Old graveyards unlock the secrets of forgotten communities.

Washtenaw County is dotted with small rural nineteenth-century graveyards, often of startling beauty. Their stone markers, sometimes in rows but often clustered around trees or bushes, record the passage from birth to death; the more elaborate stones are also decorated with symbolic images such as weeping willows or open Bibles.

Some cemeteries are well maintained by townships, churches, or private groups, and are easy to find. Others, abandoned and overgrown, are harder to locate but worth the effort. Broken gravestones, tilted or lying on the ground with bushes and grass growing around and over them, contrast with thriving remnants of flowers planted more than a century ago. The decrepitude gives even more credence to the “life is fleeting” message of cemeteries and adds to their eerie beauty.

But local cemeteries are more than places for admiration and contemplation. Just as individual graves contain the mortal remains of people who once lived, these cemeteries are the remains of dead communities--villages, churches, or clusters of farm families—that long ago were centers of local life.

In the nineteenth century, mill towns dotted the Huron and Raisin rivers. Most of them died out after steam power replaced waterpower. In 1874 the town of River Raisin, at Clinton and Braun roads in Bridgewater Township, had a post office, railroad station, sawmill, gristmill, and cider mill. All that remains today is the Bridgewater Town Hall Cemetery, bounded on the south by a cornfield and on the north by the 1882 township hall. The hall replaced one built in 1856, which the township board mandated be made available for “moral and scientific lectures, and for funerals.”

Like all the old cemeteries, the Bridgewater Town Hall Cemetery stands on high ground, and many of the graves are grouped around trees. A patch of irises is planted in the back. Nineteenth-century mourners put a lot of work into making gravesites pretty, since family members frequently visited. Families usually bought cemetery plots in a large group; the family name is often marked on a pillar or stele, surrounded by lower markers for individual graves.

At the Bridgewater Town Hall Cemetery, local veterans groups have marked the grave of Ebenezer Annabil, who died in 1842 at age eighty-six. Annabil served as a sergeant and seaman in the Revolutionary War. Veterans groups also mark Civil War vets’ graves, which are numerous in these nineteenth-century graveyards.

The settlement of Hudson Mills, on the Huron River north of Dexter, also had a cluster of mills--flour, saw, pulp, plaster, and cider--as well as a general store and a hotel big enough to host dances. Nothing remains of this town but a few remnants of the millrace and crumbling foundations on the west side of Hudson Mills Metropark, and the Hudson Cemetery on Dexter-Pinckney Road just south of North Territorial. The graves of David and Betsy Dudley are placed prominently in the front of the burial ground, facing the road. The Dudleys, farmers who came to Michigan from New York in 1829, sold the land to Dexter Township in 1841 for use as a cemetery.

Hudson Mills and other early cemeteries are filled with sandstone markers, which were inexpensive and easy to engrave. The full dates of birth and death are usually inscribed, along with the age at death. If there is a symbolic picture on top, it is often balanced with a Bible verse on the bottom, such as “She has done what she could—Mark 14:8” or “It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead—2 Maccabees 12:45.” On most old stones these quotations, small and often in script, are almost impossible to read, because the material eroded so easily.

In the early nineteenth century granite had to be imported from Scotland and was too expensive for general use. By the 1880s, however, it was being quarried in Vermont, and ordinary families could afford it. People wanted granite headstones for their durability, but they were harder to engrave, especially with the tools then available, so the inscriptions usually were limited to the name and the years of birth and death. If there are no granite markers in a cemetery, it probably was not used after the 1870s.

Hudson has the usual array of nineteenth-century decorations on its sandstone markers. The weeping willow is the most common motif, followed by various religious themes--Bibles, fingers pointing to heaven, hands clasped in prayer. None of these small country graveyards, however, features the kind of grand sculptural markers--such as angels, lambs (for children who died), or tree stumps (for people cut down in midlife)--that are sometimes found in larger nineteenth-century cemeteries. Perhaps the people in these rural areas couldn’t afford the larger carvings or thought them too ostentatious.

At the back of Hudson Cemetery is the grave of Benjamin Chamberlain, a local farmer and son of David Chamberlain, a millwright and mill owner. Although the Chamberlain family is still in the area, Benjamin is the only one buried there. Welton Chamberlain, his grandson, explains, “My grandmother bought ten grave lots at Forest Lawn in Dexter when it was the moxie thing to do--be buried in a well-kept cemetery. She died in 1909. She always planned to move her husband there but didn’t.”

Chamberlain’s grandmother’s concern about the upkeep of the Hudson cemetery was well founded. “The Howards, who lived on the corner, used to mow and go in and trim,” Chamberlain explains. “They had family there.” The Chamberlains also kept up the place, but after World War II other families died out or moved away, and the cemetery fell into disrepair. About four years ago, at the prompting of the Pinckney Historical Society, the township began mowing the site again, and the county historical society also helps keep it trimmed.

