Chelsea Farmer's Supply
It’s still got the feel of its heyday

In 1987, Greg Raye suggested that Chelsea Farmer’s Supply be torn down. Two years later he and his wife, H. K. Leonard, bought the building to keep it from being turned into a parking lot. “I had no desire to run a business,” explains Raye. But today he and Leonard are still running it.

Built about 1855, Farmer’s Supply is one of the oldest buildings in Chelsea. A classic Greek Revival structure with a low roof and gable returns, it originally faced Main Street. It looks as though it had been built as a residence, but at some point it became Chelsea’s first hotel, the Chelsea House. In 1888 the Chelsea House moved into a new, brick building, and the old building was moved to its present location at 122 Jackson. There a woman named Line Downer and several subsequent owners operated it as a residence hotel for ¬thirty-seven more years, renting rooms to railroad employees and workers at the nearby Glazier stove plant.
In 1925 the building was remodeled as a feed mill. An awning was put on the front and a one-story wing added on the west. At the time most local farmers raised cattle and brought their pickup trucks to the mill to get their grain ground into feed. Ransom Lewis owned the mill until 1936, and for the next eight years it was run by Vincent Ives.

In 1946 Anton Nielsen, a forty-year-old Danish immigrant, bought the store. He ran it for the next forty-five years. Nielsen’s father was a farmer who became a hotel operator. When he was twelve, Nielsen started an apprenticeship to be a clerk; later he went to business school. At age eighteen he emigrated to Canada and did farm work. Two years later he moved to Detroit and worked in an automobile factory and then a paint factory. At a dance in Detroit he met his future wife, Dorothy.
Nielsen served on the Chelsea Village Council and was elected village president four times. For several years he headed the community fair, and he was active in the local Kiwanis Club. He enjoyed vegetable and flower gardening and the many cats who made their home in his store.

Longtime employee Allen Broesamle was devoted to the store and often ran it when Nielsen was ill or traveling. Broesamle’s widow, Ruth, says her husband never wanted a title or ownership, even though Nielsen offered to sell him the place.
Allen Broesamle grew up on a farm in Sylvan Township. His younger brother, Roy, says Nielsen originally offered the job to whichever boy wanted it. Roy chose farming but helped in the store when needed.

When Nielsen bought the store, the main business was the feed mill operation. “Some days he’d start the grinder at seven and never shut it off all day,” Roy Broesamle recalls. “Farmers were lined up all day.” The store made most of its money selling feed additives, such as salt, minerals, and vitamins. Current Farmer’s Supply employee Jeff Weber says Nielsen sold everything from an office in the front: “You’d tell him what you wanted, and he’d go and get it.”

Ruth Broesamle remembers that her husband greased the grinder daily and repaired it often. “The equipment was old, and it was hard to find parts,” she recalls. Each type of feed presented its own challenges. “Hog feed was not a fine grind. It gets into everything,” she says. Weber remembers coming in with his grandfather in the 1960s. “Grandfather would bring in corn or wheat,” he says. “In half an hour he’d be back at the farm.”

By the 1970s many farmers had moved away from the livestock business, while others had begun to grind their own crops or had switched to commercial feed. Farmers who diversified and needed smaller amounts of lots of things became Nielsen’s customer base. Nielsen began selling more supplies such as seeds and fertilizer, and he branched out into nonfarm items such as pet food. To make more room for the additional inventory, he and Allen Broesamle built a lean-to on the back of the building, using lumber from a former railroad freight house that stood where Heydlauff’s parking lot now is.

The wider inventory necessitated more trips to pick up and deliver supplies. Broesamle drove all over southern Michigan for seed corn, feed, fertilizer, and other items, and he made deliveries to farmers as far away as Northville and Plymouth.

When Nielsen was eighty-five, he sold the store. Broesamle stayed to help Greg Raye with the transition but retired after the first summer. Nielsen died in 2001 at age ninety-six.

In his 1987 University of Michigan master’s thesis in architecture, Raye had outlined a plan to turn the area around the Chelsea railroad depot into a pedestrian mall. His wife’s parents, Walter and Helen May Leonard, published the Chelsea Standard and Dexter Leader in the Welfare Building just across the tracks from Farmer’s Supply. Once a bustling commercial center, it became a largely ignored area when passenger trains no longer stopped in Chelsea. Raye suggested that the Farmer’s Supply be replaced with a new building to be used for retail.
But when nearby Longworth Plating eyed the store for a parking lot, Raye stepped in and bought it. Contrary to his original intent, Raye became not only the rescuer of the Farmer’s Supply but also its proprietor. He and his wife have tried to keep the store much the way it was when Nielsen ran it, complete with rough-hewn studs in the walls and air bubbles in the old windows. They’ve retained most of the decor too, keeping the metal signs and the blue ribbons that come with cattle bought at auction at the community fair. The biggest change they’ve made is opening up the lean-to, which had been used only for inventory storage, as sales space.

When Raye and Leonard first bought the store, they continued to run the feed mill. But “it made the whole building shake,” Raye recalls. “It was loud and dusty. The neighbors didn’t like it.” When it broke and they couldn’t get replacement parts, they stopped operating it. They’ve kept what’s left—gears, bins, belt drives—as artifacts.

Raye and Leonard have expanded the stock too. They still serve commercial farmers, but their customers also include hobby farmers and gardeners. An animal lover, Raye has vastly expanded the pet supply department, and he caters to serious bird-¬watchers. Chelsea Farmer’s Supply also sells locally made products such as honey and maple syrup.

Fresh eggs brought in by Allen Broesamle were a staple during the Nielsen years. The new owners have carried on that tradition: now Roy Broesamle supplies them.

Mills, roads, and trains shaped Washtenaw’s towns

In 1824 thirty-eight-year-old Orange Risdon and thirty-two-year-old Samuel Dexter spent four months on horseback exploring mostly uninhabited land in southeast Michigan. At the end of the 2,000-mile trip, they settled within a few miles of each other.

Risdon bought 160 acres fronting the Great Sauk Trail, the Indian footpath that ran all the way from Detroit to Rock Island, Illinois. Dexter bought land that included a stream that flowed into the Huron River, ideal for powering mills and machines and for irrigating. These were the beginnings of Saline and Dexter.

Risdon and Dexter came from very different backgrounds. Risdon left school when he was thirteen and was always proud he’d earned his own way. He learned surveying by apprenticing in western New York, where he helped lay out the towns of Lockport, Brockport, and Buffalo. During the War of 1812 he served as an assistant surveyor for the army. In 1816 he married Sally Newland. Six of their children were born in upstate New York, and the seventh and last in Saline.

Dexter’s ancestors, members of the Protestant ruling class in Ireland, came to the United States in 1642, fleeing a rebellion. His father, Samuel Dexter VI, was a Massachusetts congressman and senator who also served in the cabinets of two presidents. He was secretary of war under John Adams and secretary of the treasury under Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Samuel Dexter VII obtained both a college degree and a law degree at Harvard--unusual at a time when most lawyers learned by apprenticeship. When he finished law school in 1815, he set up a practice in Athens, New York. The next year he married a local woman, Amelia Augusta Prevost, and they started a family.

In 1822 Amelia and their two-year-old son both died. Dexter decided he needed to start a new life rather than obsess over his losses. He later wrote to a cousin, “I came to Michigan to get rid of the blue devils, or to speak more politely of the ennui which like a demon pursues those who have nothing to do.”

