On Aug. 8, 1864, Adm. Farragut attacked Fort Morgan in Mobile, Alabama, which led to the capture of the fort by Union forces two weeks later.
What, exactly, does this have to do with Birmingham? That’s among the many questions the staff at the Birmingham Museum is asked.
People who drive past the museum might have noticed a very large rock at the end of the driveway that reads, “From Fort Morgan,” which begs the question of what connection a fort on the Gulf Coast of Alabama could have with Birmingham.
The answer is that Birmingham’s John Allen Bigelow, a veteran of the Civil War and a general store owner, decided that Birmingham ought to have a monument to the war. He began fundraising for one in 1901.
Bigelow asked each resident to contribute 25 cents to the fund, and by 1904 Bigelow had collected enough money to purchase a cannon from Fort Morgan from the federal government. A local stoneworker named John Felder created a concrete base for the cannon, and the monument was placed in front of Hill Elementary School, on the corner of Merrill and Chester streets.
So how did the cannon-less base get to museum grounds? The cannon was repaired in 1914 after a decade of children playing on it caused significant wear and tear. During World War II, it was melted down in a scrap metal drive. The base disappeared and was lost to history until 1992, when Duane Joyce unearthed it by accident at the city’s old dump.
Birmingham Historical Society members Max Horton, Jim Flack, Bill Price and Hartland Smith were able to track down its origins. The Birmingham Historic District and Design Review Committee voted to move the base to the Allen House, where it could be preserved.
Have a question related to Birmingham’s history that you’d like to see answered in a future Looking Back section? Contact Caitlin Donnelly at cdonnelly@bhamgov.org or at (248) 530-1685.
Source :
Caitlin Donnelly, museum assistant at The Birmingham Museum, “Looking Back: What’s that rock?“, Birmingham – Bloomfield Eagle, August 2, 2017.
The Detroit Tigers shut out the New York Yankees 1-0 in one hour and thirteen minutes of playing time, the quickest nine inning game in American League history.
Source : Michigan History
Acting Detroit Mayor John Nagel touches off the bomb that started the raising of the steel cable for the construction of the Ambassador Bridge across the Detroit River on August 8th 1928 according to the Detroit Free Press, August 9, 1928.. The gigantic towers holding the cables had already been constructed. The cable linking the two structures signified Detroit and Windsor being connected for the first time.
Note: The Detroit Free Press is available online free of charge to the MSU community and to visitors of the MSU Main Library.
On August 8, 1933, the Detroit Board of Education organized the six colleges it ran — liberal arts, medical, education, pharmacy, engineering and a graduate school — into one university. In January 1934, that institution was officially named Wayne University (later our neighbor, Wayne State University).
Source : Detroit Historical Society Facebook Page.
Check out a Wayne State University timeline
Every so often, the story of when Hootie & the Blowfish, Tiger Woods and the Stanley Cup all ended up at Rick’s American Cafe in East Lansing on the same night back in 1995 will come to the surface.
Such was the occasion on Tuesday night when Jesse O’Brien, a former writer for the Grand Rapids Business Journal and before that a freelance writer for the State Journal, tweeted out a link and a screenshot of an interview former Hootie & the Blowfish lead singer Darius Rucker did with PGATour.com earlier this month.
In the interview, Rucker — who performed at Woods’ wedding to his first wife, Elin, and remains friends with him — shared the story once again of the first time he met Woods, which occurred at Rick’s.
As the story goes, on Aug. 8, 1995, Hootie and the Blowfish played in East Lansing at the Michigan Festival.
The Stanley Cup was in the hands of current Michigan State hockey coach and Waverly High School graduate Danton Cole, who happened to have the famed trophy on that particular day after his New Jersey Devils had won the NHL title earlier in the summer.
Woods, according to Cole, was in town visiting a friend, having recently played in the Western Amateur Championship in Benton Harbor.
In the interview, Rucker says: “We were sitting at the bar and I look over the bar and I’m like, ‘Isn’t that that Tiger Woods kid that everybody’s talking about?’ He’s 18. And he was going to Stanford and (our bass player Dean Felber) says like, yeah. So I went over and I said, ‘Are you Tiger Woods?’ and he says, ‘Are you the guy from Hootie and the Blowfish?’ and I sat down and we just hung out all night.
