Several events — including a concert, student research poster session and faculty research symposium — will precede the inauguration ceremony, to be held at 3 p.m. April 4. The event is open to the public but a limited number of tickets are available.
The formal inauguration ceremony will be held in Wayne State’s Community Arts Auditorium and will include an academic procession, formal installation and presidential address. Keynote remarks will be made by Ohio State University’s incoming president, Michael Drake, who is the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine.
Like Wilson, Drake is a medical doctor specializing in ophthalmology. He will be Ohio State’s first African-American president.
The WSU Board of Governors unanimously elected Wilson as the university’s president on June 5, 2013.
For the full article, see “Wayne State to inaugurate Wilson as president April 4”, Detroit News, March 19, 2014.
At nine feet tall, more than 800 pounds and unable to move, this dude wasn’t quite as nimble as C-3PO, nor as small. But for several years throughout the late 1960s and early ’70s, Freddie Ford was nonetheless a crowd favorite at the Michigan State Fair and auto shows around the country. The robot was built almost completely out of Ford auto parts: The original Freddie had oil pans for feet and brake shoes for hands; his ears were made of radiator caps with car antennas attached; his eyes were parking lights from a Mustang; his mouth was the backup light from a Thunderbird. Best of all, Freddie could talk, although his programmed recitations were limited mostly to a handful of corny jokes with an embedded Ford marketing push. What’s that, Freddie? Why do you have disc brakes for hands? “They grip faster and better and 55 percent easier than manual brakes. For 1970, power front disc brakes are available on all models and standard on some,” Freddie would say. In robot land (and in some car circles), that’s what they call pillow talk.
Source : Found Michigan, April 4, 2014.
Michigan State coach Tom Izzo is officially a Hall of Famer.
Izzo was announced today as part of the 2016 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame class, and he will be enshrined Sept. 9 at the Hall in Springfield, Mass.
For the full article, see MSU’s Tom Izzo voted into Basketball Hall of Fame“,
The street musicians, dancers, scalpers, beer tents and tailgaters surrounded Comerica Park once again on opening day in 2019.
The Detroit Tigers and fans were happy since they beat the Kansas City Royals 5-4.
On April 4, 2021, Tigers outfielder Akil Baddoo hit his first pitch in an MLB game out of the park for a homer. Although the number of fans in the stadium were limited because of Covid restrictions, his parents were there to witness his major league debut.
Source : Nathan Vandenberg, “ Detroit Tigers’ Akil Baddoo Hit a Home Run on His First MLB Pitch “, 730am the game, April 5, 2021.
This 1820 painting by Chester Harding is the only portrait of Daniel Boone made during his lifetime.
On April 5, 1778, Daniel Boone arrived at Detroit as a prisoner. During the American Revolution, Boone’s settlement of Boonesborough, Kentucky, suffered repeated attacks by Native Americans.
During one of these raids, Boone was captured by Native Americans and brought to Detroit. Detroit’s British commandant, Lt. Colonel Henry Hamilton, tried unsuccessfully to pay ransom for the famous frontiersman. After a short stay in Detroit, Boone’s captors took him to Ohio, where he later escaped.
According to Lyman C. Draper and Ted Ranklin Belue’s book The Life of Daniel Boone (1998), Boone arrived in Detroit on March 30th and left Detroit on April 10.
Sources :
Michigan History.
Sheryl James, “The Battle for Daniel Boone”, Michigan History, March/April 2015, pp.21-24.
The emigrants departed from Nuernberg on April 5, 1845 and traveled by foot, wagons, and trains to Bremerhafen, where they bought the provisions for their voyage. On April 20 they boarded the CAROLINE, where four engaged couples in the party were married, since they hadn’t been able to satisfy the strict German marriage law requirements. The trip began with a bad start, as the drunken captain steered the ship into a sand bank of the Weser River. Because of winds and storms, they had to sail around Scotland instead of through the English Channel.
Their journey across the Atlantic encountered violent storms, seasickness, a nightmare collision with an English trawler, and undesirable winds which drove the ship north into icebergs and dense fog for three days. The ship was damp and overcrowded, and their food became stale. Toward the end of the journey almost everyone in the group contracted smallpox, and a child in the party died from it. They reached New York Harbor on June 8, after 50 days of sailing.
To reach Michigan, they took a steamboat, a train (which collided with a coal train, giving them only slight injuries), and another steamboat. They took another steamer to Detroit and then a sailing ship on Lake Huron for a week-long trip to Bay City. From there they had to pull the ship 15 miles up the Saginaw River to Saginaw, where they stayed until their exact settlement site was chosen. They were objects of curiosity to the French and English of the city because of their Franconian dress and habits.