Michigan Territory was established in 1805, but most of the land remained in the hands of Native tribes until 1819, when they ceded much of the Lower Peninsula in the Treaty of Saginaw. The following year the government started reselling the land to settlers for $1.25 an acre. The first permanent settlement in Washtenaw County, Woodruff’s Grove, was founded in 1823 (today it’s part of Ypsilanti).

It’s not known how or where Risdon and Dexter met or why they ended up exploring together. But Risdon, too, had suffered misfortune in New York--he had been speculating in land, and lost money in the panic of 1817. Michigan needed surveying, so Risdon came here in 1823 and spent a month exploring on foot. The following year he and Dexter found new centers for their lives.

Dexter built a sawmill on the stream that ran through his property, naming it Mill Creek, and went back to New York that winter. Risdon found work extending Woodward Avenue from Detroit to Pontiac. He also started work on a map of Michigan lands available for settlement.

In 1825 Risdon became the chief surveyor for the first major road built across the state. Father Gabriel Richard, Michigan Territory’s representative in Congress, had convinced the federal government to build a wagon road along the Sauk Trail. Though sold to Congress as a way to move troops quickly in case of an Indian uprising, it proved more useful in settling the state. Known variously as the Military Road, Chicago Road, or Old Sauk Trial, today it is US-12 or Michigan Avenue.

The survey was difficult. Risdon wrote to his wife, Sally, of “job delays” and “the hardship of the weather and other obstructions,” noting that after “a few days wading in warm water our feet were so sore it was like dipping them in scalding water. We had to stop every three or four days to doctor.”

Meanwhile Dexter returned to Michigan with a new bride, Susan Dunham. They lived first in a log house on the west side of Mill Creek--originally built for the mill workers, it was the first residence in Webster Township. Then he built a wooden house near the Huron River on what is now Huron Street. On the other side of Mill Creek, Dexter had a gristmill built.

When Dexter and Risdon first came to Michigan, the trip overland was long and tedious, made worse by a swampy area near Toledo. In 1824 it took Ann Allen, the wife of Ann Arbor cofounder John Allen, two months to make her way from Virginia in a covered wagon. But in 1825 the Erie Canal opened, shortening trips from the East considerably. From the canal’s terminus at Buffalo, travelers could board a steamboat and get to Detroit in three days.

By 1826 enough settlers were coming that the organization of Washtenaw County, carved out of Wayne County in 1822, could begin. Territorial governor Lewis Cass appointed Samuel Dexter its first chief justice. He was also the village postmaster; once a week he rode to Ann Arbor to hear cases and get the town’s mail.

Dexter continued to develop his village. He built and stocked a drugstore in order to lure the area’s first doctor, Cyril Nichols. He donated land for several churches. He had the first school built. And he started Forest Lawn Cemetery after Susan died in childbirth, followed soon by their infant son.

A year later Dexter married sixteen-year-old Millicent Bond, who had come to Webster Township the year before with her mother and sisters. A justice of the peace presided at Millicent’s sister’s house. The bride and groom rode horses back to the village. “Millicent’s trousseau was packed in the saddle bags that Dexter used to carry the mail,” wrote their granddaughter Ione Stannard in a family remembrance. “When fording the Huron River her wedding dress was dampened but the saddle bags kept the judge’s trousers dry.”

Both Dexter and John Allen were fervent anti-Masons, part of a short-lived movement whose members believed Masonic lodges were conspiring to take over the country. Annoyed that Washtenaw County’s only newspaper was neutral on the issue, the two men bought the Western Emigrant in 1829. Allen, perennially short of money, soon sold his share of the paper to Dexter. From then on Judge Dexter’s trips to Ann Arbor included working on the paper. “Once a week my father rode to Ann Arbor on his fine white horse, with saddle bags strapped to the saddle behind him, to edit and print his paper,” his daughter Julia Stannard recalled in 1895. If Dexter planned to stay overnight in Ann Arbor, Millicent, who had been appointed his assistant postmaster, rode with him so she could bring back the mail the same day. According to family legend, one night she was followed home by a panther that stalked her until she reached the village.

In 1829 Orange Risdon finally stopped returning to New York each winter and moved his family to Saline. He and Sally built a house on a hill near the Saline River overlooking the Chicago Road. The house served as a stagecoach stop and inn. It also was the town’s post office for the ten years that Risdon was postmaster, and a courtroom and wedding chapel for the twelve years he was justice of the peace. Voters in the first Saline Township election cast their ballots in the house in April 1830. For good measure, the front parlor was rented to Silas Finch to use as a general store. Like Dexter, Risdon donated land for schools, churches, and a cemetery.

Both Dexter and Risdon waited a few years to plat their new villages--Dexter was busy developing his mills and Risdon was surveying. In 1830, when Dexter finally got around to laying out his town, he was helped by twenty-year-old John Doane. “We began the survey at the west end of Main and Ann Arbor streets, the judge picking out the trees to mark for the center of the street, which now comprises the business part of Dexter,” Doane later wrote. “After the stakes were glazed, I had his instructions to pace three rods each side of the stake to form Ann Arbor Street.” Risdon laid out Saline two years later, no doubt using more professional methods.

In the early nineteenth century, water and roads determined the locations of towns. By the middle of the century, railroads played a big role too. Manchester began in 1832 with the damming of the River Raisin. Chelsea was established in 1850 when Elisha and James Congdon convinced the Michigan Central to locate a railroad station on their farm.

Unlike Dexter and Saline, Manchester did not have the advantage of a single strong leader. But within the current village limits, the River Raisin dropped forty feet, offering great prospects for powering mills. Settlement began in 1832 when John Gilbert, an Ypsilanti entrepreneur, bought twenty-two acres straddling the river. Gilbert hired Emanuel Case to dam the river and then build and run a gristmill and a sawmill.

The following year James Soule put another dam a mile downstream and built a bridge and a sawmill, starting a separate settlement known as Soulesville and later as East Manchester. A third dam was built between the first two, at what is now the Furnace Street bridge. Barnabas Case built a distillery there in 1838 and Amos Dickinson a foundry a year later. These early dams were primitive affairs “built by laying trees and logs lengthwise of the stream and throwing on stones and dirt to the required height,” according to Manchester’s First Hundred Years.

Emanuel Case built the town’s first hotel, a block east of his mills. He kept an office there in his role as justice of the peace. The hotel was rebuilt in 1869 as the Goodyear House, later known as Freeman’s. Today it’s a gas station, but the hotel dining room’s tin ceiling can still be seen in the back room.

The mills drew more settlers to Manchester. In 1834 Lewis Allen built the first school, William Carr opened the first store, and Dr. Bennett Root started the first medical practice. The block east of the mill filled with shops.

After Risdon completed work on the Old Sauk Trail, a new road was built north of it to bring settlers into the second tier of counties north of Ohio. (Originally called the Territorial Road, it’s now known variously as Jackson Road or Old US-12.) Around the same time, a north-south wagon road, today’s M-52, connected Manchester to Stockbridge.