Unfortunately, the cemetery at Scio Village gets no such attention, even though the village, between Ann Arbor and Dexter on the Huron River at Zeeb Road, was much bigger than Hudson or River Raisin. Laid out in 1835 by Samuel Foster, at its peak it had mills, a post office, grocery and hardware stores, a copper shop, a blacksmith, a saloon, a brewery, and a wagon repair shop. It was also a stop on the Michigan Central Railroad. Foster’s brother, Ted, coedited the Signal of Liberty, an abolitionist newspaper published in Ann Arbor, and ran a station of the Underground Railroad in Scio Village, helping escaped slaves reach Canada. But after Scio’s main mill burned in 1896, the community died out, with the post office closing in 1901.

Scio’s cemetery is on Huron River Drive at the western edge of the area where the town once stood. When members of the Genealogical Society of Washtenaw County first surveyed it in 1971, the graveyard was still easy to locate from the road, and they found thirty-one stones, although there were probably more than that originally.

Today the cemetery is so overgrown that it took me three tries to find it. Finally, following a small, unpromising path, I came to a circle of daylilies, a plant often used at cemeteries because of its easy maintenance and longevity. Continuing on the path, I finally found one stele lying on its side and a stone pedestal that must have been the foundation of another tombstone.

If an early community included a church, its cemetery stood a much better chance of being preserved. Rogers Corner, at Fletcher and Waters roads, and Rowes Corner, at M-52 and Pleasant Lake Road, today consist of nothing more than a few farmhouses. Yet graves are still well maintained in the church cemeteries there. That’s because the settlements’ respective churches--Zion Lutheran in Rogers Corner and Sharon United Methodist in Rowes Corner--both have active congregations today.

Of course, not all nineteenth-century churches in the area made it to the next century--much less this one. Roman Catholics in Manchester, Dexter, and Chelsea all trace their places of worship to country churches that no longer exist, although the cemeteries attached to these churches are still there.

In 1839 Germans in Freedom Township founded St. Francis, the first Catholic congregation in western Washtenaw County. They built a log church at Schneider and Hieber roads, and Catholics from the area, including Manchester, came to services in buggies. In 1858 the congregation built a brick church about a mile south on Bethel Church Road near Koebbe; it was used until 1911, when the congregation merged with St. Mary’s in Manchester.

The cemetery for the first St. Francis is overgrown and unused, with scattered tombstones, many fallen on the ground. Crosses are the only decorations on these stones. The site is reverting to forest, but the ground cover of myrtle, another common cemetery plant, still thrives.

The second St. Francis Cemetery, maintained and sometimes used by St. Mary’s, is in better shape. A wrought iron fence, with grapevines climbing it (see cover photo), surrounds the site. Inside are plantings of hosta, rose of Sharon, and lilac. The German ancestry of the founders is obvious from the names on the mostly granite tombstones, such as Dettling, Friedel, Schneider, and Fritz. The church was razed in 1933, but the Italianate rectory next to the cemetery is still there, now a private home.

Dexter’s Catholic church, St. Joseph, originally stood at Quigley and Dexter Townhall roads, five miles northwest of the village. The first burial at its churchyard was in 1839, a year before the church itself was built. The tombstones bear mainly Irish names, such as Haggerty, McEntee, Reilly, and O’Connor. James Gallagher’s stone says he was born in Sligo, Ireland.

When the original church burned down in 1856, the congregation moved its services to Dexter and after 1870 stopped using the old cemetery. A marker at the site explains: “Time, neglect, and vandalism took its toll until 1980, when parishioners reclaimed and restored this sacred place. Unable to locate the original gravesites, the monuments were gathered into the present arrangement to preserve them and honor the memory of our ancestors.” The stones were laid flat and embedded into two cross-shaped concrete slabs, one at each end of the cemetery, with groups of steles planted in the middle of each.

Another former churchyard survives as a municipal graveyard. Two miles west of Sharon United Methodist Church, another Methodist church once stood at the corner of Pleasant Lake and Sylvan roads. After a tornado destroyed its building in 1917, the congregation decided to join the Methodist congregation in Manchester. The Sharon Township Hall across the street was also destroyed, so the township bought the church property, including its cemetery, and built a new hall there.

Both the township hall and the cemetery are still in use. Near the cemetery entrance is a Civil War monument honoring Abraham Lincoln and twenty-four Washtenaw County men who died in that war.

Many farmers saw no need to use anyone else’s cemetery, preferring to bury family members on plots at the backs of their farms. Sometimes neighbors used the space, too. One example is the Popkins Cemetery in Scio Township, on the old Popkins farm on Pratt Road near Honey Creek. One of the earliest cemeteries in the township, it is now almost entirely overgrown.

