On May 10, 1803, William H. Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory and the first future president to visit Michigan arrived in Detroit. Harrison came to Michigan three more times before becoming president in 1841.
Source: Mich-Again’s Day.
On this day in 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, dressed as an old woman, was captured in Georgia by the 4th Michigan Cavalry under the command of Lt. Col. Benjamin Pritchard of Allegan.
Courtesy of WAKV (Plainwell, MI), The Memory Station
On the 48th anniversary of the event, Caspar Knobal, a member of the 4th Michigan Calvary during the Civil War and eye-witness, says that Confederate President Davis wasn’t disguised as a woman when captured. Due to the cold, he had merely put on a woman’s shawl around his shoulders for extra warmth on the chilly night.
VET CELEBRATES DAVIS’S CAPTURE: Caspar Knobel, of Philadelphia, Observes Anniversary of Arrest of Jeff Davis. Detroit Free Press, May 11, 1912, p. 1.
Note : The Main Library now provides the MSU community online access to the historical Detroit Free Press from 1858 through 1922.
On May 10, 1933, Julius Stroh of the Stroh Brewing Company poured the first legal glass of beer after the repeal of Prohibition at an American Legion convention in Detroit.
An update on the Stroh Family:
AS WITH MANY OF AMERICA’S GREAT FORTUNES, the Stroh family’s story starts with an immigrant: Bernhard Stroh, who arrived in Detroit from Germany in 1850 with $150 and a coveted family recipe for beer. He sold his brews door-to-door in a wheelbarrow. By 1890 his sons, Julius and Bernhard Jr., were shipping beer around the Great Lakes. Julius got the family through Prohibition by switching the brewery to ice cream and malt syrup production. And in the 1980s Stroh’s surged, emerging as one of America’s fastest-growing companies and the country’s third-largest brewing empire, behind only public behemoths Anheuser-Busch and Miller. The Stroh family owned it all, a fortune that FORBES then calculated was worth at least $700 million. Just by matching the S&P 500, the family would currently be worth about $9 billion.
Yet today the Strohs, as a family business or even a collective financial entity, have essentially ceased to exist. The company has been sold for parts. The Stroh Companies has doled out its last dividends to shareholders. The last remaining family entity owns a half-empty office building in Detroit. While there was enough cash flowing for enough years that the fifth generation Strohs still seem pretty comfortable, the family looks destined to go shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves in six.
Sources :
Detroit Historical Society Facebook page
Kerry A. Dolan, “How To Blow $9 Billion: The Fallen Stroh Family“, Forbes, July 8, 2014.
Rep. Monte Geralds (D-Madison Heights) was expelled from the Michigan Legislature on May 10, 1978. An attorney, he had been convicted of embezzling $24,000 from a wealthy Bloomfield Hills heiress he had represented before being elected to office.
His case was on appeal, but fellow lawmakers didn’t like serving alongside a convicted felon.
Geralds refused to resign.
Geralds, who chain smoked throughout the historic debate, finally got up to speak. Rocking back and forth on his heels, he said: “I was innocent. I am innocent and I always will be innocent of those charges.”
Moments before the 84-20 vote to expel Geralds, House Speaker Bobby Crim had his say.
“Monte, this is not easy for me because I’m asking for your expulsion…I pray no future legislature will again be faced with this decision.”
It was the second time in political history that Michigan had expelled a legislator.
Sources :
Charlie Cain, “Reporters Notes”, Dome, July 16, 2009.
Michael Arkush, “Geralds Expelled for Embezzling“, Michigan Daily, May 11, 1978.
Emily Lawler, “Deaths, drugs and skullduggery: A brief history of Michigan political scandals“, MLive, August 21, 2015; Updated August 24, 2015.
Check April 28, 1887 entry for Milo H. Dakin, the first person expelled from the Michigan Legislature.
U.S. Treasury Secretary G. William Miller announced on May 10, 1980, that Chrysler would receive a $1.5-billion loan guarantee from the U.S. government. The federally backed loans, which still had to be approved by Congress, were expected to ensure that the carmaker would survive for another year.
For the full article, see Zlati Meyer, “U.S. offers Chrysler a $1.5B loan guarantee”, Detroit Free Press, May 6, 2012.
Mrs. Helen Jackson Wilkins Claytor made it her life’s work to break down racial barriers, before the term “civil rights” became part of the country’s lexicon.
She was born in Minneapolis on April 12, 1907 and was a 1928 cum laude graduate of the University of Minnesota, where she was one of the few black students. In one of her early jobs, she was a caseworker supervisor for the federal Emergency Relief Administration in Jackson County, Mo.
She had been a member of the Young Women’s Christian Association since grade school and by the late 1930s, she was working for the organization — then racially segregated — in Trenton, N.J., and Kansas City,
She first traveled to Grand Rapids to speak at a convention in 1942 as secretary for interracial education for the national YWCA. She was a widow and mother at the time. Her first husband, journalist Earl Wilkins, died in 1941.
She met Robert Claytor, a Grand Rapids doctor, and they married a year later. She moved to the western Michigan city.
She could not get a job teaching in Grand Rapids in the early 1940s, which she attributed to racism.
Meanwhile, her husband became the first black doctor on staff at St. Mary’s Hospital. When his wife resigned her national YWCA post, joined the Grand Rapids YWCA board and became president in 1949, three white board members resigned in protest, saying the city was not ready for a black YWCA president.