In 1832 brothers Nathan and Darius Pierce came to Washtenaw County from upstate New York. The house Nathan built on the Territorial Road still stands on the north side of Old US-12, just east of the entrance to Chelsea Community Hospital. Nathan often put up travelers overnight--and when one visitor didn’t get up the next morning, Pierce started the cemetery on Old Manchester Road near the fairgrounds.
Other settlers soon arrived in “Pierceville.” Stephen Winans kept a store, postmaster Albert Holt ran a sash and blind factory, and Israel Bailey was the blacksmith.

Darius Pierce settled north of his brother, where the Manchester road crossed Letts Creek. About five families gathered there and christened the hamlet Kedron. Farther south, at the corner of today’s Jerusalem Road, was a settlement called Vermont Colony. With no waterpower, these communities could not develop into manufacturing centers, but they did serve as trading towns for the surrounding farms.

In 1833 brothers Elisha and James Congdon arrived from Chelsea Landing, Connecticut. Elisha bought 160 acres south of Kedron on the east side of the Manchester road. James purchased 300 acres across the road. This proved to be an ideal location.

In 1841 Samuel Dexter donated land to enable the Michigan Central Railroad to reach his town. The next stopping point west was a small refueling station on Hugh Davidson’s farm, just west of James Congdon’s spread. When the station burned down in 1848, the Congdons gave the railroad land for a new station where the tracks crossed the Manchester road. Their donation made it easier for farmers to bring their crops to the train, and businesspeople from Pierceville began moving closer to the depot so they, too, could more easily send and get goods. The residents of Vermont Colony also relocated nearer the station, building a Congregational church on land donated by the Congdons. And so Chelsea was established.

The railroads let farmers ship their goods much farther and faster. As they prospered, so did the towns that served them--Dexter and Chelsea grew quickly because of the Michigan Central. In 1855 the Michigan Southern built a spur that passed through Manchester, followed in 1870 by a Detroit, Hillsdale, and Indiana line that passed through both Saline and Manchester. Orange Risdon was at the festivities marking the train’s arrival in his town; he died in 1876 at age eighty-nine.

All four communities have preserved landmarks to celebrate and honor their early years. Chelsea’s railroad station is now a museum and meeting place, and Elisha Congdon’s house is part of the beautifully expanded McKune Memorial Library. Dexter’s historic landmarks include its railroad station and Gordon Hall, Samuel Dexter’s third residence.

Manchester tore down its railroad station but saved its last blacksmith shop as a museum. The last Manchester Mill is now divided into offices and shops. In Saline, Orange Risdon’s house was moved to 210 West Henry Street in 1949 to make room for Oakwood Cemetery; it’s still there, now divided into apartments. Saline’s old depot is a historical museum, and on its grounds is Risdon’s livery barn. A walking path follows the old train tracks.

Summer 2008 edition of the Community Observer

How a Saline parsonage wound up at Greenfield Village

Seventy years ago, Henry Ford moved Saline’s former Baptist parsonage to Greenfield Village. These days it’s being used to demonstrate what a typical Victorian residence of the 1870s looked like. But that wasn’t the reason Ford wanted the house in his outdoor museum in Dearborn: for him, the important thing was that it was the boyhood home of the inspirational newspaper columnist George Matthew Adams.

The original Baptist church in Saline was built in 1837 on land donated by town founder Orange Risdon, at Henry and Adrian (now South Ann Arbor) streets. The parsonage was built directly south of it two years later. Adams was born there on August 23, 1878, the son of Lydia Havens Adams and minister George Matthew Adams Sr. One of five children, Adams bragged in later years how his parents raised a family of five on an annual salary of $600.

After his father changed ministerial positions several times, Adams ended up going to high school in Iowa. After graduating from Ottawa University in Kansas, he went to Chicago to work at an advertising agency. He started out operating the elevator and worked his way up to writing copy.

In 1907 Adams borrowed money to rent and equip an office and started a syndicate to provide copy for newspapers. His stable of writers would eventually include poet Edgar Guest, children’s author Thornton Burgess, and Robert Ripley of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”

But Adams’s biggest claim to fame was his own column, “Today’s Talk,” syndicated in hundreds of newspapers all over the United States and in Canada. According to the Greenfield Village website, “It was influenced by his religious upbringing, and its inspirational tone appealed to the average American.” Adams’s writing was full of aphorisms, such as “We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves” and “It is no disgrace to start all over. It is usually an opportunity.”

“Henry Ford himself loved to give advice,” notes Greenfield Village curator Jeanine Head Miller. “He was very opinionated. You could see how he would love Adams.” Also, Adams, like Ford, had a strong religious background and his own rags-to-riches story.

Most of the buildings Ford moved to Greenfield Village meant something to him personally. Buildings from his own past included his boyhood home, two one-room schoolhouses he had attended, the home of one of his teachers, a jewelry store where he worked, and the barn on Bagley Street in Detroit where he developed his first car. Other buildings, like the Saline parsonage, were associated with people he admired. Ford moved Thomas Edison’s pioneering research laboratory from Menlo Park, New Jersey, to Dearborn--where it joined the courthouse where Lincoln practiced law; the Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop where the Wright brothers built the first airplane; the Ann Arbor house that Robert Frost lived in when he was poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan; and homes or workshops belonging to Harvey Firestone, Luther Burbank, and Noah Webster.

Adams was still famous in 1937 when Ford decided to include his boyhood home in Greenfield Village. It had been a private residence since 1918, when the Baptist congregation where the elder Adams had ministered merged with the local Presbyterian church. (Separate Baptist congregations were reestablished in later years.)

In its first decades at Greenfield Village, the George Matthew Adams House was repainted all white, the most common color for homes in the 1830s, when premixed paint was not available. Today, it’s called the Adams Family Home,
and the outside is painted as it was in 
the 1870s, off white with forest green
trim. The house is furnished like a typical
middle-class residence of the era, even though the Adams family, who were not prosperous, likely furnished their home with hand-me-downs.

“We’re trying to create a typical Victorian residence of the eighteen seventies,” explains Miller. “Mass-produced furniture would have been available to middle-class people. There were a variety of consumer goods, lots of new choices.”

Two paintings by Lydia Havens Adams, Seascape and Little Ducks, hang in the house. There are also a silver cake basket and numerous books written by either George Adams or his twin sister, Edith, who was interested in early childhood education, plus other books from their libraries.

Though Henry Ford removed one of Saline’s historic homes, he did preserve other parts of the area’s history. In 1935 he bought the old Schuyler Mill, moved it farther back from Michigan Avenue, and added a factory behind it; both are now part of Wellers’ banquet facility. In 1943 Ford moved a one-room school from south of town to a site across the street from the mill; it’s now used for offices.

Summer 2007 edition of the Community Observer

The old parish school thrives as Chelsea’s arts center

A stairway to the sidewalk on Chelsea’s Congdon Street is all that’s left of old St. Mary Catholic Church. The church rectory and convent are now private homes. The parochial school building, however, still resonates with art and music, as it did in the days when Dominican sisters ran the place: it’s now the home of the Chelsea Center for the Arts.

St. Mary School was a center of activity from 1907 to 1972. Passersby at recess time could see children climbing on playground equipment, playing baseball in an empty field behind the church and rectory, and enjoying marbles and other games in an area blocked off by sawhorses on the street.