“But the thing that tops the story, I’m sitting there with this kid, Tiger Woods, 18, and we’re sitting there and then somebody (a former Michigan State hockey player) comes in with the Stanley Cup. It was his week. Here I am in the bar with Tiger Woods and sitting on the bar was the frigging Stanley Cup. That was a crazy night.”
Source : Phil Friend, “The time Tiger Woods, Hootie & the Blowfish, Stanley Cup, Danton Cole showed up at Rick’s“, Lansing State Journal, February 13 (updated February 15), 2019.
The federal government, the State of Michigan and five American Indian tribes in northern Michigan signed an agreement today aimed at rebuilding fish populations in the upper Great Lakes and improving strained relations between whites and Indians in upstate Michigan.
The pact settles 27 years of litigation over whether the state can restrict Indian fishing, people involved in the negotiations said.
A vibrant national economy has created a boom in vacation homes and tourism here in the northern third of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The accompanying surge in pleasure boating and recreational fishing has increased tensions between whites and Indians, as pleasure boats become dangerously entangled in Indian nets and charter boat operators blame the Indian fishermen for depleting trout and salmon populations.
Some Indian nets have been sabotaged, state officials say. Indian leaders have denied that they are responsible for declining fish stocks and have angrily denounced what they have described as efforts to take away some of the few ancestral rights they retain.
Today’s pact calls for the tribes to reduce sharply their use of large-mesh gill nets, which kill fish of various sizes and species and can entangle boats. The Indians are to replace gill nets with trap nets, which catch fish more discriminately and are less likely to entangle other boats. The state government will pay $17 million to buy boats equipped with trap nets and fishing permits from white-owned companies and give them to Indian fishermen to replace boats with gill nets. The trap-net fishing permits are mainly for remote areas of northwestern Lake Michigan and northern Lake Huron, pulling Indian fishermen far from Michigan’s main recreational boating and fishing areas.
The federal government will pay an additional $8.3 million to the five tribal governments. The tribes are expected to use some or all of the money to compensate small-scale Indian fishing operations, which will not receive the trap-net boats but will face restrictions on gill-net fishing for the next 20 years. Use of large-mesh gill nets by non-Indians has been heavily restricted since 1968.
The dispute has been particularly acrimonious here in this Indian community and eight miles west in the mainly white town of Leland. Both towns are on the northwest shore of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, 220 miles northwest of Detroit.
For whites like John Lindenau, who stood on the dock in Leland this morning next to his 30-foot charter fishing boat, the Infinity, the dispute has been about imposing the same rules on Indians that white fishermen must meet. ”We won the Indian wars and gave it all away,” Mr. Lindenau said.
But here in Peshawbestown, on the tiny reservation of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, the agreement is the cause of considerable bitterness. ”The Grand Traverse Band hesitantly, really hesitantly agreed to sign off on the deal,” said Ardith Chambers, one of seven members of the tribal council, as she sat glumly in her office this afternoon. ”All the state wants to do is take apart treaty rights, and so does the federal government.”
Keith Bradsher, “Michigan Pact Resolves Battle Over Limits on Indian Fishing“, New York Times, August 8, 2000.
A resident of Holt, Mich., Rosenberg was an MSU professor of chemistry when he and colleagues developed the drug, which continues to be one of the most widely used and successful treatments for cancer.
Cisplatin has a cure rate of nearly 100 percent for testicular cancers, and significantly lowers the rates of lung cancers, head and neck cancers, bone cancers and early stage ovarian cancers.
In 1999, three separate studies appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine which found that cisplatin, when combined with radiation treatment, reduced death rates from cervical cancer by up to 50 percent.
The results were so definitive that the National Cancer Institute, for only the fifth time in history, didn’t wait until the findings were published and immediately sent notices to thousands of oncologists around the world urging them to implement the treatment.
At the time, Rosenberg said he was “euphoric” over the life-saving capabilities of cisplatin. However, he also said it was “disturbing” that a discovery he had made more than 25 years earlier remained the gold standard for cancer treatment.
“For years I’ve been saying this is the first platinum-based drug we discovered,” he said. “It can’t possibly be the best one. It’s disappointing that the scientific community has not been able to find better ones.”