The Phelps family had a plot at the corner of Baker and Marshall roads south of Dexter. Alexander and Margaret Phelps came from Connecticut in 1831 with their two grown sons, Norman and Amos, and all bought farms near each other. The cemetery in the back of Norman’s farm was the burial spot not just for the family but for other early Dexter residents as well. Dexter historian Norma McAllister recalls, “Dexter people used to be buried there. Then people with families there were told to move them to Forest Lawn, that it was no longer going to be kept up.” Most of the site is filled with trees and forest undergrowth, but a few graves remain in derelict condition, along with some myrtle and lilies of the valley.

The Scadin family of Webster Township had better luck with its cemetery at Webster Church and Farrell roads. It stayed in the family until 1967, when the last Scadin, named Will, died and left the farm to Webster United Church of Christ. Today the church maintains the Scadin Cemetery on the northeast corner of the intersection, along with its own cemetery on the southeast corner.

“Cemeteries are a peaceful place to visit,” says McAllister. Anyone who has spent time poking around old graveyards will agree with that. One warning: if you go cemetery prowling, wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt to protect yourself from poison ivy and burrs. A very useful guide is the Genealogical Society of Washtenaw County’s Directory of Cemeteries of Washtenaw County, Michigan, a booklet listing more than 100 cemeteries, complete with maps. It’s available through the society’s website, www.hvcn.org/info/gswc/.

Fall 2002 edition of the Community Observer

Commuters cursing delays at the narrow railroad underpass on the west end of Dexter should direct their anger at Charles Warner’s cow.

The bridge over Dexter-Pinckney Road was designed in 1890 by Frederick Blackburn Pelham, the first African American to graduate from the University of Michigan in engineering. But it might never have been built if Warner’s cow hadn’t calved on Sunday morning, March 20, 1887.

When Warner didn’t show up for church, his parents, Dennis and Martha Warner, became concerned. That afternoon they walked from their house in the village toward Charles’s farm, which he had taken over from them years before. As they began to cross the tracks, the Michigan Central’s Limited Express roared around the curve at forty-five miles per hour. Dennis Warner made it across, but his wife did not. “Mrs. Warner evidently became slightly confused, hesitated an instant, and just as she stepped from the track was struck by the pilot [cowcatcher] of the locomotive, throwing her head against the cylinder, crushing her skull and killing her instantly,” reported the Dexter Leader.

To be going so fast, the train must not have stopped at the train station at Third and Broad, rebuilt just a year earlier. But an inquest determined the railroad was not at fault. The Michigan Central, which ran from Detroit to Chicago, had been rolling through Dexter since 1841.

The Warners were early Dexter settlers. In 1837, when the crops failed on his farm, Dennis Warner came into town and found work shoveling gravel on the embankment being built for the railroad. He also started making shoes, and parlayed that into a general mercantile business. At the time of his wife’s death, he owned a whole block of stores on the south side of Main Street.

The accident cast a “pall of gloom over the entire community,” reported the Leader. After the funeral, held at the Congregational church on Fifth Street, townsfolk began petitioning the railroad to build a bridge at the crossing. At the time the Michigan Central was making improvements all along the line, and the railroad assigned Pelham, a young civil engineer whose specialty was bridge building, to design new bridges over the road and over Mill Creek. Both elegant stone structures are still there, the latter behind the fire station at the end of Warrior Park.

Pelham began working for the Michigan Central as an assistant engineer the year Martha Warner died, shortly after his graduation from the U-M. Born in 1865, he had grown up in Detroit, the youngest of seven children of Robert and Frances Pelham, who had moved from Virginia. Robert Pelham was a stonemason, and his son often worked with him on projects around Detroit.

Frederick Pelham excelled in math. According to The Michigan Manual of Freedmen’s Progress, published in 1915, he graduated at the top of his U-M class. The Dexter underpass was the most unusual of the twenty bridges that Pelham designed in Michigan because of its skew arch, a design used when bridges are not perpendicular to crossings. Before putting in the stone arch, the workers dug under the rail bed and put in a temporary wooden frame. They used the soil they removed to raise the banks of Mill Creek and straighten it out, filling in an old millrace so that the creek wouldn’t harm the new bridge.

Stone bridges were the best available at the time for durability, strength, and easy maintenance, but only wealthier railroads could afford them. “The enormous amounts of labor needed--especially the skilled labor of stonemasons--made this type of bridge costly,” explains Charles Hyde, author of Historic Highway Bridges of Michigan.

For the Dexter bridges the masons collected stones from Mill Creek and sized them by hand. One of the stonemasons was Peter McGinn. “He worked on viaducts in Ireland; he knew how to cut stone,” said his granddaughter, Alice Vencil, in an interview in October, a month before she died. According to Vencil, her grandfather came to Michigan to work with the railroad on bridges all around the state.

Neither McGinn nor Pelham has his name among those engraved under the bridge; the persons so honored are higher officials--H. B. Ledyard, the Michigan Central president, and L. D. Hawks, the railroad’s head engineer.

