Before being elected as president of the United States, and before becoming a General in the Union Army against the Confederates in the Civil War, young Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant served as a quartermaster living in Detroit from 1849-1851. The Grant House at the Michigan State Fairgrounds was a popular attraction for many years. The house was originally located on Fort Street near Livernois Avenue. Grant and his new wife were well-known around town and quite sociable.
Little is known about Grant during his brief time in Detroit. Colonel James Pitman offers the most complete picture of Grant’s character. Pitman writes “U.S. Grant was at that time a familiar figure in Detroit society. A man as well known as any residing in the city at that time.” One small bit of evidence exists in the collection of the Detroit Historical Society that proves a little of Pittman’s opinion of Grant’s stature in the community. On January 10, 1851, Grant signed a deposition claiming that Antoine Beaubien Jr. failed to clear the snow and ice from the sidewalk in front of his house on Jefferson Avenue at Antoine Street.
According to Ulysses Grant’s published papers, a similar charge on the same date claimed that Detroit Mayor Zachariah Chandler–also on Jefferson Avenue near Antoine Street–neglected snow and ice removal from his sidewalk. During a trial before a jury, Mayor Chandler exclaimed “If you soldiers would keep sober, perhaps you would not fall on people’s pavements and hurt your legs.” The jury found in favor of Grant and Chandler was fined six cents. Oddly, Chandler would later be appointed by President Grant as Secretary of the Interior in 1875.
Reposted from DHSDigital, “Ulysses S Grant Gives a Winter Advisory”, Detroit Historical Society Blog, January 5, 2015.
On January 10, 1872, Michigan’s first Grange, the Burnside Grange, organized at Lapeer County. By 1875, six-hundred local Granges had formed throughout Michigan and, though the first formed for educational and social purposes, they became a forceful lobbying group, leading the fight, for example, to lower railroad rates.
For more information about the Grange, see
Origin and early history of the order of Patrons of Husbandry in the United States
The Grange in Michigan, an agricultural history of Michigan over the past 90 years
—Source: Mich-Again’s Day.
William Clay Ford took control of the Detroit Lions on January 10, 1964.
Ford, one of Henry Ford’s grandchildren, paid $4.5 million for the football team on what turned out to be the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Though Detroit had been home to three previous football teams — the Heralds, the Panthers and the Wolverines — the Lions didn’t arrive on the scene until 1934, when a group of investors, headed by a radio bigwig, bought the Portsmouth, Ohio, team for $7,952.08 and relocated it to the Motor City.
Today, the Lions are worth $900 million, according to Forbes.
Sources :
Historical Society of Michigan
Zlati Meyer, “This week in Michigan history: William Clay Ford takes over the Lions”, Detroit Free Press, January 5, 2014.
On January 10, 2000, Grand Rapids was center stage on the nation’s political front as Republican Presidential candidates met for a televised debate at Calvin College. The candidates included Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Arizona Senator John McCain, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, Alan Keyes, Steve Forbes, and Gary Bauer.
About five weeks later, McCain upset Bush in the Michigan primary, but Bush was ultimately elected president.
For a copy of the transcript, see Republican Presidential Candidates Debate at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, January 10, 2000 from the American Presidency Project.
Reached at home in San Diego, former Journey frontman Steve Perry admitted for the first time that he totally made up the geographic locale of “South Detroit.”
The world’s all-time most-downloaded mp3 has inspired confusion in the hearts of Detroiters since being released in 1981.
Any woman, myself included, could be and has been that “small-town girl, living in a lonely world.” But who was her partner beneath the streetlights — “just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit?” Was he from Wyandotte or Lincoln Park? Is South Detroit a rebranding strategy for the greater Downtown area? Could Steve Perry be talking about some dude from WINDSOR, for crying out loud?
Jan. 10, New York: Perry pleads poetic license, and ignorance, despite the fact that a quick glance at a map would have alerted him to the issue. “I ran the phonetics of east, west, and north, but nothing sounded as good or emotionally true to me as South Detroit,” he says. “The syntax just sounded right. I fell in love with the line. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve learned that there is no South Detroit. But it doesn’t matter.”
Source : Ashley C. Woods, “Steve Perry answers the South Detroit question from Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’‘, MLive, January 11, 2012; updated August 10, 2017.
After seeing the devastation of war and knowing Europe would need rebuilding, the late Ralph Hauenstein decided to go into the export business, but he had no idea what he would export. With the help of an Army friend, David Rockefeller, he opened an office in New York.
