In a letter written to his brother and sister December 23, 1833, describing his arrival here the previous summer, Joel Guild said: “After looking about for a home, I thought it best to move about fifty miles down Grand river” (from its junction with Maple river) “to a place called Grand River Falls.” However, there appears to be no official record that the city was at any time known as Grand River Falls.
During the first ten years after the pioneer colony of easterners arrived, the name which the community should bear was the cause of considerable strife. At first the name was “Grand Rapids,” then for eight years it was “Kent.” Finally the postal department changed it back to “Grand Rapids.”
The battle of names began away back at the time Louis Campau won out against Lucius Lyon in the race to the government land office at White Pigeon and secured a grant for the 72 acres, now the heart of the city. This tract, as the reader will recall, was bounded by the river and Division avenue, and by Fulton and Michigan streets. Uncle Louis sold the north half of it to Lucius Lyon and had his brother plat what was left as “The Village of Grand Rapids.” Mr. Lyon called his half, “Kent,” and later, joining with Dexter, Ransom, Sheldon, Daniels, Bostwick and other holders of land north, east and south of the Campau plat, had a “Village of Kent” plat recorded at Kalamazoo February 8, 1836.
Mr. Lyon and his associates were influential enough to have the post office name changed from “Grand Rapids” to “Kent,” on September 1, 1836, when Darius Winsor was appointed postmaster to succeed Leonard Slater, who had lived on the west side. And “Kent” it remained until February 6, 1844, when it was changed back to Grand Rapids once more.
Sources: Grand Rapids or Kent?
Also see Etten, William J., A Citizens’ History of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Published by A. P. Johnson for the Campau Centennial Committee, 1926.
In 1848, the Michigan Legislature voted to establish a Michigan Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb and Blind in Flint. The first student arrived on February 6, 1854. After the School for the Blind was established in Lansing in 1880, the Flint school refocused on training the deaf. Boys studied carpentry, printing, tailoring, and farming, while girls learned the sciences of cooking, sewing, darning, and patching.
Source : Michigan School for the Deaf historical marker; Traveling Through Time : A Guide to Michigan’s Historical Markers
A professor, scholar and expert on United States diplomacy, Merze Tate was the first African American graduate of Western Michigan Teachers College, first African American woman to attend the University of Oxford, first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in government and international relations from Harvard University (then Radcliffe College), as well as one of the first two female members to join the Department of History at Howard University.
In 1990, she gave WMU a $1 million gift to establish the Merze Tate Student Education Endowment Fund, which provides support for student needs. At the time, she said she wanted to thank Western and the other institutions for helping her overcome the barriers of race and sex.
For more information, see Wikipedia entry
Mark Ranzenberger, “Merze Tate blazed her own trail”, Mt. Pleasant Morning Sun, December 29, 2009.
Sharon A. Hanks, Rediscovering Merze Tate: A remarkable African-American woman who grew up in our own backyard, Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council.
On February 6, 1924, the state highway department placed the first 10,000 metal signs along Michigan highways that notified drivers for the first time of railroad crossings, route markers, mileposts and danger points. These days, the Michigan Department of Transportation also keeps motorists informed of traffic, construction and weather-related delays at https://mdotnetpublic.state.mi.us/drive/.
Sources:
Historical Society of Michigan
Michigan ratifies the 20th amendment. The 20th Amendment sets January 20th as the ending date for presidential and vice presidential terms. It also sets a succession line for the presidency.
Source: Michigan History
On Feb. 6, 1950, the city of Livonia was born. The new 36-square-mile city was formally known as Livonia Township, but voters supported incorporation 2,011 to 1,741. In square area, Livonia became the second largest city in Michigan.
Source : MIRS Capitol Capsule, February 6, 2020
On February 6, 1974, it was day four of the 11-day 1974 truck drivers’ strike against high fuel prices when things turned particularly violent.
In Washtenaw County, a livestock truck driver was injured by flying glass when someone threw a brick through the trucker’s windshield. Two shotgun blasts were fired into the front of a semi-truck traveling on U.S. 12 through Hillsdale County.
The attacks were brought by those sympathizing with the 100,000 independent truck owners across the country who wanted to shut down the nation’s highways in protest to rising cost and scarcity of diesel. Gov. William Milliken responded to the strike by doubling Michigan State Police road patrols and ordered the National Guard into the streets to quell the violence.
Despite the measures, bursts of violence were reported throughout Michigan, from a driver in Holland who was assaulted after stopping in an intersection to a Canadian trucker who was forced off of I-75 in Wayne County by a car full of men who fired shots into his windshield.