Ann Arbor’s Koch Brothers constructed the two-story brick school. Its first students were mostly descendants of Irish immigrants who had fled the potato famine and of Germans from Alsace-Lorraine who had come to avoid serving in Napoleon III’s army. Father William Considine, who started the school, was a good friend of Frank Glazier, Chelsea’s leading citizen. At Considine’s behest, Glazier, a Methodist, spoke at the school’s opening in January 1907.

The school had four classrooms on the first floor and an auditorium on the second. Originally it housed only grades 1 through 8, but in 1909 a two-year commercial course was added, which turned into a four-year high school in 1916. Six women enrolled in the first commercial course, and two students made up the first high school graduation class. During World War I classes were moved into the convent because there was not enough coal to heat the school.

The school’s auditorium included a stage, an orchestra area, and dressing rooms. The school regularly produced concerts, recitals, and plays. A 1917–1918 St. Mary’s musicale program listed thirty-two student numbers; the instruments included violins, cornet, bells, drums, and piano. Several times a year students put on plays or pageants, and not always on religious themes. The hall was also used for church and community functions and as a gym.

John Keusch, a 1927 graduate, recalls shooting baskets at recess, after school, and at night. Some parishioners complained about the cost of lighting the gym at night, but the parish priest at that time, Father Henry Van Dyke, was an ardent supporter of athletics. A former student remembers him watching a baseball game out his window. “The bell rang and they started to come in, but he called out that they should finish the game,” she recalls.

Keeping the gym open at night paid off. In 1923 a team composed mostly of St. Mary’s students won a state basketball championship. In 1925 an official St. Mary’s team won the class D title. The next year the team, with an added member from Chelsea High School, won a three-state tournament sponsored by the Ann Arbor YMCA. St. Mary’s also had an excellent girls’ basketball team that often accompanied the boys to out-of-town games and played against girls from the competing school.

These victories, especially the 1925 championship, were remembered and celebrated for decades. When Rich Wood attended St. Mary’s in the 1950s, the winning teams’ pictures were still hanging prominently on the wall, and students knew which classmates’ fathers had participated.

The 1925 basketball triumph was especially memorable, since it came on the heels of a fire that destroyed the school on February 6. Keusch recalls, “I had been there that evening practicing basketball until nine or ten. I was woken up at one when the fire whistle blew.” He rushed over from his house. “The volunteer fire department all came out, but they couldn’t save the building,” he remembers. All that was left was the foundation and some walls.

After the fire, classes moved to the church, with groups gathering in separate corners. The younger students sat on the kneelers and used the seats of the pews as desks. The basketball team practiced and played games in the Glazier Stove Company Welfare Building’s unheated second-floor gym.

Within two days of the fire, farmers came with teams of horses, pushed down the walls, and cleaned up the debris. Detroit architect William DesRosiers designed a new building, which was constructed by Detroit builder George Talbot, who had a summer place at Cavanaugh Lake. Keusch, then fifteen, worked as a mason’s assistant that summer. By November the building was ready for use.

The new school was built on the same foundation but had only one floor. An auditorium was added to the side of the building. It was named after one of St. Mary’s first graduates, Herbert McKune, who was killed in World War I. (McKune also gave his name to Chelsea’s American Legion post.)

The basement served the social functions of the hall. It had a full kitchen where food was prepared for Altar Society dinners, fish fries in Lent, and other events. At Thanksgiving “feather parties,” parishioners played keno to win live turkeys and chickens.

In 1934, in the midst of the Depression, the high school closed. Four seniors graduated that June, and the next year the rest went to the public high school. A student recalls that the move was traumatic: “We couldn’t remember not to stand up when the teacher called on us. We were trained to stand up and say ‘No, Sister,’ ‘Yes, Sister.’ The kids made fun of us and did things like put gum on our seats.”

Pat Dietz, who went to elementary school at St. Mary’s in the late 1930s, recalls that she was petrified attending the public high school. “It was a whole new challenge,” she says. “St. Mary’s was so much smaller.” But she found the sisters had prepared her well, especially in math, penmanship, and grammar. A generation later, in the late 1960s, her son Todd Ortbring also found he was ahead academically, especially in subjects that were conducive to rote learning, but public school was “a major cultural shock. The girls wore miniskirts and the boys bell-bottoms, and they all talked about music, drugs, and sex.”

In the 1960s, as nuns became scarcer, lay teachers were increasingly employed at St. Mary’s School. In 1968 seventh and eighth grades were discontinued, and in 1972 the school closed. One sister stayed on to teach religious education, and the hall continued to be used for functions such as wakes.

In 1998 Jeff and Kathleen Daniels bought the school to use the hall as rehearsal space for the Purple Rose Theater. Since they didn’t need the rest of the building, they sold it to the Chelsea Center for the Arts for $1. The center, founded in 1994, offers adults’ and children’s art and music classes as well as revolving art shows. A nonprofit group, it raises most of its funds at an annual autumn jubilee.

“It was one of my life’s blessings that I was able to attend the school under the Dominican sisters,” says Keusch, adding, “They would be proud of the present use of the school building.”

Side by side, separate resorts catered to blacks and whites

People once came from all over southeastern Michigan to play golf, dance, swim, and fish at two resorts on neighboring lakes north of Chelsea. But the guests rarely mingled, because one group was white and the other was black.

Both resorts were established in the 1920s—Inverness, on North Lake, by a white former Detroit business owner, and Wild Goose Lake, a short hop away, by three black families from Ann Arbor. The latter was born in controversy. When word first got out that some farmers were considering selling their land to blacks, neighbors circulated a petition urging them not to do so. When grocer Perry Noah refused to sign—he reportedly told the petitioners, “My father died in the Civil War to free these people”—his store was briefly boycotted.

The sellers, descendants of the area’s original settlers, refused to be intimidated. And that is how dual resorts, each with its own country club and a beach, grew up almost side by side.

The land around the two small lakes, about five miles north of Chelsea, was first permanently settled in 1833. Charles and John Glenn and their sister Jane Burk¬hart came from upstate New York with their spouses and children. Charles Glenn reportedly had decided to move west after his first wife and two young children were killed when flax she was spinning caught fire.

The siblings bought adjoining tracts of government land and built houses. Charles Glenn’s original house at 13175 North Territorial Road still stands. John Glenn had a fancier Italianate house down the road. The Burkharts settled just south of Wild Goose Lake.

Other settlers quickly followed, enough to justify a post office at North Lake in 1836. That year the Glenn family organized a Methodist church. Nineteen people gathered at John Glenn’s house for the first service, with Charles Glenn presiding as lay preacher. Ten years later the two brothers built a small church that also served as a school. In 1866 John Glenn deeded land for what is now the North Lake United Methodist Church. He also gave land for a cemetery on Riker Road.

The land around the lakes, hilly and full of glacial gravel, was best suited to fruit farming. Charles’s son Benjamin Glenn went into the nursery business with his cousins William and Robert, starting apple trees from seeds they procured at a cider mill. (At Wild Goose Lake today, aged apple, pear, and cherry trees are the remnants of a much larger orchard.)

The local Grange built a hall that served as the community’s social center. The North Lake Band, which played in neighboring towns, was based at the Grange Hall from about 1897 to 1906. In 1925 the North Lake church bought the building for $1 and moved it to church property to use as a Sunday school, dining room, and kitchen.

