Read an Excerpt
Ann Arbor Observed
Selections from THEN & NOW
By Grace Shackman THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2006 Grace Shackman
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-03175-7
Chapter One
Public Buildings and Institutions
The 1838 Jail
Jailbreaks were a constant danger.
Even in the good old days there were criminals. Ann Arbor was smaller and more neighborly in the nineteenth century, but there were still very serious crimes, including robbery and murder. Thus, there was a need for jails. For half the century, from 1838 to 1887, local wrongdoers were imprisoned in a Greek Revival building on North Main, where the Ann Arbor Community Center now stands.
When John Allen and Elisha Rumsey founded Ann Arbor in 1824, Rumsey gave the land bounded by Fourth and Fifth Avenues and Liberty and William Streets (now containing the downtown post office, the Blake Transit Center, and the former YMCA) to the community as a site for a jail. Allen contributed the block at Main and Huron still used for the county courthouse.
The county's first jail was built on Rumsey's square in 1829. The project was organized in a socialist fashion. "The citizens of Ann Arbor and vicinity contributed, each according to his ability, some timber, lumber, work or other materials necessary for the construction of a building that would answer for a county prison," wrote a local historian in the Charles C. Chapman 1881 History of Washtenaw County, Michigan. The wooden building included quarters for the jailer's family as well as one room for prisoners.
The first jail was notoriously insecure. According to O. W. Stevenson's Ann Arbor: The First Hundred Years, "No one could be sure that a prisoner who had been placed within its confines on any particular night would be found there the next morning." Less than seven years after it was built, a grand jury concluded that a new jail was needed. The county bought the land on North Main, four blocks from the courthouse, and the next year the Davison brothers began construction of a two-and-a-half-story red brick building.
The work evidently took several years to finish; local newspapers published numerous letters asking why it wasn't done yet and explanations for the slowness of getting the necessary funds. Meanwhile, large numbers of prisoners continued to escape from the old jail-five when the door was opened for delivery of some dishes and seven others who managed to cut a hole through the floor.
"When erected [the Main Street jail] was considered a handsome building, in which the citizens felt a just pride," Chapman's historian wrote. William Spaulding, son of sheriff Ephraim Spaulding (who served from 1847 to 1852), had a less cheerful description in his memoirs, written in the 1920s. Spaulding remembered how "the family lived in a wing of the big gloomy jail, with its barred windows, in the lower part of town. 'When we lived in the jail' was a very common reference in our family, and there was no stigma attached."
Spaulding's entire family was involved in keeping the jail. "My brother James was old enough to act as 'turnkey,' which involved locking and unlocking cells at stated times," Spaulding recalled. "Imagine a boy serving in such capacity in one of our modern prisons."
The sheriff's wife, Jane McCormick Spaulding, cooked for the prisoners in her own kitchen. "Father and mother made due allowance for the fact that the jail was a place of enforced restraint. But, when these stern requirements were satisfied, every effort was made to treat the prisoners with consideration and kindness.... This policy not only contributed to the discipline and good order of the institution, but it actually gained the confidence and good will of many of the prisoners," Spaulding wrote. He went on to say that his parents often helped the families of prisoners and that after they were released, they often came by to "give good account of themselves and testify their appreciation. In testimony of this Mother treasured various keep-sakes of hand-craft which had been presented to her on such occasions."
Ann Arbor's citizens had reason to worry about their safety even after the new jail opened. Criminals held there included horse thieves and bank robbers. Murderers were sent to the state penitentiary (as they still are today), but even they stayed in the county jail while they awaited trial. And despite the new jail's brick construction, jailbreaks in Ann Arbor were still rife. On June 1, 1842, the State Journal recorded that "Henry Andrews, indicted for larceny, made his escape from our jail on Sunday last by digging through the outer wall. He was not confined in a cell. He has acquitted himself without the assistance of judge or jury, and avoided his trial which was to have taken place today."
Chapman's history tells of two men convicted in 1857 for the murder of Simon Holden and sentenced to the state penitentiary for life. About a year after the sentence, the court ordered a new trial. "They were returned to Ann Arbor jail, but before court next convened they escaped from jail and were never re-captured."
Allen K. Donahue, who lived across the street from the jail, reminisced about it toward the end of his life in a 1943 Ann Arbor News interview. Many of his stories concerned escapees such as Charles Chorr, who was sentenced to hang for murder in 1843 but escaped and was never caught. Donahue recalled a pair of prisoners who got out through the jail's chimney in the middle of winter but were glad to be caught again because they were so cold. Two other prisoners tried to escape through the underground drainage pipe but couldn't get beyond a heavy grate and were dead by the time they were found. Another escapee, a horse thief, was shot and killed while trying to get to the stables.