In the early 1950s, she led the Grand Rapids Human Relations Study Commission to look at race relations. She led a study on de facto segregation in Grand Rapids public schools in the early 1960s and made recommendations on integration.
The elimination of racism was a key goal of Mrs. Claytor’s tenure as president of the national YWCA, and one of her proudest achievements was to get the organization to support that principle at the 1970 convention.
Mrs. Claytor received many awards during her life. The Grand Rapids YWCA established the Helen J. Claytor Merit of Distinction Award, making her the first recipient in 1983; she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1984; the Helen Jackson Claytor Civil Rights Award was created by the city of Grand Rapids; and Helen was named a “Woman of Courage” by Michigan Women’s Foundation in 1994. And of course, the city of Grand Rapids erected a statue of her as part of the Grand Rapids Community Legends project.
Sources :
Michigan History, March/April 2015
“Helen Claytor: Activist in Civil Rights, YWCA“, Washington Post, May 14, 2005.
“Helen Claytor Statue Dedication“, MLive, July 23; updated July 24, 2014.
Cindy Lang, “Dr. Robert W. and Helen J. Claytor“, HistoryGrandRapids.org, April 13, 2010.
The first licensed American female pilot and the first woman in the world to fly solo over the English Channel was born in Arcadia in Kinderhook Township, Michigan on May 11, 1875. She flew across the English Channel on April 16, 1912.
She was highly competitive and a fearless, independent young woman with self confidence, beauty, ambition and brains. Harriet Quimby did not marry, drove an automobile, used a camera, a typewriter and flew an airplane. Any of these individually would have been a problem for men in the late years of Victorian America, but all of these accomplishments rolled into one woman were impossible for most men to deal with.
Seen here w/ her Moisant monoplance c. 1911. Courtesy of the Henry Ford / Benson Ford Research Center.
A true Renaissance woman, she was also a drama critic for Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly; a motion picture screenwriter and actress; a stage actress; and even a spokesperson for Vin Fiz grape soda.
Source : Michigan Historical Calendar, courtesy of the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University.
Mary Zimmeth, “Sky Queens“, Seeking Michigan, March 1, 2011.
For more information, see Her mentor was an albatross : the autobiography of pioneer pilot Harriet Quimby / Henry M. Holden. Mt. Freedom, N.J. : Black Hawk Pub. Co., c1993 available for loan through MelCat.
What if the young farmer Henry Ford had been killed in this accident in 1883? Would he have been able to develop the Model T later on?
Sources :
A BIG BLOW.: A Severe Storm Breaks at the Railroad Crossing on Grand River Road. HENRY FORD SERIOUSLY HURT AND HIS HORSES AND WAGON DEMORALIZED. Other Thrilling Experiences and Damages Reported.
Detroit Free Press (1858-1922); Detroit, Mich. [Detroit, Mich]11 May 1883: 1
The MSU Libraries provides free access to the historical Detroit Free Press to the MSU community and visitors to the Main Library.
Reposted by Michigan’s Past, July 30, 2018.
Out of the farmlands of Fowlerville was born who many sports experts say was the greatest of all the Detroit Tigers: Charles Gehringer.
Born on May 11, 1903, Charlie just couldn’t get into farming as his father was. He shirked his farm chores throughout his grade school & high school years, but he was a star when it came to high school sports – basketball, to be exact. His prowess on the basketball courts landed him a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he also wound up playing baseball and football.
When he was 20 years old, he was spotted playing baseball back in Fowlerville by Detroit Tiger Bobby Veach. Veach went back to Detroit and coaxed teammate Ty Cobb into seeing this farm kid from Fowlerville; after watching him play, Charlie was invited to tryout for the Tigers, and in 1924 – at the age of 21 – Charlie began his Major League career.
Unfortunately, his father passed away before he had a chance to see his son play. From then on, Charlie felt it was his duty to care for his mother for the rest of her life. He refused to get married, as he felt it would be unfair for his wife to help care for his mother. When his mom passed away in 1946, he felt he could finally be comfortable with a wife. In 1949, at the age of 46, Charlie married Josephine Stillen, and stayed together for the rest of his life.
After his mother passed away in 1946 and before he married in 1949, he wanted to get back with the Tigers. He asked if he could join them for spring training but they refused, probably thinking he was too old at age 43. But in 1950, he was asked to be the Tigers’ general manager, which he accepted.
Charlie did not like the GM position, but stuck with it for two years, and then became Tigers Vice-President, which wasn’t as nerve-wracking.
Not a bad life for a farm lad from Fowlerville.
On January 21, 1993, Gehringer passed away at the age of 89.
Source: John Robinson, “The Greatest Detroit Tiger of All Time Was From Fowlerville“, 99.1WFMK Blog, September 17, 2021.
Charles Gehringer wikipedia entry.
COUNTY ROADS HIGHLY PRAISED: Delegates From American Cement Manufacturers’ Assn. Convention on Inspection Tour. MAY SOLVE PROBLEM OF HIGH COST OF LIVING Government Road Official Says Similarly Constructed Highways Should Connect All Cities.
Detroit Free Press, May 11, 1912, p. 14.
Note : The Main Library now provides the MSU community online access to the historical Detroit Free Press from 1858 through 1922.