In an effort to attract settlers to Detroit, the governor general of New France (Canada) offered each man who would settle there a spade, an axe, a cow, a sow, a ploughshare, one large and one small wagon and seed. Over the course of two years, more than one hundred persons accepted the offer.
Source : Michigan History
Henry Howland Crapo (pronounced Cray-poe; May 24, 1804 – July 23, 1869) was the 14th Governor of Michigan during the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction.
In 1858 Crapo left Massachusetts and moved to Flint, Michigan, primarily due to investments in pinelands, and became Flint’s mayor in 1860. His family established a lucrative lumbering business in the area, which by the beginning of the Civil War was one of the largest individually owned lumber firms in the state. He was instrumental in the construction of the Flint and Holly Railroad, and was President of that corporation until its consolidation with the Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad.
Crapo purchased about 1,000 acres of swampland called “Gaines’ Dead Marsh” or “Dead Man’s Swamp” in 1860. This swamp, the source of the west branch of the Swartz Creek and its name, was drained. An effective settlement was established there with the Crapo Farm with most structures outside of the current boundaries of the City of Swartz Creek. Crapo Farm even had its own rail depot.
In 1862, he was elected to the Michigan Senate to represent Genesee County, and ranked with the leading men of Michigan in the Civil War Senate.
In 1864, he was nominated on the Republican ticket for Governor of Michigan and was elected by a large majority. He was re-elected in 1866, holding the office two terms and retiring in January 1869. His administration was very efficient and marked particularly by his vetoing railway aid legislation and his firm refusal to pardon convicts, except upon overwhelming proofs of their innocence or excessive sentence. Crapo held office at the Farm’s Mansion, Grassmoor.
Sources :
Henry H. Crapo wikipedia entry.
Jessica Pressley Sinnott, “Henry Howland Crapo A Governor with Grit“, My City Magazine, November 1, 2013.
The Henry Howland Crapo Family Papers are available at the Genesee Historical Collections Center, Frances Wilson Thompson Library, University of Michigan-Flint.
Michigan Gov. Lewis Cass and geologist Henry Schoolcraft were among those who participated in the first major American expedition to explore the Upper Peninsula, which began on May 24, 1820.
People in the eastern part of the continent weren’t interested in moving to Michigan, because they’d heard reports of an unhealthy climate and poor soil quality. Cass wanted to make sure Michigan turned its reputation around, so he’d asked the federal government for permission to survey the area’s natural resources and relations with American Indians.
Also in the group, which traveled in three canoes, were 10 soldiers, two interpreters, a doctor, nine American Indians, a reporter, a geographer and a private secretary, according to Willis Dunbar’s book “Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State”.
Stops included Mackinac Island, where another 23 soldiers joined them; Sault Ste. Marie, where Cass angrily tore down a British flag flying over an Indian camp where a chief in a British redcoat uniform was in charge; what is today known as the Pictured Rock National Lakeshore, and the Ontonagon River.
Part of the group made it to Wisconsin, while the rest went to Ft. Dearborn, which is where modern-day Chicago is. Another split had one contingent, including Schoolcraft, returning to Detroit via lakes Michigan and Huron, and the other, including Cass, riding horses along the Old Sauk Trail in southern Michigan to Detroit.
Cass’ plan to get Michigan good public relations worked, plus it was on this trip that Schoolcraft’s lifelong fascination with American Indians began. He became a leading ethnologist.
Source : Zlati Meyer, “Cass, Schoolcraft in 1st major U.S. expedition to U.P.”, Detroit Free Press, May 23, 2015.
On May 24, 1825, surveyors began laying out a military road from Detroit to Chicago. The crude road followed the path of the Old Sauk Trail (approximately present-day U.S.12), and upon its completion, two stagecoaches a week operated between Detroit and Fort Dearborn (Chicago).
Sources:
Mich-Again’s Day.
Detroit Historical Society Facebook page
For more information, see U.S. Route 12 in Michigan
On May 21, 1863, the Seventh Day Adventist Church was formally established in Battle Creek, Michigan.