There were escape attempts even during Spaulding's benign reign. "One story which my father told was of pursuing and capturing a number of prisoners who had escaped. There was a rough-and-tumble bout between the officers and the fugitives. Revolvers hadn't been invented, and shooting was not such a ready resort. Father grabbed one of the escapees, wrestled him down, and was sitting astride him, when he chanced to glimpse something out of one corner of his eye which caused him to dodge with the free part of his body. It was just in time to avoid a large rock which the fellow hurled at him: the missile whizzed by and split open the head of the prisoner beneath."
If Spaulding couldn't stop all escapes, his methods allowed him to stop one. "Once, when a gang of tough customers had just been incarcerated, they managed to secure from outside confederates, tools to saw their way out, and arms. They had nearly brought matters to a climax, and were prepared to murder the guard or anyone who opposed them, when a warning word was passed by one of the inmates to the sheriff. At least that was a substantial return for the humanitarian policy toward prisoners."
There were also quiet times in the jail. Donahue recalled that he had seen the jail "swamped with inmates and devoid of any life at all." An 1843 newspaper article noted little activity. "There is but one person in our jail and he is committed for want of bail to keep the peace. It is supposed that the man is partially deranged or he never should have been there." Unfortunately, the incarceration of mentally ill people is still an issue.
As the county grew, especially in the years after the Civil War, the Main Street jail became too small. After a new courthouse was finished in 1878, civic leaders began discussing building a new jail. They lost a ballot issue in 1884, but by selling the old jail they managed to raise enough money to buy land at Ashley and Ann. The jail stayed on that site, in two different buildings, until 1970, when it moved to its present location at Hogback and Washtenaw in Pittsfield Township.
John J. Robison, who had served as state senator, county clerk, and mayor of Ann Arbor, bought the Main Street jail in 1887 and made it into his family home. He took off the cellblock in back and used the bricks to build two houses to the south, one of which was turned into a store.
In 1917 Morris Kraizman bought the old jail and used it for a tire company, gas station, and scrap metal and junk store. Later it became the Pentecostal Church of God and then apartments. In 1951 it was severely damaged by fire. In 1958 what was left of the building was torn down. The Ann Arbor Community Center was built on the site two years later.
The County Poorhouse
It doubled as an insane asylum.
People choose to go to the Meri Lou Murray Recreation Center and the County Farm Park, on the south side of Washtenaw between Platt and Medford, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the site of the county poorhouse, a place for homeless people of both sexes and all ages who had no other place of refuge.
The poorhouse sheltered a diverse group of unfortunates: the insane, alcoholic, feeble, indolent, senile, developmentally disabled, handicapped, injured, sick, transient, or just down on their luck. Their common denominator was their poverty. Some stayed only for a short time, but others remained until they died. If no relative claimed the body, it was buried on the premises or given to the U-M medical school. Some human bones found in the 1960s when Washtenaw Avenue was being widened were at first believed to be Indian relics until someone figured out that the road extended over the area used for the poorhouse cemetery.
Poor farms were the nineteenth-century solution to poverty. Reformers such as Dorothea Dix, a pioneer in the movement for specialized treatment of the insane, believed that placing people on working farms could make them into contributing members of society and also relieve the public of paying for their care. Most of the people who lived in poorhouses were not able to work, however, or if they could, were not very productive. Income from crops raised at the Washtenaw County Poorhouse helped defray costs, but except for a few years during the Civil War, it was never enough to cover all expenses.
The land for the Washtenaw County Poorhouse was purchased by the county in 1836 from Revolutionary War veteran Claudius Britton, to comply with an 1830 Michigan law directing each county to build a poorhouse. The county hired a keeper, always a local person with a farming background, who lived on the premises with a wife who cooked for the residents (or "inmates," as they were called in the official reports).
The farm included orchards of apples, peaches, and pears; livestock (pigs, cattle, sheep, and chickens); and gardens with vegetables and grains. "I would often see poor farm residents out in the fields pitching hay, always under supervision," recalled George Campbell, who grew up on nearby Cobblestone Farm. "The men worked the farm as long as it was done with horsepower, but they couldn't manage farm machinery. The women residents helped in the kitchen, setting the tables or peeling potatoes. During the day they would sew." Campbell also remembered that Platt Road used to be known as "Pauper's Alley" and that "poorhouse residents used to sneak away and, using a little money they might have gotten from relatives, buy some tobacco at McMillan's store on Packard, where the gas station is now."
