Bridge to the Nineteenth Century: Can Bell Road's span be saved?

The Bell Road Bridge in Dex­ter Township is on the Na­tional Register of Historic Places. The plaque so designating it, however, is sitting in neighbor Bill Klinke's garage—because for twelve years the nineteenth-century "iron through-truss bridge" has been rust­ing away on the banks of the Huron River. As the Bell Road Bridge lies there, overgrown with brush and poison ivy, it seems impossible that it could ever rise up out of the muck again. Yet citizen efforts have already saved two similar bridges downstream.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Huron River was spanned with iron bridges at ev­ery mill town—including Dexter, Scio (at Zeeb Road), Osborne Mill (at Tubbs Road), and Geddesburg (near present-day Washtenaw Community Col­lege)—as well as in Ann Arbor and Yp-silanti. Another iron bridge crossed the River Raisin in Manchester.

The bridges came in kits, like giant Erector sets, the pieces sent by rail. Locals assembled them and rolled them on logs down to the river to place on abutments made by local stonemasons. They were a lot better than wooden bridges that needed continual upkeep.

Iron truss bridges, patented by broth­ers Thomas and Caleb Pratt in 1844, are supported by a series of iron triangles held together with iron pins. A "through-truss" bridge has a top section that helps hold up the sides. "These old bridges supported more weight than you would think," says Richard Cook, who helped save the Delhi Bridge downstream of Dexter. "They car­ried not just horses and wagons but heavy steam-powered agricultural equipment."

In 1832 Samuel Dexter, the founder of Dexter, and Isaac Pomeroy built a sawmill a mile below Portage Lake. A later owner added a gristmill, and the hamlet of Do­ver grew up around it. At its peak it had a church, a hotel, a store, a blacksmith shop, several dozen houses, and a post office. A drawing in the 1874 County Atlas shows a wooden bridge across the Huron there. But by the time an iron bridge was installed in 1891, the village was waning; Dover's post office was torn down the next year. The bridge was named after John Bell, whose farm was across the river. By 1915 Dover no longer appeared on maps.

The other surviving bridges also served mill towns. Samuel Foster, a miller from Massachusetts, answered Dexter's invita­tion to work at his mill in Dexter. Eventual­ly Foster started his own mill downstream, where Zeeb Road crosses the Huron; the village of Scio grew around it. Foster later built a second mill downstream at Maple Road. The settlement there, originally named Newport, became Foster's Station but was never very big. There was an iron bridge there as early as 1876.

Another iron bridge was built in 1888 at Delhi. At its peak this village, founded in 1831, was a railroad stop with five mills, a school, and a post office. The last mill was dismantled in 1906, and the stones from the mills spilled into the river, forming the rapids that are now the main attraction at Delhi Metropark.

During the twentieth century, the iron bridges disappeared one by one from the Huron, until only three were left— Bell Road Bridge, the Del­hi Bridge, and the bridge at old Foster's Station, now known as the Maple/Foster Bridge.

In 1992 the Bell Road Bridge closed for awhile after a drunk driver ran into a post. It reopened with a load limit of four tons, which made it impassable for garbage trucks, school buses, delivery vehicles, and fire engines. Its abutments were crum­bling, and in 1995 the Washtenaw County Road Commission put the replacement of the Bell Road Bridge on its wish list for the state's Critical Bridge Fund. Admin­istered by the Michigan Department of Transportation, the fund covers almost all the cost of repairing or replacing failing bridges. In a typical CBF project, the local government pays just 5 percent of the bill; 15 percent comes from the state and 80 percent from the federal government.

The road commission wanted to re­place the narrow iron bridge with a two-lane concrete span. Neighbors pushed in­stead to repair the old bridge, arguing that it was good enough for a small rural road, and that emergency vehicles could cross the river on North Territorial Road a mile south. They attended road commission, township, and county meetings, gathered hundreds of petition signatures, and got the National Register designation.

Eventually the road commission agreed not to replace the bridge. But in 1997 the bridge was taken down; its abutments were so weak that it was feared a spring flood might wash it away. It's been sitting on the riverbank ever since.