In 1920, Doug Fraser, president of American Brass and Iron Company in Detroit, retired and moved to North Lake. Fraser had ulcers, and his daughter Lauretta had contracted whooping cough, tonsillitis, and diphtheria; he hoped farming would be a healthier way of life for them both.

Fraser and his wife, Laura, bought John Glenn’s seven-bedroom Italianate farmhouse from John’s grandson Fred Glenn. The dining room was so large, Lauretta Fraser Sockow remembers, that the family preferred to eat meals in the sunroom next to the kitchen.

Sockow, now in her nineties, remembers how she loved the rural area as a child. She attended the one-room North Lake School at 1300 Hankerd, now a private home. Her family joined the North Lake church and sometimes hosted barn dances, playing music on their Victrola. Fraser grew apples, strawberries, raspberries, and currants and also raised pigs, but his pride and joy, according to Sockow, was his registered cattle.

Unfortunately, her father eventually developed an allergy to them. “His arms swelled up to the size of a football,” Sockow recalls, and he had to sell his animals and machinery and find another way of making a living.
His property reached all the way to North Lake, so in 1927 Fraser decided to start a resort. Invoking his Scottish heritage, he called it Inverness and gave its streets such names as Glencoe, Aberdeen, and Bramble Brae. He divided the land between his house and the lake into lots for cottages and set up the deeds so that all owners would have lake privileges. He put in tennis courts behind his house, and he built a nine-hole golf course, expanding into additional land he’d bought along North Territorial Road. He moved his family to Ann Arbor and turned the former Glenn home into the golf course’s clubhouse.

Fraser’s gamble paid off. In the 1920s, greater prosperity and rising car ownership created a new demand for resort communities, even in once-remote areas like North Lake. Ads for Inverness noted it was “only sixty miles from Detroit,” and Fraser encouraged potential buyers to drive out for the day to sample activities, such as pony rides for children and dances for adults (the clubhouse living room was big enough to accommodate two sets of square dances simultaneously). Sockow remembers that one neighbor might play the piano and another the violin.
Sylvia Gilbert, who today lives in the house built for the farm’s hired man, says the original clubhouse “was gorgeous. There was a beautiful powder room upstairs, wicker furniture. You could eat in the dining room or the sun porch.” Gilbert recalls dances where people would dress in kilts, and Halloween parties with elaborate decorations. Her house has since been moved from its original spot to 7095 Glencoe, around the corner.

Inverness attracted people of means from Detroit and Ann Arbor. Doctors, dentists, and businessmen built large cottages. Laurence Noah, Perry Noah’s son, earned money by doing chores for the summer people, such as delivering wood and taking away garbage. In the winter, Laurence and his father cut ice from North Lake and stored it to sell in the summer.

A mile away, at Wild Goose Country Club, the members enjoyed the same amenities as at Inverness—swimming, dancing, fishing, and golf. But for the people who frequented it, Wild Goose represented a much rarer opportunity.

“Blacks had no place to go,” explains Mercedes Baker Snyder. Her father, Charles Baker, along with Donald Grayer and Iva Pope, bought the land and organized the resort. Baker, co-owner of the Ann Arbor Foundry, was interested in the venture because “he loved golf, and blacks couldn’t play at public courses,” explains Mercedes’s husband, Charles Snyder.
The partners developed the club on the 250-acre farm of Sam and Fred Schultz, who were descendants of the original settlers, the Glenns. The petition drive that residents of North Lake started to keep out the black resort community didn’t deter the Schultzes. After the sale was completed on June 1, 1927, the Wild Goose Country Club was formed, with ninety-three lots for cottages and a stretch of communal lakeshore with a fishing dock. As at Inverness, the original farmhouse eventually was converted to a clubhouse. A nine-hole golf course began behind the clubhouse and went across Wild Goose Lake Road toward the lake. A dance hall was built on a hill.

Pawley and Carrie Grayer Sherman, Charles Baker’s father- and mother-in-law, became the first residents when they moved from Ann Arbor to the farmhouse. Mercedes Snyder, who came out for weekends to visit her grandparents, remembers it had three bedrooms downstairs, two big living rooms, and a big kitchen, but no plumbing. Her dad would play golf while the children romped around, walked in the woods, or swam in the lake.
The first two cottages, one built by the Shermans, the other by Donald Grayer, were log cabins made from Sears Roebuck kits. A couple more cabins were built before the Depression. The rest of the eighteen or so members merely owned unbuilt lots, which sold for $100. “At that time most Ann Arbor blacks worked in fraternities or cafeterias,” explains Charles Snyder. “Fifty cents an hour was considered a good wage, so they couldn’t afford to build.”

Most of the members were relatives or friends of the organizers. A much larger group, consisting of other friends and extended family members, came to visit and swim, dance, or golf. Visitors often traveled for hours to get there; in those days there weren’t many recreational facilities open to blacks.

Coleman Castro used to come in the 1930s to fish with Don Grayer Jr., his future brother-in-law. Ann Arbor resident Donald Calvert recalls coming out in the late 1940s or early 1950s to swim with friends at Wild Goose Lake. Back then, he says, the resorts favored by his white classmates, such as Zukey Lake or Groomes Beach at Whitmore Lake, did not allow blacks.

In its heyday, Wild Goose hosted big dances organized by Jim and Harriet Moore (a Sherman daughter), who moved into the clubhouse after the senior Shermans moved out. The public dances attracted blacks from all over southeastern Michigan. U-M dentistry graduate D. J. Grimes, who was one of the first black dentists in Detroit and a cousin of Jim Moore, told his Detroit friends about the dances and also put Moore in touch with good bands. Ann Arbor residents would go home after the dances, but the Detroit visitors often stayed, sleeping in rooms the Moores rented to them, either in the clubhouse or in another house they built across the road.

The lakeside resorts’ golden age was brief. Once the Depression hit, “people didn’t need cottages. People didn’t need to play golf,” says Sockow. Sales at Inverness dropped so precipitously that her father had to incorporate and bring in other investors to keep going. Although he ceded control of the development to a board of directors, he kept managing the country club until his death in 1952.

Cottage building completely stopped at Wild Goose Lake during the Depression. The dance hall was knocked over during a big storm in the 1930s and was never rebuilt. Russell Calvert, Donald’s brother, remembers that the golf course was still there in the late 1940s and 1950s but had become less popular because by then blacks could play on municipal courses. It eventually fell into disuse and is now overgrown.

North Lake residents and Wild Goose Country Club members apparently reached a state of grudging coexistence after the failure of the initial petition drive. Wild Goose people patronized North Lake businesses and report they were treated well. But the two groups did not socialize much.
After World War II, building at both lakes resumed. The prewar cottages were winterized and often enlarged, and the old prejudices began to ease. In the 1960s a Wild Goose resident, Bessie Russell, joined the North Lake church. “They were glad to have her,” recalls Mercedes Snyder. “They needed someone to play the organ.”

Today, both former resorts have turned into bedroom communities where working people and retirees live year round. At North Lake, the Inverness Country Club is going strong, with a waiting list to join. Buying a house in the original subdivision bestows automatic membership. The clubhouse has been replaced with a more modern building that looks like a ranch house.

The Wild Goose clubhouse was sold and is again a home. Much of the communal land, including the golf course, has also been sold and is divided into residential lots awaiting development.