After graduating from the U-M, Pelham returned to Detroit to live with his parents. He did some work on the interurban system there, taught Sunday school at Detroit’s Bethel AME Church, and was a member of the Michigan Engineering Society and the YMCA. Pelham died at age thirty in 1895.

Longtime Dexter residents recall that it used to be common for engineering students from the U-M to make field trips to study Pelham’s bridge and its skew arch. For decades, the underpass was fine for pedestrians and horse-drawn buggies, and later for automobiles. But as the area’s population has grown and traffic has increased, it has become more of a bottleneck, especially during rush hours.

Officials are considering two possible solutions: building a bypass from Parker Road to Dexter-Pinckney Road west of Gordon Hall, or building a new underpass just to the south and retaining the current one for pedestrians and bicycles. But altering Pelham’s masterpiece isn’t on the table.

The Spring 2007 edition of the Community Observer

July 2003 edition of the annual Art Fair Guide

From casual beginnings, the Art Fairs have put Ann Arbor on the national visual arts map The first Ann Arbor Art Fair was a casual, two-block event in 1960. It was initiated by South University Avenue merchants to draw attention to their summer bargain days. They teamed up with the Ann Arbor Art Association, which saw the event as a way to further its goal of art education for townsfolk. "We did it to draw attention that there was such a thing as art," recalls Milt Kemnitz, a participant in that first fair. "We tied clotheslines between parking meters to hang pictures. When it rained we would take them down and take them into a store close by and wait for the rain to stop." The organizers included the chamber of commerce, the potters' and hand weavers' guilds, and the public schools' adult education program. They put out a general call for artists to display their wares in an "arts and crafts market." For the first few years, the only requirement was that all art had to be original and sold directly by the artist. By 1965, though, there were so many artists seeking to participate that the organizers switched to a jury system to ensure quality and variety. That same year they renamed their event the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair. "It was run by wonderful ladies who poured their heart into it," recalls Dick Brunvand, who was the fair's only paid staffer from 1971 to 1985. The women from the art association were supported by the South U merchants, who helped with costs, materials, and publicity. The merchants assembled the fair's first booths in parking lots behind their stores. "Everyone helped--the merchants, the merchants' children," recalls Paul Schlanderer, a South University jewelry store owner. Carol Furtado, who participated in the Street Art Fair for seventeen years, usually was placed in front of the Village Apothecary. "The owner was very helpful," she recalls. "He would let me and others with booths nearby bring our stuff in at night." The fair did so well that soon other artists and other retail areas wanted to create their own fairs. The State Street Area Art Fair started in 1968. It was a juried fair from the beginning, and run directly by the merchants' association. "You see more of the merchants. They are right on the street," explains Kathy Krick, the fair's director. In fact, the merchants take up all the available space on State Street itself, leaving display space for the artists on nearby blocks of Liberty, Maynard, and William. The Summer Art Fair's origins date to 1970. The counterculture was in full swing, and some younger people were calling the established fairs elitist. "I remember a meeting in the basement of the bank at South U and East U when a young man came and asked that they let students in," Brunvand recalls. "The little old ladies answered, 'This is our art fair, and we're not going to let students in.' " The students responded by starting their own alternative fair on the Diag. Called the Free Fair, it was a very laid-back affair with no space assignments. Furtado, who displayed in the Free Fair before joining the Street Art Fair, recalls, "We'd just set up our paintings against the trees. Once a dog peed on one of them." The university soon decided it didn't want anything sold on the Diag, and the fair moved to South University between State and East University. But the participants' attitudes didn't change. "We'd sit on the grass and talk," Furtado recalls. "If anyone looked interested [in our art], we'd glare at them. Later in the day, one of us would watch about six booths and the rest would go to Dominick's for the afternoon." Gradually the Free Fair became more organized. In 1973 the fair's sponsors organized into the University Artists and Craftsmen Guild, opening an office on the fourth floor of the Michigan Union. In the early 1980s the Guild left the U-M to become the nonprofit Michigan Guild of Artists and Artisans. The fair moved around the corner to State Street in front of the Michigan Union, and a downtown section was added after the Main Street merchants invited Guild members to display there as well. As soon as the fairs began drawing big crowds, political activists and street performers began showing up. They added to the ambience but also to the space crunch, and eventually were limited to certain locations. The university helped by letting nonprofit groups use the space in front of the Engineering Arch. "Every cause was there, sometimes opposing ones right next to each other," laughs Brunvand. In 1989 the nonprofits moved to the block of Liberty between Division and Fifth, linking all three fairs in a continuous pathway. A little farther north on East U (which today is a mall), the Graceful Arch tent in front of the Physics and Astronomy Building provided a dramatic setting for a performance stage. Designed by Kent Hubbell's U-M architecture class, the arch sheltered such popular local talent as the Chenille Sisters and the Cadillac Cowboys. "The Art Fairs were supportive, but they were also always afraid the music would overwhelm the Art Fairs," recalls local music impresario Joe Tiboni. "But it's part of the Art Fair, an oasis, a hangout, a place to recuperate." In 2001 a fourth fair, Art Fair Village, was set up on Church Street. It was sponsored by South University merchants, who for several years had been engaged in a financial and philosophical spat with the Street Art Fair. This year the new fair, now called Ann Arbor's South University Art Fair, will take over the South University area, while the original Street Art Fair will take over Ingalls Mall and surrounding streets, circling Burton Memorial Tower on Washington, Thayer, and North University. Most visitors don't realize that what appears to be one seamless fair is actually four separate ones, each with its own history and flavor. Despite disagreements along the way, the organizers have kept the same hours and operate in adjacent (and even overlapping) locations. They've also agreed on keeping high artistic standards. "We walked a tightrope to satisfy what was wanted, to not be too restrictive, but to say no when necessary to keep the sense of it," Brunvand recalls. The result is a unique, popular, and prestigious event. It attracts more than 1,000 artists from around the nation and hordes of visitors from all over the Midwest. The fairs are consistently ranked among the best in North America. "This is a small town to provide an event like this," says Shary Brown, longtime director of the Street Art Fair. It may have started out as a lark, but Ann Arbor's July arts gathering has become a juggernaut.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: In the early years, it was a radical concept to put art on the streets. Like many fruits of the 1960s, the fairs soon became commercialized.

