. Risdon himself served as postmaster and magistrate, officiating at the first marriage in the township. After Michigan became a state in 1837, he was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives. Risdon’s “advice was often sought in the selection of lands,” the county history records. “Very many miles were traveled by him to point out desirable locations, yet [he was] ever unwilling to receive a reward.” Although there is no evidence that he made any other maps, his contemporaries knew of his pioneering effort. L. D. Norris, in an address to the Washtenaw County Historical Society in 1874, said, “The first general map of the surveyed part of this territory of which I have any knowledge was published in 1825 by Orange Risdon, then and now a pioneer of Washtenaw.” Risdon died in 1876 at age ninety, a well-regarded member of the community. “He was genial in his disposition, unselfish, benevolent, and liberal almost to a fault,” said the county history. At his funeral, “great numbers of people from neighboring towns and cities were in attendance.” His home passed to his daughter after his death. In 1948 the house was moved to Henry Street to make room for expansion of Oakwood Cemetery. Still standing, it has been divided into apartments. The Clements copy of Risdon’s map was a gift from the Michigan Map Society, purchased to honor Frank Kerwin, a founding member of the society who recently died. The Michigan Map Society meets at the Clements and works closely with the library, so members knew that although the Clements had a large collection of Great Lakes maps, it was missing this very important one. Since Kerwin, a Grosse Pointe resident and sailor, was himself a collector of Great Lakes maps, the Risdon map, a copy of which had gone on the market, seemed a logical choice. Of the 472 copies originally printed, only thirteen are known to have survived. Kerwin lived long enough to learn of the purchase but died before the formal presentation last May. The map society has about seventy members; most are from the Ann Arbor and Detroit areas, but some come from more distant places, such as Lansing and Grand Rapids. Although mostly amateurs, they are a very knowledgeable group; many are serious map collectors. Several of them volunteer their expertise to help the Clements staff. They meet four times a year to hear map-related lectures; including a talk by Dunnigan on his book, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838, before it was published. Since the Clements is a research library, people cannot just come in and casually look at Risdon’s map. “Serious researchers may study the map once they have completed our reader registration process, which is relatively simple,” explains Dunnigan. The map itself will also be exhibited from time to time, but at the moment, no public exhibition is scheduled.