For half a decade, Battle Creek acted as the hub of the budding Seventh-day Adventist Church. Founders of Adventism likely anticipated a welcoming atmosphere in Battle Creek, said James Nix, director of the Ellen G. White Estate.
“Battle Creek was influenced by Quakers who were noted for being tolerant of different viewpoints held by others,” Nix said. “That might have given a more open, tolerant reception to the Sabbath-keeping Adventists than might have been true of some other places.”
Battle Creek is the site of the Adventist Church’s first publishing house, the Review and Herald, and the Battle Creek Sanitarium, made famous by John Harvey Kellogg. Adventist Church co-founder Ellen White lived with her family in the city.
In 1855, Sabbath-keeping believers in Michigan invited Adventist Church co-founder Ellen White and her husband James to move to Battle Creek, where they promised to run the church’s printing press.
The newly-established believers in Battle Creek organized into a world church structure in 1863, calling themselves the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Over the next 50 years, the Adventist movement grew into a more than 100,000-member organization. Today, membership is nearly 16 million.
While Battle Creek is no longer the headquarters of the Adventist world church, William Fagal, associate director for the White Estate, said the city holds important parts of the church’s history.
“Things really began to take place there,” Fagal said. “We took our first steps [toward] organization medical work, and official church-sponsored educational work in Battle Creek, and from there we sent out our first missionary. All of these enterprises, and more, grew during the Battle Creek years.”
Today, Battle Creek is the home of the Adventist Historic Village, a restored collection of buildings that played vital roles in the church’s heritage. Exhibits include the homes of Ellen and James White and church co-founder William Hardy, an influential African-American Adventist.
Sources :
Adventist Historic Heritage Historic Sites.
Megan Brauner, “Birthplace of Seventh-day Adventist Church turns 150“, Adventist News Network, February 25, 2009.
Kevin Craig, “Battle Creek’s historic Seventh Day Adventist Village“, Fox 17, April 21, 2015.
Coleman A. Young at age 11. He’s believed to be the only black boy or girl enrolled at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Greektown at the time this picture was taken in 1929. Young is shown standing on the far right. The @CityofDetroit‘s first black mayor was born on May 24, 1918.
Young was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to William Coleman Young, a dry cleaner, and Ida Reese Jones. His family moved in 1923 to Detroit, where he graduated from Eastern High School in 1935. A member of United Auto Workers, Young worked for Ford Motor Company and later the United States Post Office Department.
During World War II, Young served in the 477th Medium-Bomber Group (Tuskegee Airmen) of the United States Army Air Forces as a second lieutenant, bombardier, and navigator. As a lieutenant in the 477th, he played a role in the Freeman Field Mutiny in which 162 African-American officers were arrested for resisting segregation at a base near Seymour, Indiana in 1945
In the 1940s, Young was labelled a fellow traveler of the Communist Party by belonging to groups whose members also belonged to the Party, and was accused of being a former member. Young’s involvement in radical organizations including, the Progressive Party, the United Auto Workers and the National Negro Labor Council made him a target of anti-Communist investigators including the FBI and HUAC. He protested segregation in the Army and racial discrimination in the UAW. In 1948, Young supported Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace.
In 1952, Young stunned observers when he appeared before the McCarthy era House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and defied the congressmen with sarcastic retorts and repeatedly refused to answer whether or not he was a member of the Communist Party. The encounter came at a highly publicized formal hearing in Detroit. Young’s performance made him a hero in Detroit’s growing black community. On HUAC’s charge that he seemed reluctant to fight communism, Coleman said: “I am not here to fight in any un-American activities, because I consider the denial of the right to vote to large numbers of people all over the South un-American.” On the HUAC congressman from Georgia: “I happen to know, in Georgia, Negro people are prevented from voting by virtue of terror, intimidation and lynchings. It is my contention you would not be in Congress today if it were not for the legal restrictions on voting on the part of my people.” On the HUAC committee: “Congressman, neither me or none of my friends were at this plant the other day brandishing a rope in the face of John Cherveny, a young union organizer and factory worker who was threatened with repeated violence after members of the HUAC alleged that he might be a communist, I can assure you I have had no part in the hanging or bombing of Negroes in the South. I have not been responsible for firing a person from his job for what I think are his beliefs, or what somebody thinks he believes in, and things of that sort. That is the hysteria that has been swept up by this committee.”