Three years later the same is­sues arose downriver, when the road commission decid­ed the Maple/Foster Bridge was unsafe and needed to be replaced with a bigger, stroriger span that could carry emergency vehicles and school buses. Again, neighbors ral­lied. They formed the Citizens for Foster Bridge Conservancy and raised more than $40,000 to hire an engineering firm. It re­ported that repairing the bridge was feasi­ble, though costly. Barton Hills, northeast of the bridge, offered to put in $250,000 from an escrow fund built up over years of refunds from state road repair money. (Barton Hills is a private village, and it pays for its own street repairs).

In 2003 the road commission spent five months repairing the bridge—replac­ing the timber deck, improving guardrails, and installing cable to strengthen the sides. Roy Townsend, the road commission's di­rector of engineering, estimates the total cost was about $800,000, so the road com­mission paid about $550,000.

Two years later, the Delhi Bridge was closed by the road commission as unsafe. Because the abutments needed much work, the cost of renovating the bridge would be even greater than for Maple/Foster—and there were fewer neighbors with deep pockets like the residents of Barton Hills. Still, a citizens group, the East Delhi Road Conservancy, raised $50,000 from the Kellogg Foundation and $10,000 from in­dividual donations and sales of lemonade and T-shirts.

An engineering study, paid for jointly by the road commission, Scio Township, and the conservancy, showed that the bridge was in good enough shape to reha­bilitate—if money could be found to do so. Then the conservancy discovered that Critical Bridge Fund money could legally be used to restore historic bridges. Al­though MOOT agreed, the road commis­sion was leery, joining the effort only after state representative Pam Byrnes convened a meeting with all the stakeholders.

In September 2005, when the Delhi Bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the way was paved for repairing it with CBF money. With 95 per­cent of the cost covered by the federal and state government, the road commission agreed to put up half of the local contribu­tion; the other half was split between the Delhi Road Conservancy and Scio Town­ship. When the cost of the projected repair ballooned to $1.2 million, Huron-Clinton Metroparks chipped in $15,000.

The last hurdle, paying for the upkeep, was cleared when the bridge activists gath­ered enough signatures to ask the township to form an assessment district. About 120 nearby properties will pay around $30 a year to help maintain the bridge.

For further protection, the group got the county to establish an East Delhi Bridge Historic District, encompassing just the bridge itself. This designation ensures that the bridge may not be changed or moved without permission of the county's historic district commission.

"It was a grind," admits Cook. "It took a couple of years, endless meetings, and beat­ing our heads against the wall." But he adds, "Very few get saved. We're very happy."

In fact, according to Townsend, this was the first bridge in Michigan to utilize CBF money for a historic rehabilitation. Because it was historic, the state waived the requirement that the bridge have two lanes. Instead, a traffic light will be put up, perhaps on side poles to make it less ob­trusive. The bridge is scheduled to reopen in June.

Only five Pratt through-truss bridges survive in Michi­gan, and three of them are in Washtenaw County. The restored bridges at Foster and Delhi are the only two still in use in their original locations. The fate of the third, the Bell Road Bridge, remains uncertain.

The cost of saving the bridge hasn't been calculated, but it won't be cheap— Townsend says the abutments would have to be replaced. If it ended up costing $1 million—halfway between what was spent at Foster and at Delhi—then the lo­cal 5 percent match would be $50,000.

Cathy VanVoorhis, one of the leaders of the Bell Road group, is still hopeful. She says that the bridge isn't in bad shape-that most of the rust is on the parts attached to move it, and that it's easier to work with on the ground. "It's not abandoned," she says. "It's a project sitting there waiting for funding."

Dexter Township supervisor Pat Kelly says she wants the bridge saved, but "it's not likely to be rehabilitated anytime soon. In these economic times, there is no way." Meanwhile, Bill Klinke is keeping the bridge's historic plaque safe and dry. "It was the least I could do," he says. "I was hoping someday someone would call and say, 'Let's put it up.'"

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: A 1936 photo of the Delhi Bridge in its prime; in contrast, the Bell Road Bridge sits unused and rusting, and its historic plaque is in a neighbor's garage.

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: A $250,000 contribution by Barton Hills helped save the Maple-Foster bridge, an important route into the village.

During World War II, the Ypsilanti factory became a worldwide symbol of American industrial might. To get it built, Charlie Sorensen had to overcome red tape from Washington, skepticism from the aircraft industry, and his own quixotic boss, Henry Ford.