On Aug. 6 of this year, just two days before Rosenberg’s death, Great Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence published an article that said cisplatin, when combined with a chemotherapy known as Alitma, was especially effective in fighting certain types of lung cancer.
“With the passing of Barnett Rosenberg, Michigan State University and the worlds of science and health have lost a huge figure,” said MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon. “The scientific advancements of Dr. Rosenberg have saved thousands of lives, and we will forever be grateful. In addition, the royalties from the development of the drug cisplatin also build for the future as they help fund an endowed chair in neuroscience and help fund the training of tomorrow’s physicists, chemists and other researchers and teachers.
“The name Barney Rosenberg will forever represent the impact a great research university with leading faculty can have on the lives of people throughout the world. His work was not only historic at MSU; it was globally transformative in the chemotherapy for several forms of cancer.”
It was in the early 1970s that Rosenberg and colleagues Loretta Van Camp and Thomas Krigas happened upon the cancer-fighting properties of platinum. While doing some experiments designed to determine if electromagnetic energy could stop cell growth, they found that the platinum from the electrodes, when combined with chloride and ammonium, had a dramatic effect on cells.
In 1978 the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of this solution, eventually named cisplatin, for use in humans to fight cancer.
The MSU Foundation, which received royalties from the cisplatin discovery, helped fund the Barnett Rosenberg Chair in Neuroscience. In 2001 S. Marc Breedlove, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the development of the central nervous system, was appointed to the position.
Originally from New York City, Rosenberg began his MSU career in 1961 when he was appointed an associate professor of biophysics. He retired in 1997. He also had a private laboratory, the Barros Research Institute, located south of East Lansing in Holt.
After earning a bachelor of science in physics from Brooklyn College in 1948, he received master’s and doctorate degrees, also in physics, from New York University. Before coming to MSU he was a research scientist at NYU (1959-61) and a senior research scientist at Westinghouse Electric Corp. (1956-58).
Rosenberg was a veteran of World War II. In 1979 he was named Michiganian of the year in 1979 by The Detroit News.
Source: “Former MSU Professor, Developer of Anti-Cancer Drug Dies at Age 82“, MSU Today, August 10, 2009.
With its famed dome covered in scaffolding and restoration work happening throughout the State Capitol, another historic and significant event will occur on the Capitol lawn this summer. On Saturday, August 8, at noon, the Capitol lawn will see the return of the famed Loomis Guns—replicas of the historic Civil War cannons that Michiganders took into battle over 150 years ago to fight against slavery and protect our Union. The project has been funded solely through private fundraising efforts.
Two Civil War, 10-pound Parrott guns once flanked the walkway that leads to the front entrance of the Michigan Capitol. The Michigan Capitol was dedicated to the memory of Michigan’s Civil War soldiers, and the Loomis guns symbolically protected the building’s main entrance.
It is widely believed that the original guns disappeared approximately 70 years ago during a World War II scrap metal drive. With the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, Senators Michael Kowall (R-White Lake) and Steven Bieda (D-Warren) put partisanship aside and spent the past two years raising money to bring exact replicas of the guns back to the State Capitol. Every dollar raised was from private funds—no taxpayer money was spent.
“This project allows us to remember our Civil War soldiers and commemorate their extraordinary efforts – it’s been a great and humbling experience for us,” Kowall said. “It’s amazing the horrors these brave men went through, Michigan made a commitment to remember them, and it’s time we honor them by restoring their history.”
The original cannons belonged to the renowned Loomis Battery, led by General Cyrus O. Loomis of Coldwater and comprised of local volunteer soldiers of the Coldwater Light Artillery. The Loomis Battery participated in many significant Civil War battles, including Perryville, Stones River, and Chickamauga.
“Like all of America’s soldiers, Michigan’s Civil War soldiers gave up so much for our nation, and this is our way of thanking them,” Bieda said. “Like many in Michigan, I have a passion for our history, and when I found out these original guns went missing, I immediately agreed to work with Senator Kowall to bring Michigan’s history back to the Capitol’s front steps to bring that legacy to life.”
It started out as a conversation about some vintage War of 1812 cannon balls that were retrieved from the floor of Lake Erie.
But it ended up as a historic restoration project between two state senators from different parties — Mike Kowall, a Republican from White Lake Township, and Steve Bieda, a Democrat from Warren.