The biggest change at Wild Goose Lake is that the population is now about 50 percent white. “As older blacks die, young blacks don’t want to live in the country,” explains Charles Snyder. But residents still often have family connections—including some that cross the old color line. Members of one of the new white families are the in-laws of Coleman Castro’s son, Tommie.

7-5-1 Doug Fraser boating on North Lake with daughter Lauren “Courtesy Sylvia Gilbert

7-5-2 Glenn House, later the country club “Courtesy Sylvia Gilbert”

7-5-3 Inverness clubhouse today “Courtesy Adrian Wylie” 

7-5-4 Shirley, Sherman, Carl, and Mercedes Baker at Wild Goose Lake with their father, Charles, and grandfather Pawley Sherman. “Courtesy Mercedes Snyder”

7-5-5 Wild Goose sign “Courtesy Adrian Wylie”

7-5-6 Original plat for Inverness “Courtesy Sylvia Gilbert”

7-5-7 The first cottages at Wild Goose Country Club were log cabins built from Sears Roebuck kits “Courtesy Mercedes Synder”

7-5-8 Mercedes Baker Snyder and her husband, Charles, still enjoy the lake. “Courtesy Adrian Wylie”

When switchboard operators ran the show

In the days when telephones had human connections, the most feared person in Dexter was Min Daley. As the village’s switchboard operator, she had the goods on everyone. From her perch on the second floor of the Gates Building, Daley kept an eye on everything in town, and she could listen in on anyone’s phone calls. She even slept in a small room behind the switchboard office, and if there was a blaze, she roused the volunteer firefighters.

Information is power, and Daley had it. She could answer such questions as “What stores are still open?” and “Has the band concert begun?” She could tell wives whether their husbands had left work for the day, and she knew where the doctor could be reached. It was hard to hide anything from Min Daley.
In these days of the Internet, it’s hard to imagine one person wielding the authority of Daley, who was Dexter’s ears and eyes from 1906 to 1938. Maybe she really didn’t listen in on very many calls, but just knowing she could do so made townspeople wary of her. When telephones were a place’s only means of speedy communication, the switchboard operator was the information gatekeeper.

It’s also hard to imagine a time when communication was so intimate. Before connections were automated, operators were so vital to village business and social life that they usually operated from thrones of a sort. In Manchester the phone switchboard was in a small second-floor office in the Arbeiter Building (now the site of a laundry and pizza store). In Chelsea switchboard operators sat above Oscar Schneider’s grocery store, now the Chelsea Market. In Saline a small Greek Revival house at 200 South Ann Arbor Street was devoted to telephone operation. These were the power centers of their communities for many years.

Phone service began in western Washtenaw County in the early 1880s, just a few years after Alexander Graham Bell’s famous 1876 conversation in Boston with his assistant Thomas Watson. The first local phones were like Bell’s, one-to-one devices linking two places--such as an office and a home, or two locations of a business, like a mill by a river and the mill’s downtown office.

The first phone in Saline was set up in 1881 by Beverly Davenport to connect his store at Ann Arbor Street and Michigan Avenue with his home on East Henry Street. “Not only can a conversation be carried on with perfect ease, but also while in the store we could distinctly hear the music of the piano Mrs. D. was playing,” reported the Saline Observer. Some lines were set up purely for social reasons. Chelsea’s John Keusch recalls that his mother had a line connecting her with a friend a block away.

Rural residents were the first to get phone lines with multiple users. “Local service was not demanded by small villages that could sling the local dirt over the back fence,” explained Archie Wilkinson, a prime mover in the Chelsea telephone system, in a 1920s reminiscence. “The demand came from the farmers.” As Manchester historian Howard Parr relates, “An influential farmer might go to his neighbors and ask if they wanted to chip in for poles and wires.” Some of these early lines, set up along country roads, were shared by a dozen or more families.

The next step was to establish toll lines between communities. About 1882, Chelsea’s George Glazier began selling coupons for toll service to Dexter. When he had enough money he set up an office over his drugstore on the northwest corner of Main and Middle streets. “You went up the stairs, had operator call party you wanted by name, and then a messenger would be sent out to locate party and bring them to central station” in Dexter, wrote Wilkinson. It wasn’t until 1895 that the Glazier Stove Company installed its own telephone. Later the phone office was relocated above Schneider’s grocery.

Thomas Keech, who had organized the first phone system in Ann Arbor, instigated phone service linking Manchester, Dexter, and Saline. In 1882 Keech asked Mat Blosser, publisher of the Manchester Enterprise, to help sell scrip good for phone rentals and messages. By May 1883 they had sold enough to set up a line between Manchester and Chelsea. Blosser at first managed it out of his newspaper office. Soon they moved the exchange to an office next door in the Arbeiter Building and hired their first operator, Jennie Moore, who later married Keech.

In Dexter, Keech persuaded Thomas Birkett, owner of the local flour mill, to link Dexter with the other long distance lines in his system. A public phone was installed in the Irving Keal drug and medicine store on Main Street, with Keal acting as the first phone manager. As in Manchester and Chelsea, the company helped meet the cost by selling coupons, to be redeemed when the service was completed. The phone office was later moved to the Gates Building.

Keech and Clark Cornwell of Ypsilanti owned a phone line between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, and in 1881 they approached Saline to hook up to their service. Keech’s companies would grow into the Michigan State Telephone Company, later Michigan Bell. In its early days, the company was challenged by a number of small local companies and an Ann Arbor–based regional company called Washtenaw Home Phone. By 1913 Bell had bought everyone out and had become the sole provider, except in Saline, which was served by the Saline Telephone Company, a private company formed by Edward Hauser.

Hauser, a Saline wool dealer, started his own line between Saline and Bridgewater to save him the time and trouble of frequent buggy trips to make deals with farmers. In 1902 he set up an exchange in an office in the Union Block on Michigan Avenue. In 1933 he moved the phone office to the house at 200 South Ann Arbor Street. When Hauser died, he left the company to his sister, Ella Henne; her son, Ed Henne, became its manager. His office and the switchboard were in the two front rooms. A workroom in the back had benches for about four repairmen, a small room upstairs served as the lounge, and the garage stored phone equipment.

In Saline and other communities, the switchboard was linked to the lines of all the local users. People in most homes used wooden wall-mounted “magneto” telephones, so called because the power to start the connection came from a hand-cranked generator. People who wanted to make calls turned the crank to ring the operator, who used a switchboard to plug them into the line of the desired party. Often the operator recognized the caller’s voice. One person remembers calling as a child and asking the operator only “Can I talk to my grandmother?” That was enough to get connected to Granny. That personal service is quite a contrast to today, when you can’t even get someone in directory assistance who’s familiar with your own state.

Two one-volt batteries stored in the bottom of the magneto phones provided the power to send the caller’s voice over the lines. Another type of phone, the “candlestick,” so called because of its tall, thin shape, was more often used in stores and offices. Its batteries could be stored separately and were often kept in a box under a desk or counter. In both models, the batteries had to be replaced periodically. As a child in Manchester, Howard Parr used to take the carbon rods out of old phone batteries and use the rods as crayons to write on the sidewalk.

Party lines were common, especially in rural areas. Incoming calls could be heard at every home on the line, but the ring was different for each family. Sometimes, as a prank or to eavesdrop, somebody in another house would also pick up the phone.