Nationwide, the strike resulted in two dead and “scores injured,” reported The New York Times by the time the strike disbanded on Feb. 12, 1974.
Source: Michigan Every Day; The New York Times
Having suffered more than 40 arrests, physical attacks and serious injuries, John Lewis is often called “one of the most courageous persons the Civil Rights Movement has ever produced.” He began participating in sit-ins at segregated lunch counters while a student at Fisk University, and in 1961, risked his life as a Freedom Rider to desegregate interstate transportation. By the age of 23, he was an architect of and keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington and a founder and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
With Hosea Williams, he led the “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, an event seminal to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After his activism in the Civil Rights Movement, Lewis served as director for the Voter Education Project and was appointed by President Carter to direct more than 250,000 volunteers in ACTION. He was elected to the Atlanta City Council, and in 1986, he was elected to Congress.
Currently, he is senior chief deputy whip for the Democratic Caucus, a member of the Ways and Means Committee, its Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, and is ranking member of the Subcommittee on Oversight. He is also a best-selling author and has received numerous awards, including the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Obama and the only lifetime “Profile in Courage Award” ever granted by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.
Former U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg, 84, who served Oakland County in Congress for 16 years, died today from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease, a longtime family friend, Mike Murray informed MIRS today. Knollenberg is the father of current state Sen. Marty Knollenberg (R-Troy).
Knollenberg served in Congress from 1993 to 2008. Prior to that, he chaired the Oakland Republican Party from 1978 to 1982. Knollenberg had agreed to serve as former U.S. Rep. William Broomfield’s campaign manager in 1992, but Broomfield ultimately decided not to see re-election after 18 terms and asked Knollenberg to run in his place.
An insurance agent by trade and a U.S. Army veteran, Knollenberg ended up losing his position in Congress in 2008 during the Barack OBAMA-induced Democratic landslide to now-U.S. Sen. Gary Peters.
Sources :
MIRS News Release, February 6, 2018.
Joe Knollenberg wikipedia entry
, “Former U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg dies after battle with Alzheimer’s“, Detroit Free Press, February 6, 2018; updated February 12, 2018.
Ex-U.S. Rep. Knollenberg dead at 84“, Detroit News, February 6, 2018; updated February 7, 2018.
Andrew LaLonde poses with his 60-inch sturgeon, the final fish taken during the two-hour sturgeon season on Black Lake. Kelly House, “Long odds, short season: Michigan sturgeon a zany conservation success“, Bridge, February 8, 2021.
Additional Info About Sturgeon Fishing
The lake sturgeon – Latin name acipenser fulvescens – is one that biologists sometimes call a “living fossil.” Sturgeon go back 136 million years or more. Compare that to salmon, a mere 5 million years in existence.
“A fish like the sturgeon is closer to the dinosaurs. They’ve been around a lot longer than bluegill land perch and bass,” said Tim Cwalinski, fisheries biologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
Caught lake sturgeon wait to be weighed on Saturday, Feb. 4, 2017 near Black Lake in Cheboygan County.
(Photo: Julia Nagy/Lansing State Journal)
It’s likely that females hatched during the administration of President Ulysses Grant still swim in the Great Lakes. Female sturgeon live up to 150 years; males up to 80. It takes 12 to 20 years for males to mature and up to 25 years for females to do so.
Dinosaurs are what came to Archambo’s mind the first time she ever saw a sturgeon, ice-fishing with her grandfather on Burt Lake when she was six years old.
“We heard this ruckus going on, and everybody was running over to the shanty,” she said. “There was this big, huge fish that I’ve never seen on the ice. I remember looking into the eye of the sturgeon. The pupils were shaped like diamonds, like pictures of dinosaurs I had seen before.”
The lake sturgeon lives in all five Great Lakes as well as large inland lakes and rivers, including Black Lake and nearby Burt and Mullet lakes, the Kalamazoo River, Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River. Overfishing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries combined with loss of habitat and the sturgeon’s irregular spawning habits caused their numbers to dwindle.
Kathleen Lavey, “On a lake full of living fossils, the state’s shortest fishing season:On the first Saturday of February, hundreds gathered to celebrate the traditions, the season and each other.“, Lansing State Journal, February 16, 2017.
Update on 2018 Season
Anglers caught seven sturgeon in two and a half hours, ending the Black Lake sturgeon season for 2018, the Department of Natural Resources announced Wednesday. The season started at 8 a.m. on Saturday and four fish were taken before 8:30 a.m., the department said. The quick season exceed the quota the department had set of six fish, but met the allocation for the season. The quota has been set low to avoid exceeding the allocation. The largest was 72 inches and 99 pounds.