Young built his political base on the East Side in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1960, he was elected as a delegate to help draft a new state constitution for Michigan. In 1964, he won election to the Michigan State Senate, where his most significant legislation was a law requiring arbitration in disputes between public-sector unions and municipalities. During his senate career, he also pointed out inequities in Michigan state funding, “spending $20 million on rural bus service and a fat zero for the same thing in Detroit.”
Coleman Young served as mayor of Detroit, Michigan from 1974 to 1994. Young was the first African-American mayor of Detroit.
Young had emerged from the far-left element in Detroit, and moderated somewhat after his election as mayor. He called an ideological truce and gained widespread support from the city’s business leaders The new mayor was energetic in the construction of the Joe Louis Arena, and upgrading the city’s mass transit system. He assisted General Motors in building its new “Poletown” plant at the site of the former Dodge Main plant, which involved evicting many long-time residents. It has been argued that he pulled money out of the neighborhoods to rehabilitate the downtown business district, because “there were no other options.”
Young’s tenure as mayor has been blamed in part for the city’s ills, especially the exodus of middle-class taxpayers to the suburbs, the emergence of powerful drug-dealing gangs, and the rising crime rate. Political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote that, “In Detroit, Mayor Coleman Young rejected the integrationist goal in favor of a flamboyant, black-power style that won him loyal followers, but he left the city a fiscal and social wreck.”
Source:
Joseph W. Guyton (1889 ~ 1918) lived most of his life near Evart, working as a farmer, plumber, and well driller. When the U.S. entered World War I inn 1917, Guyton was drafted into the army. He could have elected not to go since he was married and had a child, but instead he served with the 126th Infantry Regiment of the 32nd “Red Arrow Division.” On May 24, 1918, shortly after reaching the front line in the Alsace region of what was then Germany, Guyton was the first American killed on German soil when he was hit by machine gun fire. France bestowed the Croix de Guerre medal upon Guyton, as well as his unit to recognize their bravery in combat.
In 1918 when Private Joseph Guyton died during World War I, his fellow soldiers buried him in a German cemetery. In 1921 his remains and those of 5,212 other U.S. soldiers were returned home. At a memorial ceremony in Hoboken, New Jersey, President Warren Harding laid a wreath on Guyton’s casket which represented all the war dead. Guyton’s remains were given to his parents and daughter, his wife having died in the worldwide flu epidemic only months after him. Newspapers reported that 10,000 people attended Guyton’s funeral in his hometown of Evart. Tributes include; Evart’s Guyton Park, the Joseph W. Guyton American Legion post in Evart, the US-10 “Guyton” Bridge over the Muskegon River in Osceola County, and Guyton Elementary School in Detroit. His remains are now located in Evart’s Forest Hill Cemetery.
Joseph W. Guyton Historical Marker
Photo taken from Michigan Historical Review Facebook Page, May 24, 2017..
The Michigan legislature enacts the “Burns Act” prohibiting “public gatherings of masked men.” The law is carefully drafted to apply almost exclusively to Ku Klux Klan activity.
Source : Detroit African American History Project Timeline. Interviews conducted for the Detroit African American History Project are housed at the Wayne State University. Walter P. Reuther Library.
Apparently, the Ku Klux Klan was fairly active in the Michigan of the 1920s. At the height of its power in the 1920s, the “Invisible Empire” had what Fox called “staggering membership numbers,” exceeding 6 million members nationwide. Although Michigan membership is difficult to pinpoint, Fox cites reports of between 265,000 to 875,000 members. Many prominent businessmen, doctors and lawyers found their way to Klan membership, including Dan F. Gerber, the founder of Gerber Baby Foods.