A few of the colonists walked to the future settlement region to examine the land. They selected a slightly hilly area which reminded them of the native Mittelfranken and built a rough shelter there. On August 18, almost four months after they had left Bremerhafen, the 15 colonists packed their belongings in an oxcart and walked about 12 miles through forest, thickets, and swamps to Frankenmuth.
They purchased 680 acres of Indian Reservation land from the federal government for $1,700.00. The colonists were often weakened with malaria while working at clearing the forest. A combination church-school-parsonage log cabin, built in the center of the land tract, was completed before Christmas day. The church was named St. Lorenz, after their mother churches in Neuendettelsau and Rosstal. The settlement, however wasn’t developed exactly according to Loehe’s original plan.
Pastors Loehe and Craemer wanted everyone to build their homes together near the church, so that the group would remain intact and organized in the manner of German villages. The colonists disagreed, and all decided to live on their own 120 acre farms which they would clear.
For the full story of the founding of Frankenmuth, visit here. Immigrating to Michigan wasn’t an easy trip!
Source : History of Frankenmuth.
April 4-6, 1882.
Cadillac’s decade-long struggle for the county seat came to a head on April 4, 1882, when ballots were cast throughout the county to determine whether the coveted prize should be moved from Manton to Cadillac. Twelve months earlier, residents of Cadillac and Manton had united to remove the county seat from Sherman to Manton. Now Cadillac was determined to secure the prize for itself.
Feeling duped by Cadillac, Manton residents were furious. A couple of townships destroyed their ballots, refusing to make a return. But when the “official” count of the April 4 vote was totaled, the results were overwhelming: 1,363 “yes” voters favored moving the county seat to Cadillac, while 309 voted “no.”
In the early dawn following the election, a train left Cadillac with the sheriff and twenty “specially deputized” men and headed to Manton to collect the county property. Legend has it that the train backed quietly into a sleeping Manton, coming to a halt in front of the courthouse. Within a half hour, most of the county records and much of the furniture was aboard the train. As the Cadillac faction attempted to remove the first of three safes from the courthouse, however, Manton residents awoke.
Battle of Manton, Part I
There are two different versions of what happened next. Cadillac’s version tells of a mob of over two hundred Manton men who drove off the small band of deputies.
Manton’s version claims the city was deserted and only a handful of men were in town. Although outnumbered, these “brave few” quickly gathered at the courthouse and confronted the heavily armed “Cadillackers.” The safe was overturned, Cadillac men produced firearms and a drunken county clerk urged the murder of the Mantonites. Nonetheless, the Mantonites managed to force the attackers “back to Cadillac in fear.”
Battle of Manton, Part II
The Cadillac faction returned home where they were greeted by an ever-increasing jovial crowd. When the crowd learned that three county safes of records remained in Manton, a second invasion of Manton was planned. Cadillac beefed up its force to include not only the sheriff and his deputies, but also city officials, many of Cadillac’s finer citizens and several hundred mill hands. Provisions consisted of a barrel of whiskey and fifty repeating rifles donated from a local hardware store. Some Cadillac citizens bought clubs, poles, brooms and crowbars.
Again, there are two versions of the second assault on Manton. Cadillac’s version is that they numbered three hundred men and were cautioned by the sheriff to avoid violence or damage to property. When they arrived in Manton, they found a waiting angry mob made up of every able-bodied citizen of Manton and most of the farmers from miles around. Cadillac claims Manton attempted to hang the county clerk and that Manton women rallied to grease the rails with lard and butter to make the tracks too slippery for the train to move.
Manton’s story claims “an unopposed invasion by a drunken mob of five hundred to six hundred men, led by a drunken sheriff and clerk.” The sheriff ordered that the courthouse be demolished and turned his men loose onto Manton streets “like a pack of crazed hounds.”
A New County Seat
While we may never know the full extent of what took place during the “Battle of Manton” on April 5, 1882, we do know it was a highly charged confrontation. Weapons were carried and injuries did occur. There were no deaths. Fortunately, the only gunshots fired that day were those in celebration on the victorious return trip to Cadillac with the county safes – and Wexford’s new county seat.
Source: Brenda Irish, Battle for Wexford County, Seeking Michigan, November 27, 2012. This article originally appeared in the September/October 2006 issue of Michigan History Magazine.
On April 5, 1920, Detroit voters approved Mayor James Couzens’ $15 million bond issue proposal to build and operate a (separate from the existing Detroit United Railway) municipally-owned street railway system.
Source : Detroit Historical Society Facebook page