Since all the neighbors knew one another, it wasn’t too hard to identify who was listening in. Parr says users would pay attention to various clues, such as “a grandfather clock striking while they were listening, or an asthmatic--we’d hear them puffing.” John Keusch of Chelsea recalls that at his grandparents’ farm “sometimes a third party would join in the conversation,” much to the annoyance of those talking. In the end, “we’d laugh about things. We were all neighbors--it worked out,” recalls Ruth Kuebler of Freedom Township.

Saline residents paid extra to reach other communities on the toll lines that Bell had installed. Kuebler, who grew up on a farm linked with the Saline system, remembers that to avoid long-distance costs her family would drive to a neighbor’s house to make calls to Ann Arbor, or to a different neighbor’s to make calls to Manchester. Neighbors outside the Saline area would come to their house to make calls to people in the Saline system.

In villages the party lines were less personal, because users were not necessarily neighbors. Many villagers went without phones for a long time. “If we had to find out something, we went somewhere to find out,” recalls Norma McAllister of Dexter.

Despite those holdouts, local telephone managers and switchboard operators soon became the towns’ most vital figures. They handled emergencies, calling doctors and police and ringing fire alarms.

In Saline, Ed Henne was a well-loved figure. Running the office during the Great Depression, “he was lenient if people didn’t pay their bills on time,” recalls Doris Henne, his daughter. She says that her dad often took in stray dogs at the office and found homes for them. When he died in 1939 at age fifty-one, the Saline schools closed for his funeral.

Min Daley was Dexter’s lifeblood; in turn, Daley’s whole life was the phone company. She never married. Daley could be very helpful; she’d even take messages for people when they were not home. But she was widely suspected of listening in on calls. “Everyone thought she did. The opportunity was there,” recalls Davenport. “People were afraid of her. They didn’t know what she knew or what she passed on.”

But Daley wasn’t infallible. Louise Mann, who worked as an operator in the late 1930s, recalls, “She once was telling everyone a man died, and then we saw that man walking across the street.”

Like the operators, the telephone repairmen were well-known figures in their communities. Chelsea’s William Van Orman was dubbed “Mr. Telephone.” “People in Chelsea never called the repair department in Ann Arbor--they’d call Dad at home,” recalls his son, Wayne Van Orman, who has a vivid memory from his youth of holding a flashlight one rainy night while his dad shimmied up a pole to splice a broken wire.

Western Washtenaw County villages began switching to dial phones in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The technology, developed in 1919, had been in use in Ann Arbor since 1925, when it was installed in the phone company’s new Beaux-Arts building at 315–323 West Washington. It was a big job to change systems: larger buildings were needed for the automatic equipment, and all the magneto phones had to be replaced with dial versions.

“We’d go from house to house to house putting in new phones,” recalls Bob Kuhn, who worked on the switchover in Milan. The change was always made in the middle of the night, with the phone company workers returning in the morning to pick up the old phones. For many people, this was their last personal contact with their phone companies. From then on, a dial tone rather than a voice greeted customers.

Today, even with the advanced technologies of voice mail, e-mail, and the Internet, getting quick and easy contact with a central source of information can be a daunting task. In the old days in the small towns, all you had to do was pick up the phone and you were connected.

When dial phones arrived in Dexter, Min Daley retired, but she was left with a memento of all the years she’d run the show in town. The company gave her the switchboard to keep in her home.

For a century, railroads were the heart and soul of our towns.

In 1827 most people in Michigan Territory had never even heard of a railroad. But on Independence Day that year, village founder Samuel Dexter made a speech extolling the wonders of English passenger trains that reached dizzying speeds of thirty to forty miles an hour. Dexter’s vision of the future soon proved prescient: for much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, trains would be the lifeblood of Chelsea, Dexter, Manchester, and Saline.

Nine years after Dexter’s speech, the Michigan Central Railroad began laying track from Detroit toward Chicago. In 1837 Dexter ceded part of his pear and apple orchard so that the line would come through his village. The arrival of the first train in 1841 was the occasion for a public festival.

“Early in the morning of that day the people of the surrounding country came pouring into the village on foot, on horseback, in carriages and wagons,” according to the 1881 Chapman History of Washtenaw County, Michigan. “By 9 a.m. a large concourse of people had assembled at the depot, awaiting the arrival of the cars, which were to bring the visitors from Ann Arbor and other eastern villages along the line of the road.”

By later standards those first trains were dangerous, noisy, and smoky, but residents welcomed them enthusiastically. “We had but a few minutes to wait before the shrill whistle of the iron horse was heard, and instantly the train came in its grandeur and majesty around the curve into full view, and thundered up to the depot, when the air was filled with loud huzzas and shouts of welcome, and everyone was happy,” recalled an eyewitness.

Eight years after putting Dexter on the map, the Michigan Central reached New Buffalo on the Indiana state line. It was known as the “strap railroad,” because the tracks were made of wood with an iron strip spiked to the top.

Those lightweight rails were later replaced with modern solid steel. The original wooden stations similarly gave way to far more impressive structures. Dexter’s first depot was replaced in 1886 by a new building, on the opposite side of the tracks, that still stands today. Its designers were Spier and Rohns, Detroit architects responsible for many other depots, including the massive fieldstone station in Ann Arbor (now the Gandy Dancer restaurant).

Originally, the next stop west of Dexter on the Michigan Central line was Davidson’s Station, on Hugh Davidson’s farm about two miles west of present-day Chelsea. When that station burned down in 1848, arson was suspected. Afterward, Elisha and James Congdon offered free land to the railroad to relocate the station eastward to their farm, where a road to Manchester crossed the tracks. The first shipment from the new station, in 1850, was a 130-pound barrel of eggs sent to Detroit.

The railroad spurred the development of the village of Chelsea, as stores and businesses began to locate nearby. In 1870 tricksters tied a rope to the wooden depot and attached it to the caboose of a train. When the train left, the station fell. Ten years later the Michigan Central replaced it with a station designed by Michigan architects Mason and Rice (George Mason is best known for designing the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island).

To compete with the Michigan Central, which ran west near the present course of I-94, another railroad was built across the southernmost tier of Michigan counties. Originally known as the Palmyra and Jacksonburgh (an earlier name of Jackson), it became the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern. In 1844 a spur of this railroad, going northwest from Adrian to Jackson to connect with the Michigan Central, passed through Manchester. In 1854 a wooden station was built in Manchester at the site of the present Manchester Market.

In 1870 a second line reached Manchester--the Detroit, Hillsdale, Indiana. This line connected the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern at Hillsdale to the Michigan Central in Ypsilanti. The two lines crossed west of Manchester, and a second station was built at the site of present-day Chi-Bro Park. The DHI continued east through Bridgewater, Saline, and Pittsfield Junction. In 1910 the brick Union Station replaced the original wooden one used by the Lake Shore line. The DHI built a spur to reach the new station.

The DHI was a fairly small line, and railroad historian Sam Breck of Ann Arbor describes its Saline station, which still stands, as “a freight house with a public area on the end.” Nonetheless, Saline residents celebrated their first rail service with great fanfare. City founder Orange Risdon was among the dignitaries who spoke at the opening of the line on July 4, 1870. Eleven years later, the Chapman county history reported that the train “has been of great convenience to the citizens of the village. . . . It has opened up a market for the productions of the country, enabling farmers and others to realize handsomely on many of their investments.”