The annual guide to the Ann Arbor Art Fairs, a special edition to the Ann Arbor Observer: 1998-2003

Fall 2004 edition of the Community Observer

At the Michigan Union Brewing Company and the Ann Arbor Brewing Company, Ann Arborites could pick up beer by the pail.

The Ann Arbor Brewing Company at 416 Fourth Street was the only brewery in the city to survive Prohibition. Yet its product was not greatly valued in its hometown. "It was considered good only for putting out fires," claimed the late Carl Horning in a 1995 interview.

Horning was exaggerating: for eighty-eight years, the local brew found customers throughout Ann Arbor and beyond. And townsfolk weren't averse to stopping by for a glass or two of beer, on the house, any time of night or day. According to Will Frey, who worked at the brewery off and on from 1937 to 1943, leaky barrels that couldn't be sold were put in a back­room. Those who knew the barrels were there—namely, just about everyone in town—could come in through an always-unlocked door off the loading dock and get a drink. They used glasses hanging nearby, which they rinsed out when they were finished.

"It was a good stop for the postman. It took him longer to deliver mail there than the rest of the block," recalls Frey. The staff got free beer, too. Robert Kauffman remembers the job he got there at age sev­enteen cleaning out an old metal tank on top of the brewery: "At lunch break we went down to the main floor of the brew­ery and helped ourselves to a few pints of Ann Arbor Cream Top directly out of the barrel." People who played baseball in that era recall coming by after games to cool down with a glass of beer.

The brewery was founded in 1861 by Peter Brehm, who had recently moved to Ann Arbor from Germany. Brehm named his business the West­ern Brewery, after its location on the west side of town in the heart of the German neighborhood. In 1864, after his first building burned down, Brehm built a larg­er, two-story brewery, with a basement.

When Brehm opened his brewery, there were three others in town. Two—Hooper's (1858-1866), at State and Fuller, and the Bavarian (1860-1872), on Fuller between Elizabeth and State—were probably home operations. The City Brewery (1860-1886), at 210 South First Street, was clos­er to Brehm's operation in both size and location. It's now the Cav­ern Club—named after the basement vaults where the beer was aged.

Two other brew­eries started short­ly after Brehm's, both also named for their locations: the Central (1865-1875), at 724 North Fifth Avenue, now the Brewery Apart­ments; and the Northern (1872-1909), at 1037 Jones Drive, now an office building. Competition from the two ambitious newcomers surely didn't help Brehm's business, and the Panic of 1873 drove him over the edge: he lost control of the brew­ery and killed himself in despair.

Yet his successors managed to keep the business going for another seventy-five years. In 1880 Christian Martin and Mat­thias Fischer bought the Western Brewery. Martin, the brewmaster, walked over from his house across the street at 431 Fourth at 4 or 5 a.m. to start the fire in the boilers. Fischer, who ran the bottling operation, also lived in the neighborhood, on West Jefferson.

The new owners made a success of the operation from the start. A year later, the 1881 Chapman History of Washtenaw County, Michigan, reported, "The beer produced by this brewery finds a ready sale in all parts of the county." According to Chapman, "some 1,500 barrels of malt, 1,700 Ibs. of hops, 225 cords of wood and 800 tons of ice are used in the manu­facture and stor­age of the 3,000 barrels of beer turned out annu­ally." The West­ern Brewery's nearest competi­tor, the Northern Brewery, turned out just 2,400 barrels.