Ann Arbor High senior Don Exinger spent the summer of 1941 working on a farm east of Ypsilanti. Named Camp Willow Run, after the creek that wound through its woods and gently rolling fields, it belonged to auto pioneer Henry Ford. Ford was determined to instill his own work ethic in the teenaged campers: they slept in army tents and were roused at 5:30 a.m. to attend church services before breakfast and a hard day's work in the fields.

But even as Exinger's group planted and reaped, bulldozers were leveling Camp Willow Run's woodlot. By the next summer, the first of a corps of 50,000 factory workers were crowding out Ford's youthful campers. Two years after that, new B-24 Liberator bombers were pouring out of the Ford Willow Run plant at the rate of one each hour, headed for battle in the European or Pacific theaters.

Then, almost as quickly as it began, it was over: fifty years ago, on June 24, 1945, the farm-turned-factory completed its last bomber and halted production.

At the outbreak of World War II, Henry Ford was an elderly, unpredictable man riddled with contradictions. Decades earlier, he had been far ahead of his time in paying workers at the unheard-of rate of $5 a day. Now he was threatening to close down Ford Motor Company rather than accept workers' efforts to unionize. He was often spiteful toward his only son, Edsel, although he doted on his four grandchildren. At first loath to build weapons for a conflict he believed to be driven by a conspiracy of moneyed interests, he ended up as one of World War II's most prolific arms makers.

Ford abandoned his stand against the war when the Nazis swarmed across Europe in May 1940. But at first he insisted that his weapons be used only to defend the United States. In June, he vetoed a contract Edsel had negotiated to manufacture Rolls-Royce aircraft engines under license, because most of the engines were destined for England. A few months later, the elder Ford accepted a contract to build 4,000 Pratt & Whitney engines for U.S. aircraft.

In January 1941, Ford executives were invited to visit Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego, California, in the hope that the company might expand its involvement in aircraft production. Henry Ford had made it clear that he wasn't interested in collaborating with any aviation company, but Edsel made the fateful journey anyway, accompanied by Ford manufacturing boss Charles Sorensen.

Sorensen had begun his Ford career in 1905 as a $3-a-day pattern maker. The Danish immigrant was Hollywood-handsome, with a commanding presence, piercing blue eyes, and swept-back blond hair. Associates admired his quick mind as much as they feared his hot temper. Though little known compared to his publicity-hungry boss, Sorensen was Ford Motor Company's top manufacturing expert.

The Ford executives were polite to their hosts, but Sorensen in particular was unimpressed by the methods Consolidated was using to produce its B-24 Liberator bomber. There were no blueprints or accurate measuring tools. Major components were custom fit, so each plane was different from the next. Final assembly took place outside in the California sun. In his memoirs Sorensen observed sourly, "What I saw reminded me of the way we built cars at Ford 35 years earlier."

Sorensen knew that the assembly line method he had perfected in building more than thirty million Ford automobiles could easily eclipse Consolidated's modest goal of one airplane per day. When asked how he would manufacture the B-24, Sorensen replied confidently, "I'll have something for you tomorrow morning."

He wasn't kidding. He sequestered himself in his Coronado Hotel room, and by 4 a.m. the next day, he had sketched out the plan that became Willow Run. Working solely from figures he carried in his head, Sorensen estimated that it would take 100,000 workers and a $200 million plant to meet his goal of delivering one finished airplane every hour.

Over breakfast the next morning, Edsel Ford pledged his full support for Sorensen's bold stroke. George Mead, the government's director of procurement, was delighted, but Major Reuben Fleet, Consolidated's president, wasn't convinced. His counteroffer: a contract for Ford to build just 1,000 wing sections. Sorensen flatly replied, "We'll make the complete airplane or nothing."

Back home in Dearborn, Sorensen explained his scheme to Henry Ford. First he got an antiwar lecture, then a diatribe on how General Motors, the Du Fonts, and President Roosevelt were conspiring to drag the country into war and take over Ford's business. But in the end the cranky Henry agreed to the plan.

With little more than a letter of intent from the government, an army of Ford laborers set to work in a frenzy. Late in March 1941, 300 men with saws, axes, and bulldozers attacked the 100-acre woodlot where the plant would be situated. A steam-powered sawmill was brought in from Greenfield Village, Henry Ford's outdoor museum, to convert the felled trees to 400,000 board feet of lumber.