Traveling through a village in Germany, he saw a man in a garage mixing dough and turning out fish-shaped snacks with a hand-operated press. Hauenstein had engineers design equipment to mass produce the snacks, shared the technology with the German baker and sold the machines to Pepperidge Farm.
Goldfish crackers have been popular ever since.
During World War II, he helped break Nazi codes and was instrumental in convincing Hitler that the allies would land in Calais instead of Normandy.
For his efforts during World War II, he received the Order of the British Empire and the French Croix ce Guerre (Cross of War).
After World War II, Hauenstein helped recruit some of the first officers for the Central Intelligence Agency.
He was a major supporter of St. Mary’s Hospital, Aquinas College, and Grand Valley State University.
Hauenstein died Sunday, Jan. 10, at age 103.
Sources:
Matt Vande Bunte, “How Michigan man made Goldfish crackers a snack phenomenon”, MLive, January 11, 2016.
It’s hard to believe but MeLCat is now 13 years old! The first successful patron request was placed on January 10, 2005 at 12:41pm when a West Bloomfield patron requested Alice Starmore’s “The Celtic collection: Twenty-five knitwear designs for men and women” from Bloomfield Township Public Library.
There were a number of key milestones in MeLCat’s prehistory – the formation of the Michigan Electronic Library (1995), birth of AccessMichigan (1997), Our Preferred Future Conference for Libraries (1999), the creation of ATLAS (2001), and the subsequent release of Leveling the Playing Field 2: Creating a Statewide Resource Sharing Service (Final Report of the Action Team for Library Advancement Statewide, 2002).
From those early dreams, MeLCat was born.
The success of MeLCat is a testament to the power of all types and sizes of libraries working together to build a service that benefits Michigan residents statewide. A hearty congratulations to all MeLCat member libraries!
Since that day 13 years ago:
- over 430 libraries have joined
- patrons have made over 11 million requests
- the annual fill rate has reached 91.9%
None of that would be possible without the hard work of hundreds of library staff across the state. Everyone contributes.
We’ve seen items go between the far corners of the state . . . from Ironwood Carnegie Library to Monroe County Library System’s Luna Pier branch, from the Blissfield branch of Schultz-Holmes Memorial Library to Calumet Public School, from Three Oaks Township Public Library to Bayliss Public Library, and from Pickford Community Library to Reading Community Library.
We expect to see the large public and academic libraries lending to the smaller libraries; they just have bigger collections. But a surprising amount of material has been lent by small K12 libraries to the largest public and academic libraries.
Everyone contributes.
The MCLS MeLCat staff thanks every one of you for making MeLCat the success that it is.
Happy birthday to us all.
Megan Dudek
MeL Catalog Training & Support Librarian
Midwest Collaborative for Library Services (MCLS)
(800) 530-9019 ext 153
Source : MCLS News, January 2015; MCLS post of Michpub-l, January 10, 2018.
In a staff report, the Bureau of Elections once again concluded the Recall Inman Committee did not collect the 12,201 signatures needed to recall Inman, R-Williamsburg, who last year was accused of trying to sell his vote on a controversial issue.
Inman is still a sitting member of the House of Representatives and continues to vote, although he’s been stripped of his House office, staff and committees and is no longer a member of the House Republican Caucus.
“Larry Inman recall committee short by 208 signatures, state says“, MLive, January 10, 2020
On January 11, 1805, President Thomas Jefferson signed an act establishing the Michigan Territory.
When Ohio became a state in 1803, the present-day state of Michigan became part of the Indiana Territory. Since the territorial capital was in Vincennes — a long distance (350 miles and no roads) from Michigan’s population center of Detroit — Michiganders lobbied for their own territory. Communication between the Indiana territorial leadership and Detroit was so poor, that when Gov. William Henry Harrison ordered an election to be held in the territory, the order never reached Detroit and Detroiters never voted.
The law creating the Michigan Territory took effect in July 1805. It included the Lower Peninsula and the tip of the eastern Peninsula. Over the next several years the territory was expanded to include parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Michigan shrank in 1836 with the creation of the Wisconsin Territory. Wisconsin Territory was established in 1836 with the present boundary in the Upper Peninsula.
The disputed portion of Michigan Territory referred to as the Toledo Strip.
Sources :
Michigan Territory wikipedia entry
The Mitten, a publication of Michigan History magazine.
Michigan is Amazing