By 1903 the brewery was do­ing so well that the partners hired their German neighbors the Koch brothers to build a larger brick build­ing south of their original one. In those days they used gravity to move the beer from place to place as it brewed, so the north end of the new building had five levels—three above ground and two below. A lower section, on the south, was used for packaging— in kegs, and later in bottles.

When the new building opened, the business was renamed the Michigan Union Brewing Company in honor of the local union of bartenders and brewery workers, which represented the employees. Shortly after that, in 1906, the North­ern Brewery went out of business, leaving Michigan Union Brewing as the only brewery in town.

It delivered beer by horse and wagon to saloons and businesses all over Ann Arbor and as far away as Dexter and Saline, which also had large German populations. In 1915 the company acquired an Ann Arbor-made Star Truck and extended its delivery routes to Milan and Whitmore Lake.

The brewery also did home deliver­ies—or people could pick up beer at the brewery in their own containers. The late Harry Koch used to tell how as a young boy he was sent to the brewery by his dad, who was one of the Koch brothers, to fill a pail with beer for the construction crew's lunch.

Michigan adopted Prohibi­tion in 1918, a year ahead of the country as a whole. The brewery was renamed the Michigan Union Beverage Company and for a short time made near beer, but that didn't satisfy anyone. "The Germans wouldn't have anything to do with glorified hop water," says Will Frey. Many Germans made their own wine (you can still see their grape ar­bors around the Old West Side) or ob­tained bootleg products from Canada.

In 1920 Connor Ice Cream rented the building, since much of the equipment could be used for making ice cream (De­troit brewer Stroh's did the same thing). Florence Seitz Clark, who grew up across the street at 427 Fourth, reminisced in 1986, "The secretary at Connors ate her suppers with us. On weekends Connors al­ways had specials. If there was some left over, which there often was, she would bring us a quart for our supper. This was a real treat since otherwise we never had any. When she would come with a brown bag we knew what it was and got all excited."

When Prohibition ended in 1933, three local contractors, Chris Mack, Stanley Thomas, and Ed Bliska, decided to revive the brewery. They persuaded Jake Ludwig, a trained brewmaster who had moved to Pennsylvania to farm during Prohibition, to return to beer making. Ludwig was later replaced by Al Bek, who had gone to Germany to learn the trade.

The new business was not a union brewery, so it was named the Ann Arbor Brewing Company. Frey recalls that some­one tried to start a union but that no one was interested. "No one grumbled about the pay. It was good money in the Depres­sion," he explains.

The work was seasonal—heavier in summer, when the demand for beer was highest—so a lot of the crew was tempo­rary. It attracted young people like Frey who didn't mind sporadic hours, as well as farmers who needed a little extra work to help pay their taxes. Peter Marion recalls how his father, Alvin, came in three days a week from his farm near Saline to work the bottling line.

Frey began work­ing at the brewery in 1937, whence was just out of high school; he was hired because his half brother, Ted Ziefle, was the assistant bookkeeper. On his first day on the job he was put to work loading bottles into big crates in a small building, since torn down, in the back of the brewery. When brewmaster Al Bek saw him, he yelled, "What are you doing here?" It turned out Bek had two boys near Prey's age whom he had wanted to have the job. The next day Alvin and Dick Bek were both working there too; they and Frey became good friends.

Frey recalls that the brewery got hops from out west and grain from a Chicago grain dealer. He still remembers that every Christmas the Chicago dealer gave his family a big box filled with treats like cheese and sausage. They looked forward to the dealer's package so much that they opened it last.

Frey worked mainly in the bottling op­eration. Making the beer was very special­ized work and left to the brewmaster. Frey does remember that the mash was made in a big copper kettle, which could be seen out the back window of the main office. It was pumped up to the top floor and then sent down to the basement by gravity.

The bottling operation was semi-mechanized. The machines had to be constantly monitored, and at several points the bottles had to be transferred by hand. With all the moving, Frey admits, "there was a fair amount of broken glass in the brewery, but we also got pretty good at it. You learned fast, or you'd get all bloody."

Returned bottles were loaded onto a conveyor belt, where "they marched like little soldiers," in Prey's words, through the washing machine. It was Alvin Mari­on's job to watch the bottles as they came out to make sure that they weren't chipped and that the washer hadn't missed any for­eign objects, such as cigar butts, chewing gum, or pebbles.

The bottles were filled and capped by machine, but again they had to be watched carefully—if the pressure were wrong, the bottles wouldn't fill completely. "A bunch of us would stand around and drink half bottles," Frey says, "since it was very dif­ficult to put it through again."

Ann Arbor Brewing sold sev­eral brands: Cream Top, Old-Tyme, and Town Club. But according to Frey, they were actually all the same beer. He remembers they would attach la­bels in batches: "We'd start with, say, six hundred of Old Tyme, then three hundred of Town Club." Hazen Schumacher, who worked at the Pretzel Bell restaurant in the late 1940s, recalls that the brewery would also dye beer in novelty colors for holidays—red on Valentine's Day and green on St. Pat­rick's Day. But the only beer that was actually brewed differently was the bock produced each spring.