The fields were cleared for construction of the plant, designed by renowned Detroit architect Albert Kahn. Tool designers and other engineers were dispatched to San Diego to learn everything they could about building B-24's. Tool and die maker Martin Chapin traveled to San Diego with the first wave of 240 Ford personnel. "Consolidated had built and assembled aircraft for generations, and they thought our innovations were almost sacrilegious," he recalls, "They built airplanes with plumb bobs and levels, while we were used to sophisticated fixtures and gauges."

Ford engineers were particularly amazed by Consolidated's design fora landing-gear pivot. It was assembled out of half a dozen pieces of steel, a couple of large tubes, and some flat plates, all held together by nearly a hundred welds, each of which had to be X-rayed. Back in Dearborn, the inevitable conclusion was that Consolidated had never engineered the B-24 for high-volume production. Ford engineers reduced the landing-gear pivot to just three large castings.

Nine hundred men and women worked night and day seven days a week to design the critical tooling. More than 30,000 metal stamping dies—equivalent to eight or nine car model changeovers—were ultimately required to manufacture the bomber's 1,225,000 parts.

On April 18, 1941, five weeks after receiving an initial $3.4 million contract to build B-24 subassemblies, Ford broke ground for the plant. It was dedicated less than two months later, shortly before Henry Ford finally consented to the very first contract between the United Auto Workers and the Ford Motor Company. The last load of concrete for the adjoining mile-square airport was poured on December 4, three days before Pearl Harbor.

The harsh spotlights of publicity now shone on Willow Run. The sheer size of the facility was daunting. In his journal, Charles Lindbergh called Willow Run "a Grand Canyon of the mechanized world." With 2.5 million square feet of usable floor space, Willow Run had more aircraft manufacturing area than Consolidated, Douglas, and Boeing combined. The press extolled the sheer size of the undertaking without understanding that Willow Run still had to be equipped with effective tools and a functioning workforce. Production began in November 1941, but ten months passed before the first B-24 rolled off the mile-long assembly line. People began calling the plant "Willit Run?" prompting Senator Harry Truman to undertake a special investigation. According to a May 1943 article in Flying magazine, "The Truman Committee, which came to Detroit with blood in its eye, felt better after touring the plant and talking to Ford officials, and left with the pronouncement that 'Willow Run compares favorably with any other airplane plant in the country as far as actual production work is concerned—and we have seen them all.' "

Ted Heusel, then a teenager working in plant protection at Willow Run, remembers getting a call on Sunday morning from his boss, the infamous Harry Bennett, to help shepherd the Truman Committee around the factory. Ordinarily, Heusel's job was to listen in on phone calls made from the plant to watch for possible security leaks. The future WAAM radio host was just one of many Ann Arborites who found jobs at the plant. Based on interviews with people who lived in Ann Arbor during the war, it seems that anyone who didn't work at Willow Run themselves had a friend or family member who did.

Warren Staebler's uncle, Herman Staebler, co-owned the Pontiac dealership, but with car production halted for the duration of the war, he took an office job at Willow Run. Steve Filipiak, retired manager of WHRV (WAAM's forerunner), ran the factory's internal radio station, playing music, interviewing Truman and other distinguished visitors, and selling war bonds. Attorney John Hathaway remembers that almost everyone in his family worked at the plant. His sister Betsy was a long distance telephone operator in Harry Bennett's office. She sometimes drove to work with Ted Heusel. Hathaway's other sister, Mary, inspected hydraulic tubing, while her husband, Ned, worked in shipping and receiving. Hathaway's mother, Lucile Hathaway, identified and inventoried tools. "At Miller's Dairy Store, I had been working for 35 cents per hour," she wrote in an unpublished memoir. "When I drew my first pay at Willow Run I nearly fainted. We were working 9 hours per day and all day Saturday so that my pay at $1.10 per hour was really staggering."

In all, more than 10,000 women worked at Willow Run. Anne Morrow Lindbergh lived in Bloomfield Hills while her husband, Charles, was helping Ford develop the planes. (Opinions differ on whether he was merely window dressing or an important advisor, but many report having seen him at the plant.) After a tour of Willow Run, Anne wrote in her diary, "One noticed chiefly the size, and the number of women working (they all looked like housewives—quite ordinary Middle Western housewives—not a new breed of 'modern women,' as I had expected ...)."