The two history buffs are hoping to raise $75,000 this year to replace the two Civil War-era cannons that sat on the lawn of the state Capitol from 1879 to 1946.
The two cannons were used by the highly regarded First Michigan Light Artillery Battery, better known as the “Loomis Battery” because of the military leader Cyrus O. Loomis.
They fought in many battles, including the Battles of Perryville in Kentucky, Stone Rivers in Tennessee and Chickamauga in Georgia. All three were key skirmishes that led to the Union victory over the Confederates. The Michigan unit’s participation was part of the reason that President Abraham Lincoln famously stated, “Thank God for Michigan.”
For the full article, see Kathleen Gray, “Senators unite to put Civil War cannons on state Capitol lawn again”, Detroit Free Press, August 2, 2013.
The rest of the story:
Two Civil War, 10-pound Parrott guns once flanked the walkway that leads to the front entrance of the Michigan Capitol.
It is widely believed that the original guns disappeared approximately 70 years ago during a World War II scrap metal drive. With the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, the two put partisanship aside and spent the past two years raising money to bring exact replicas of the guns back to the State Capitol.
The original cannons belonged to the renowned Loomis Battery, led by General Cyrus O. Loomis of Coldwater and comprised of local volunteer soldiers of the Coldwater Light Artillery. The Loomis Battery participated in many significant Civil War battles, including Perryville, Stones River and Chickamauga.
“Like all of America’s soldiers, Michigan’s Civil War soldiers gave up so much for our nation, and this is our way of thanking them,” Bieda stated. “Like many in Michigan, I have a passion for our history, and when I found out these original guns went missing, I immediately agreed to work with Senator Kowall to bring Michigan’s history back to the Capitol’s front steps to bring that legacy to life.”
A public ceremony is planned for Aug. 8 on the front lawn of the State Capitol as the Loomis cannons are restored to their rightful place. The event will include Civil War re-enactors, firing of Civil War cannons, an original Loomis cannon on display, a President Abraham Lincoln re-enactor and more. This historic and fun event is planned as a family affair.
Source : “Civil War Replica Cannons return to state capitol in Lansing”, Grand Rapids Legal News, July 29, 2015.
On August 9, 1812, Lieut. Col. James Miller and a force of about 600 American regulars and militia moved down Hull’s Trace in an attempt to bring desperately needed supplies from Frenchtown (Monroe) to Detroit. A similar effort had failed at Brownstown on August 5.
The Battle of Monguagon from the British point of view, displayed in the Windsor Public Library.
Near the Wyandot village of Monguagon, American scouts ran into a British and Indian force of about 400 men led by Capt. Adam Muir and Tecumseh. In the heavy fighting that followed, the Americans drove the British back through present-day Trenton and across the Detroit River, while Native forces withdrew into nearby woods. Despite this tactical victory, Miller returned empty-handed to Detroit, which American General William Hull surrendered to the British a week later.
The Michigan Wyandot who fought at Monguagon were neutral at the beginning of the War of 1812. In the years leading up to the war, their villages at Monguagon and Brownstown had not joined the loose coalition led by the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, in its opposition to the treaties imposed on Natives by the United States. But in early August 1812, Tecumseh and Roundhead, his leading Wyandot supported, convinced the Michigan Wyandot and their head chief, Walk-in-the-Water, to join them and the British. Although the Anglo-Native alliance was repulsed at Monguagon, the battle played a significant role in the isolation and surrender of Detroit.
Sources:
Dan Wilkins, “The Battle of Monguagon Part One: We Are Going to Meet the Enemy, and Beat Them!”, Dan Wilkins War of 1812 Blog, April 29, 2015
Dan Wilkins, “The Battle of Monguagon or Maguaga Part Two”
Dan Wilkins War of 1812 Blog, May 13, 2015.
Benson John Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812
Michigan Historic Marker : Registered Site S0199 Erected 1962 Location: Slocum and West Jefferson, Trenton, Wayne County
Evolution of Michigan’s Legal Boundaries
Sugar Island/St. George’s Island in the St. Mary’s River
The Webster-Ashburton Treaty, signed August 9, 1842, settled a border dispute with Great Britain in which Michigan gained governance over Sugar Island (called St. George’s Island by the Canadians).
Return to Evolution of Michigan’s Legal Boundaries Exhibit courtesy of the MSU Library Map Library