Brewery work­ers used a machine to attach the labels and to put a paper tax stamp on each bottle. Sometimes the machine got gummed up, which was not a big problem with labels but upsetting when it happened with the tax stamps: they were prepaid, so it was like throwing money away.

The final step was transferring the beer by hand into cases. These were made at the brewery, riveted together by the thou­sands. Frey recalls that they were so sturdy that they were used over and over, and were good for use on camping trips or as luggage for kids.

By this time, the beer was delivered farther afield. Frey says that besides near­by towns with German populations like Manchester, Stockbridge, and Milan, an Amish population in Ohio got shipments, and so did a pocket of German farmers in Texas.

In 1939 the brewery was purchased by a group of investors from Chicago. They sent Charles Ackerman, who Frey believes was the nephew of one of the investors, to oversee the operation. Ackerman, who is listed in the city directory as president, treasurer, and general manager, saw the brewery through its final decade; it closed in 1949, and the equipment was sold.

By then local breweries were either expanding or dying out as the beer industry consolidated—a trend that's continued ever since, most recently with a joint venture uniting Miller, Molson, and Coors. The brewery was sold to Argus Camera, which already owned two neighboring buildings.

The U-M bought the Argus buildings when the camera company left town in the 1960s. Beginning in 1965, the former Ann Arbor Brewing building was shared by Mathematical Reviews, a bibliographic journal that had just moved to Ann Arbor from Providence, Rhode Island, and the U-M's audiovisual education center. By then all traces of its former use were oblit­erated. "I was unaware that it had been a brewery until one of the movers told us that he had drunk a beer where our film library was going," recalls retired center employee George Williams.

Mathematical Reviews moved out in 1971, only to return in 1985, when it bought the building from the U-M. To make room for more parking, the journal removed the old shed in back where Frey worked the first day he arrived. The staff do, however, fully appreciate that they are in an old brewery.

"When I first came here and found out the building used to be a brewery, I in­terpreted it as a sign from God," recalls as­sociate editor Norman Richert. A beer buff whose first academic job was in Milwau­kee, Richert was delighted to learn from local historian Wystan Stevens that memo­rabilia from Michigan Union Brewing and Ann Arbor Brewing regularly come up for sale on eBay. He's since amassed a collec­tion that includes labels, bottles, a box, and a wooden beer keg.

Richert admits it was "a little disap­pointing" to hear, through Frey, that Ann Arbor Brewing's different brands were all the same beer. But he also points out that our standards in food and drink have be­come much more refined in recent years. "People thought of it more like a commod­ity then," he says. "You go get beer, you go get milk. You don't necessarily think what it tastes like."

He guesses the different labels may have been a way to appeal to different buyers—an early form of the steady blur­ring of consumption and marketing that has led to phenomena like Old Milwau­kee's Swedish Bikini Team. In contrast, he says, one of his Michigan Union Brewing bottles had a much simpler sales pitch: embossed in the glass is the motto "Pure and without drugs or poison."

That and the other items in Richert's collection may eventually be available for public viewing: He hopes eventually to start a small museum commemorating the building's beer-loving past.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: "There was a fair amount of broken glass in the brewery, but we also got pretty good at [handling bottles]" Will Frey recalls. "You learned fast, or you'd get all bloody."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Mathematical Reviews associate editor Norman Richert bought most of his brewery memorabilia (above and below) on eBay—but the wooden keg was a gift from Harry Cross, whose father salvaged it from the building.

Carleton Angell's beloved sculptures return to the Natural History Museum

The two pumas that guarded the Ruthven Museums Building on North University for sixty-six years are missing. Generations of kids had clam­bered over the stylized black cats, and countless museum visitors had posed for pictures standing in front of them. But last July, a hole was noticed in the head of one of the pumas.

Officials first sus­pected vandalism. "They've been hit with paintballs. They were once trimmed with masking tape to look like zebras. And they've been painted green (probably in deference to a certain Big Ten ri­val)," writes museum employee Dan Madaj. But a more careful look made it clear that the real culprit was years of exposure to the ele­ments. The big cats were removed for restoration and replace­ment—the first time they'd left their perches since museum sculptor Carleton Watson Angell put them there in 1940.

A farm boy from Belding, in west Michi­gan, Angell overcame great obstacles to build a career as an artist. Born in 1887, he got his first art lessons as a child from a customer on his father's milk route. But then his father died, and his mother moved back to her hometown of Hion, New York, where Angell worked for seven years to save up for art school. He finally enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1909, at age twenty-two. Afterward he worked at the American Terra Cotta Company in nearby Crystal Lake, making decorative panels for building facades but lost that job dur­ing an economic downturn. He returned to Illinois, worked in his brother's grocery store, and married Gladys Thayer.