Flora Meyers worked first in fingerprinting (another wartime security measure) and then on the telephones—for instance, she'd call cleanup people when there were accidental spills. Johanna Wiese, retired assistant dean of the U-M School of Nursing, worked as a librarian in the Ford Airplane School, where new workers learned such skills as riveting. Betty Walters Robinson, although trained as a beautician, found herself working as a carpenter at Willow Run, hammering lids onto waterproof boxes that held replacement parts to be shipped to air bases all over the world.

Workers flooded in.from all forty-eight states, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Latin America. John Hathaway, who bought his house from shoe store owners Fred and Gertrude Smith, remembers them saying that some of their customers had never worn shoes before and had to be taught how to walk in them. The late Art Schlanderer remembered bomber plant workers, many of them enjoying real money for the first time in their lives, coming to his jewelry store and making extravagant purchases, like diamond-studded watches. Helen Mast, who was running Mast's shoe store by herself while her husband, Walter, was in the service, sold hard-toed protective shoes to many women who worked at the plant.

By early 1942 there were no rental rooms to be found within a fifteen-mile radius of Willow Run. Resourceful landlords often collected double or even triple rent for rooms: while one tenant worked, the other slept. Many larger single-family homes in Ann Arbor were divided into rental rooms or apartments during this time. Warren Staebler's parents, Dora and Albert, rented a room to a Willow Run control tower operator. Fritz and Bertha Metzger, owners of the German Inn on Huron, rented rooms to four or five lucky people who for $11 a week got not only a bed but meals at the German Inn.

At first Henry Ford balked at building housing for Willow Run workers, but under federal pressure he finally relented. Guy Larcom, later Ann Arbor's city manager, came to Willow Run to work for the Public Housing Administration. The PHA erected an entire town—Willow Village—almost overnight, with dormitories for single workers and small houses for families. The first set of fifteen buildings, accommodating 3,000 people, opened early in 1943. A mobile home park that followed was promptly jammed with 1,000 trailer homes. Ramshackle prefab houses rolled in by the truckload. They were loaded with the floor sections on top and roofs on the bottom, and as a crane lifted the pieces off, workers nailed them up in speedy succession. Each house had a crude coal stove, and residents had to get by with iceboxes instead of refrigerators. They were the lucky ones: many workers lived in converted gas stations, shacks, or tents. By the end of 1943, when 42,331 employees worked at the plant, Willow Village was providing temporary shelter for 15,000—a population greater than the city of Ypsilanti's.

Gradually, Willow Run's production numbers began to mount: from a net output of fifty-six airplanes for all of 1942 (most of them assembled by Consolidated and Douglas, in Oklahoma and Texas) to thirty-one airplanes in January 1943 and 190 in June. By March 1944—shortly after Charlie Sorensen was pressured into resigning from Ford in a power struggle—Willow Run realized his dream, producing 453 airplanes in 468 working hours. Willow Run's output nearly equaled the entire airplane production of Japan that year. Ford's efficient assembly line methods led to a remarkable drop in the delivered price of a B-24: from $238,000 in 1942 to $137,000 in 1944. In all, 8,685 B-24's were built at Willow Run before the last contract expired in June 1945—including 1,894 knocked-down kits shipped to other plants for assembly.

After the war ended, Ford chose not exercise its option to buy Willow Run from the government. The airport served as southeast Michigan's main passenger airport until the late 1950's when all the main carriers moved to Detroit Metro. The plant was sold to Kaiser-Fraser for production of automobiles (and, later, of C-119 cargo planes). General Motors acquired the facility in 1953 after fire ravaged its Hydra-Matic transmission plant in Livonia. After a frantic twelve-week conversion, GM began making automatic transmissions at Willow Run and continues making them there to this day. Some of the overhead cranes and hangar doors installed by Ford more than fifty years ago are still in regular use.

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.

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.

A fortune built on waste paper

In 1911, George Langford took out a second mortgage on his house in order to start Economy Baler. The company, headquartered on North Main Street, grew to be the largest business of its kind in the world. In a 1943 Ann Arbor News article, Langford claimed that its success was "a direct result of the old system of free enterprise which not only permitted but encouraged the plowing of profits back into the business."