Poorhouses are usually depicted as bleak, terrible places, but Ann Arborites old enough to remember believe this one was not such a bad place. "It was a lot nicer than old age homes are today. Those who could work, did, and there was a nice visiting room. No one minded going there to live," recalls lifelong Ann Arbor resident Arthur Rieff. Edith Staebler Kempf agrees it was a pleasant enough place, especially with all the homegrown food, but says there was enough of a social stigma in being there that she was taught in her childhood to refer to it not as the "poor farm" but as the "county home." She adds, "People of means were ostracized if they let their relatives live there."
After the welfare system was created in the 1930s, the farm changed from a home for poor people to a place for people who needed continual medical care but could not afford it. The farmland was rented to Ralph McCalla, who continued raising cattle and growing crops until 1960. According to McCalla, "Some of the poorhouse residents still helped. They would come down to the barn and feed the livestock just to have something to do."
The county infirmary, as it was known after 1917, was closed in 1971 after county officials decided it would cost too much to modernize. It was torn down in 1979. For a time, St. Joseph's Mercy Hospital seriously considered building on the site, and doctors' offices were built on the eastern side of Platt in anticipation of this move. After St. Joe's decided to locate elsewhere, debate centered on whether the land should be used for new county buildings or for a park.
After the county commissioners decided to keep the county courthouse in downtown Ann Arbor, the County Parks and Recreation Department went to work creating the County Farm Park. Today the 127- acre park includes a parcours (a jogging-exercise trail patterned after European fitness courses), a woodland trail, and Project Grow gardens. The Meri Lou Murray Center, named after a former county commissioner who was responsible for starting the county parks system, was opened in 1991.
The Private Hospital Era
Between 1875 and 1945, the city was home to seventeen proprietary hospitals. Ann Arborites could go to Dr. Cowie for a difficult diagnosis, study nursing with Dr. Peterson, get cuts stitched by Dr. Gates, and have their babies in Nurse Grove's home.
When Dr. Carl Malcolm Jr. started practicing in Ann Arbor in the 1930s, many patients still expected him to treat them at home. When he urged them to go to the hospital, Malcolm recalls, "they thought it was the end of things."
Malcolm's older patients had been born in a time when anything a doctor could do to help he could do in their homes. As recently as the mid-1800s, hospitals were charity institutions for those who had no home to be sick in-"refuges mainly for the homeless poor and insane," according to Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine.
Starr's fascinating medical history explains how, "in a matter of decades, roughly between 1870 and 1910, hospitals moved from the periphery to the center of medical education and medical practice." A string of breakthroughs, including antisepsis, anesthesia, and X-rays, transformed surgery from a desperate last resort into a routine medical tool. At first, doctors performed surgery in people's homes-Elsa Goetz Ordway remembers the family physician operating on her mother on the dining room table in 1914. But as medical standards rose, more and more doctors preferred to work in hospitals, which gradually evolved from shelters for the poor and the dying into, in Starr's words, "doctors' workshops for all types and classes of patients."
Today, Ann Arbor's three huge hospitals-the U-M, St. Joe's, and the VA-together handle more than a million patient visits every year. But it took a long time to get there. Both the University of Michigan Hospital (1869) and St. Joseph Mercy Hospital (1911) started out serving mere handfuls of patients in converted homes. For two generations, they shared the town with numerous small hospitals owned by individual practitioners.
Between 1875 and 1945, Ann Arbor had at least seventeen "proprietary" hospitals. All were located in converted houses. Otherwise, they were as different as the personalities and medical specialties of their owners.
The hospitals' owners included some of the most distinguished physicians in the city. Dr. David Murray Cowie founded the U-M pediatrics department, cared for patients at the U-M Hospital, and engaged in extensive research while also running his own hospital in a former mansion on South Division Street. His colleague Dr. Reuben Peterson, U-M professor of "women's and children's diseases," established a private medical complex that eventually filled ten buildings on Forest, Church, and South University. At the other end of the spectrum, nurse Josephine Grove took patients into her own home on Huron near Revena, caring for them around the clock. And Neil Gates, a down-to-earth general practitioner, attempted to treat almost every kind of medical ailment, whether in a patient's home, in his downtown office, or in his hospital on South Fifth Avenue.
Dr. Cowie's Exclusive Clientele
Dr. David Cowie's sprawling brick mansion at 320 South Division is by far the most impressive surviving former hospital. In its day, it was also the most prestigious.
Cowie was born in Canada in 1872 to Scottish parents (his obituary called him "as Scotch as MacGregor"). He came to Michigan in 1892 to attend Battle Creek College but soon transferred to the U-M, where he graduated from the medical school and was hired as an assistant in internal medicine in 1896. He earned a second medical degree at the University of Heidelberg in 1908, the year he married Anna Marion Cook, who was also a doctor, although there is no evidence that she ever practiced medicine.
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Excerpted from Ann Arbor Observed by Grace Shackman Copyright © 2006 by Grace Shackman . Excerpted by permission.
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