But Angell continued sculpting and drawing, and in 1922, when he was thirty-five, his persistence finally paid off: he got an offer from the U-M to be a half-time instructor at the College of Architecture and Design. By then he and Gladys had three children, so to supplement his income, they ran a boardinghouse at 1438 Washington Heights (about where the new School of Public Health building is today). Their daughter, Jennett Angell Hamilton, re­members watching her dad strip the sheets from the beds and bring them down for her mother to wash.

In 1926 Angell was offered additional work at the U-M Museum of Natural His­tory, which was preparing to move from State Street to North U. Celebrated indus­trial architect Albert Kahn designed the V-­shaped building, but Angell contributed many decorative details, including the bronze front doors and the limestone bas-reliefs of animals and naturalists on the facade. And even after the building opened in 1928, he continued to produce busts of important people connected with the museum, both living and dead. They were placed in alcoves around the rotunda as he finished them during the 1930s.

The pumas were his last major contri­bution to the decoration. In an article in the August 17, 1940, Michigan Alumnus, Angell explained that although lions are often chosen to guard public buildings, he preferred Michigan's native cats. After building scale models to check the propor­tions, he constructed full-size figures of wood, wire, plaster of Paris, and clay. From these he created plaster molds, which were used to cast the final versions in terrazzo, a stone aggregate. Sixty-six years later, the terrazzo finally began to show its age.

Angell's main job was to make mod­els for dioramas, miniature re­creations of natural and historic scenes. He worked with scientists to mod­el extinct animals from fossil skeletons, and with anthropologists to show how people in different cultures lived. He often depicted American Indians, whom he typi­cally showed at work—making pottery, drilling, carrying things.

None of Angell's Indian dioramas are still on display, but it's interesting to wonder how he would have reacted to the recent protest by art students who charged that the museum's current repre­sentations of Native Americans are racist. Angell worked hard to create accurate de­pictions. Jennett Hamilton recalls how the family traveled to a reservation in Missaukee County, where her father spent nine hours sculpting an Ottawa chief named Henri. When the chief died soon afterward, the Angell family went back north for the funeral.

His work at the museum led to com­missions from other university depart­ments, community groups, and individu­als. Angell eventually completed hundreds of local projects, including a bronze bas-relief of philanthropist Horace Rackham in the Rackham Building and a plaque at An­gell School depicting the school's name­sake, U-M president James B. Angell (the two Angells were believed to be distant relatives).

By 1936 Carleton Angell was earning, enough that he and his family were able to leave the boardinghouse. They lived at 933 South State Street and 1217 Lutz before building a home at 3125 Hilltop in the early 1950s. Angell created Arborcrest Memorial Park's Four Chaplains monu­ment in the family room at the Hilltop home. It depicts four clergymen—two Protestants, a Roman Catholic, and a Jew—who died after giving up their life jackets to others when their ship was tor­pedoed during World War II. He complet­ed another commission—relief panels for the Washtenaw County Courthouse depict­ing local life—in the home's garage. Daughter Jennett remembers how when he was done her father enlisted her husband and brothers, along with every other able-bodied relative and friend he could find, to help him deliver the massive artwork.

Angell died in 1962 from a massive heart attack. Though he was seventy-four, granddaughter Barbara Gilson says that his death came as a shock, since he seemed in good health and was by then taking care of Gladys, who had suffered a stroke. Dariel Keeney recalls, "The last thing my grandfather said to me on my last visit to him in the hospital, hours be­fore he died, was 'Take care of your grandmother. She is so precious to me.'"

Since their installation, Angell's pumas have served as symbols of the museum, standing out in all weather. Over the years various small repairs were made, but last July's discovery made it clear that the time had come for a com­plete overhaul.

This time the museum is taking a twor pronged approach. The Fine Arts Sculp­ture Centre in Clarkston made molds from the original figures and then cast replicas in bronze. The Venus Bronze Works in Detroit has added a black finish to the bronzes, and also has restored the original terrazzo figures.

The pumas are expected back around the middle of May. The bronze cats will take over the plinths outside the doors, while the terrazzo originals will be placed in a yet-to-be-determined location inside the museum. On June 2, the museum will celebrate their return with a Puma Party, including a display of Carleton Angell's work in the rotunda.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Farm-boy-turned-artist Carleton Angell created much of the ornamental detail on the Ruthven Museums Building, including the ornate bronze doors and the bas-relief sculptures on the facade. The two pumas guarding the entrance were the final touch—Angell chose Michigan's native cats instead of the customary lions.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Bronze replicas of the pumas were cast at the Fine Arts Sculpture Center in Clarkston. The Venus Bronze Works in Detroit has since added a black finish to match the terrazzo originals.

Photo: Carrie, Jeffrey, and Laura Pew at University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, August 1972