In Lansing, the Klan was able to muster more than 15,000 members for a march down Michigan Avenue on Labor Day in 1924.
Klan activities in Michigan fizzled out by 1926.
Bill Castanier, “1920s Michigan: Klan Country“, Lansing City Pulse,
Also see Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan by Craig Fox. East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, [2011] Also available online to the current MSU community.
On May 24, 1963, LIFE magazine featured a profile of then-MSU Museum Director Rollin H. Baker, who was about to undertake a monumental project: reconstructing a 10-foot African elephant skeleton!
The African bush elephant came to the MSU Museum as a gift in 1962 from Jens Touborg, innovator of refrigeration compressors for Tecumseh Products. Decades ago, Touborg donated numerous skulls, skeletons, and taxidermy mounts of various mammals and reptiles, including a brown bear, musk ox, ocelot and bongo. The skeletal materials, while not on exhibit, are important resources for research and teaching.
The May 24, 1963 LIFE magazine feature can be seen here (see page 77-78).
Footprint outlines let visitors compare the size of their feet to those of the elephant, and appreciate its immense stature.
Today, the African bush elephant is a protected species, and the African Elephant Conservation Act of 1988 is in effect.
Source : MSU Museum, Collections up Close: Object of the Week, May 13, 2013, still available thanks to the Internet Archive.
For more information about Rollin Baker, see Carleton J. Phillips, Robert J. Baker, and Hugh H. Genoways, “Rollin Harold Baker: 1916–2007“, Journal of Mammalogy, Volume 90, Issue 5, 15 October 2009, Pages 1265–1269, https://doi.org/10.1644/09-MAMM-O-169.1
Here is the opening paragraph: Rollin H. Baker passed away on 12 November 2007, 1 day after reaching his 91st birthday. Rollin was a living legend, famous for his pioneering research on biogeography and natural history of Mexican mammals, especially rodents, for his contributions to the understanding of Michigan mammals, and for being a mentor and friend to all young, aspiring mammalogists. Rollin Baker’s career lasted way beyond his traditional retirement, and in his final months he was still active in the Texas Society of Mammalogists and in conservation issues in Texas. Indeed, when he was 89 years old he presented a guest lecture in mammalogy for appreciative graduate students at Texas Tech University.
The Michigan Activity Pass went live on May 24, 2007.
To quote TLN Executive Director Jim Pletz:
“The Library Network is pleased to continue support for the highly popular Michigan Activity Pass. From humble beginnings in southeast Michigan, featuring a partnership with 30 museums and cultural institutions, the program, with its destination partner, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, now features over 435 sites statewide. With all 11 Michigan library cooperatives participating as contact points with more than 367 public libraries across the state, library patrons are empowered to visit these sites. Last year, the Michigan Activity Pass program returned over $50,000 in value to over 10,000 patrons who used their library card to secure admission to a featured site.”
The Michigan Activity Pass gives library cardholders in the state free or discounted access to Michigan state parks and recreation areas, historic sites, cultural attractions and campgrounds.
The Michigan Activity Pass is offered through Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, the Department of Natural Resources, Michigan Recreation and Park Association and the Library Network. The program encourages residents to lead healthier lifestyles, “from running and biking to swimming and climbing …,” said Suzanne Miller Allen, director of Community Responsibility at BCBS Michigan in a statement.
Through May 23, 2018, cardholders of participating libraries — more than 367 across the state — can print free, one-day passes at home or the local library, which can be used at 435 participating destinations in the state, including Michigan’s 102 state parks or 138 state forest campgrounds. The program also offers free or discounted admission to 195 historical and cultural sites in the state.
Source : “Get free or discounted passes to parks, cultural sites“, Detroit News, May 24, 2017.
For more information see Michigan Activity Pass Program resources.
Michigan Activity Pass Facebook Page.
Jim Flury
Technical Services Manager
The Library Network
41365 Vincenti Court
Novi, MI 48375
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Fax 248-536-3098
jflury@tln.lib.mi.us