The hotels in the communities served by the railroads got much of their business from train passengers. Often there were modest hotels near the stations and fancier ones downtown. Horse-drawn carriages met trains at the station to take passengers to the downtown hotels. In Chelsea, the Chelsea House (now the Sylvan Building) was around the corner from the depot, and the Boyd Hotel (now Dayspring Gifts) was a few blocks down Main Street. Manchester’s Don Limpert remembers a boardinghouse near the Union Station, although the Green and Goodyear hotels were much more important. Dexter historian Norma McAllister says there were a number of downtown hotels over the years, with Stebbins House (now Elaine’s Gallery) the most important, and the Railroad Hotel just east of the station. “It was two stories, with a big porch where you could sit and watch trains come in,” she recalls. Converted to apartments, it burned down a few years ago. Only Saline, with its single small line, had no hotels near the station.

Many of the early passengers were immigrants. A Dexter history reported that it was not unusual for fifty to sixty to get off the train at one time and that there were always more passengers than seats. Later, salesmen and visitors accounted for most of the traffic. According to Manchester historian Howard Parr, in the days before national prohibition, when drinking was a county option, “thirsty men from Lenawee County came to drink on Saturday night. Manchester was a German town, so there were a lot of saloons. The clothes stores sold cheap cardboard suitcases, so they could load up with booze to bring home.” Several Manchester breweries supplied those busy saloons.

As the area’s industry developed, commuting workers added to the passenger traffic. Most of the employees at Frank Glazier’s stove company in Chelsea, founded in 1890, came by train, boarding with local residents and returning home on weekends. From Chelsea, workers could commute directly to Detroit or Jackson. In Dexter in the 1930s, McAllister recalls, many people who worked for the University of Michigan commuted to Ann Arbor by train.

In the early twentieth century passenger trains ran all the time; Manchester had twenty a day. People took trains to bigger towns, such as Jackson, Adrian, or Detroit, for shopping, entertainment, and excursions. Parr recalls hearing from his father that the local baseball team would take the train to Clinton to play. Saline historian Wayne Clements has seen old ads for special excursion trains to the Hillsdale County Fair. For U-M football games, Saline residents would take the train to Pittsfield Junction and transfer to the Ann Arbor Railroad. But riding on the DHI had its disadvantages. “They used to call it Old Strawberry, because it was so slow you could get off and pick strawberries,” laughs Clements.

Eventually all the local railroads became part of the New York Central system. In 1881 the former DHI (which by then was the Detroit, Hillsdale, South Western) was leased in perpetuity to the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, which in turn was linked to the New York Central in 1915. The Michigan Central became part of the New York Central in 1930.

In wartime, trains played a major role in transporting troops and supplies. Civil War troops left from Dexter and Chelsea to convene in Adrian. During World War I, a banner supporting the soldiers was hung on the Welfare Building across from the Chelsea station.

Even more troop trains came through during World War II. Johnny Keusch of Chelsea remembers traveling back to Chicago as a soldier: “The train was so crowded by the time it reached Chelsea, I had to stand between cars all the way.”

Passenger trains usually included a post office car. “The mail would stop and unload,” recalls Robert Devine, who was stationmaster at Chelsea after World War II. “If it didn’t stop, they’d just pick up the mail from a crane and throw what they had off on the platform.”

Carrying passengers was an important service, but freight was the moneymaker. Manchester, Dexter, and Chelsea each had a separate freight house to handle incoming goods. When farmers could ship produce quickly and cheaply, they could go beyond subsistence farming to cash crops. Those with farms between the Michigan Central and the Lake Shore benefited from a price war between the two lines.

Farmers would bring goods into the station by horse and wagon and unload them into storage bins that would hold their produce until there was enough to fill a boxcar. Sheep--big business in Saline, Manchester, and Bridgewater--were herded into pens near the stations and eventually led up ramps into cattle cars. Dairy farmers used the train to get their output to creameries, such as the one in Manchester.

The railroad also delivered equipment and supplies. Parr’s family got hatchling chicks from Klager’s Hatchery in Bridgewater. “We’d get a postcard to go down to the station and pick them up,” Parr recalls. Keusch’s father, a grocer, depended on the train for much of his inventory. “We’d get bread from Ann Arbor every morning,” Keusch says.

Frank Glazier sent his stoves all over the country by rail. At the company’s peak, its buildings stood on three sides of the Chelsea depot. During Devine’s time the line into Chelsea had spurs for Chelsea Milling, Chelsea Spring, Central Fiber, Chelsea Lumber, and several coal and oil dealers. In the 1950s Devine’s duties were increased to include Dexter; he recalls that there was less industry there but that D. E. Hoey, right across the tracks, was among several nearby lumber and coal businesses that relied on rail deliveries.

In the nineteenth century Manchester had a lot of manufacturing, including several barrel-making factories. A large gravel pit outside of town sent loads daily by train. As late as 1950, when Delbert Ludwick was stationmaster, the Manchester station had spurs on either side of the main track, one of which served two nearby gas stations. There was also a wool shed “where they brought in the wool and bagged it. When they had enough for a carload, they’d send it out,” recalls Ludwick.

Saline had a ribbon of industry opposite its depot--a blacksmith shop, a planing mill, a concrete block making operation, and the Saline branch of the Manchester Bat and Handle Company, which made baseball bats. These businesses used the train both for receiving raw materials and for sending out finished products. Across the street, Mercantile Delivery had storage facilities for farm products.

After World War II people and companies began to prefer the door-to-door convenience of automobiles and trucks. The stations in Saline and Manchester, which had lost passenger service in 1938, nursed a dwindling freight business. By 1951 the old DHI line was down to two freight trains a week, and it took eight hours to get from Ypsilanti to Hillsdale. Even that service was discontinued in 1961.

Chelsea and Dexter, on the main line across the state, kept going a little longer. In 1947 they were still served by four passenger trains a day, two each way. Although the New York Central connected to transcontinental lines, by then people were making most long trips by car and used the train mainly for local travel. “I’d occasionally sell a ticket to someplace else, to California or Texas or Canada,” recalls Devine. Passenger service in Dexter stopped in the 1950s. The station closed, and freight was limited to full boxcars delivered directly to spurs.

The New York Central halted passenger service to Chelsea in the 1960s, but a small commuter train continued to stop there until the early 1980s. There was no stationmaster after 1975, so people wanting to board had to hoist a flag indicating they wanted to be picked up.

The Manchester station has been torn down, but the Chelsea, Dexter, and Saline stations are still being used. When the Chelsea station closed, concerned citizens formed the Chelsea Depot Association to acquire it. Today, the west half is the Chelsea History Museum, while the east half is used for a meeting room. Dexter’s depot is occupied by the Ann Arbor Model Railroad Club, which is building a model of the Michigan Central line from Detroit to Chicago.

Saline’s depot, also a local history museum, is enhanced by a caboose and a livery stable moved to the property. The Boy Scouts plan to construct a windmill, of the type that would have been used to draw water for the DHI’s steam locomotives. Saline’s model railroad club also meets there, and there is talk of someday turning the whole depot into a railroad museum and moving the other Saline exhibits to another site. In each of the four towns, the local interest in railroad heritage continues to be strong, a generation or more after the last trains left the station.

Spring 2003 edition of the Community Observer