Economy Baler's motto was "turning waste paper into profit." In the early years of this century, corrugated cardboard began to replace wooden crates for shipping. While wooden crates could be used again and again, cardboard was hard to get rid of. Merchants would let it pile up in their basements, where it was a serious fire hazard, before eventually paying someone to haul it away. While paper mills were eager to get more paper waste and were willing to pay for it, the empty boxes were so light and bulky it seldom was worth the trouble to handle and ship them. Langford's invention changed that.

Langford learned about balers, and about business practices, from his uncle, Wendall Moore, manager of the Ann Arbor Machine Company on Broadway. The company made agricultural machines, including hay presses (see "The Broadway Bridge Parks," August). Langford began working for the company while living with his uncle and aunt in their big house on Moore Street, having come to Ann Arbor to attend high school. He held a variety of jobs; the last one, before he left to go on his own, was traveling by horse and buggy to county fairs to show farmers the firm's products. On one of these trips Langford heard that someone had invented a paper compressor. But the crude wooden contraption left him unimpressed.

Believing he could make a better paper compressor, Langford tried to convince his uncle to add one to his product line. When Moore refused, Langford decided to do it himself, quitting his job in 1911 to devote himself to his new enterprise. His only asset at the time was his house, on Greenwood, so he secured a $5,000 second mortgage on it. He spent $100 to build a prototype of a hand-powered metal baler. Using a picture of this single machine, he spent the rest of the mortgage money on advertising, offering to sell the baler for $50, with a $10 deposit. Within a month he had 100 orders. On the strength of those, he went to the First National Bank and asked for a $5,000 loan. They gave him $500.

With $1,500--the bank loan plus the money from his customers' deposits--Langford bought supplies and rented, for $10 a month, a small shop in the alley behind his uncle's business. At first he made the balers himself in the shop during the day. Evenings he worked at home on bookkeeping details. When the business began to take off, he hired a mechanic, Albert Wenk, to help him build the balers. Wenk later became a partner, buying a 1/15 interest for $600. In 1943, reminiscing about those early years, Langford said, "It was a tough job for a while, meeting the payroll on Saturday nights and counting on checks coming in from purchasers in time Monday to keep the company bank account in balance."

By 1912, Langford was in good enough shape to build his own shop at 1254 North Main. Economy Baler's first building was a 35 by 70 foot shed, large enough for fifteen employees. By 1916, the company had expanded into two additional stucco buildings complete with machine shop, forge shop, assembly line, printing, woodworking machinery, and electrical shop. At the north end he built a tall shed for his electric crane. Langford's son, Bob, remembers that the sign on its roof--"World's Largest Baling Press Mfgr."--was so large that it served as a landmark for early pilots.

As his business prospered, Langford became well known in town. Almeda Koebler, who worked as a cook for the Langfords in the 1930's, when they lived on Woodside Road and summered at Winans Lake, remembers Langford as a large man, partly bald, very friendly and outgoing. He loved jokes so much that he would pay people 25 cents to tell him a new one. He was also a practical joker. Anecdotes handed down include one about a chair in his office that collapsed when someone sat in it and another about rubber hooks on the wall that confounded first-time visitors when they tried to hang their coats on them.

By 1925, Economy Baler was able to claim that Ann Arbor made more baling presses than any city in the world. Langford employed 100 men who worked fifty hours a week year-round; had branch offices and salespeople in practically every important city in the country; and was continually adding new presses to handle everything from tin cans to tobacco.

In 1937, Economy Baler built a new office building facing Main Street. Architect Douglas Loree designed a "modernistic" building with glass block windows across the front. Bob Langford, who worked in the purchasing department of the new building, remembers that the glass block let in light but got so cold in the winter that frost sometimes formed on the inside.

Economy Baler continued to thrive after World War II, developing several more special balers including a huge cotton press and a scrap-metal baler that could swallow a whole auto body. By then George Langford was ready to retire. Bob Langford might have taken over his father's business, but although he had worked there, he did not feel right about going in as manager over the heads of older, more experienced people. So in 1945, George Langford sold his controlling stock, taking care to find a buyer who would keep the facility in Ann Arbor. (Bob Langford started his own Ann Arbor business and later developed properties on Huron View Boulevard and Research Park Drive.) George Langford died in 1956.

Economy Baler closed in 1976, when the last owner, American Baler Company, merged the Ann Arbor operation with their plant in Bellevue, Ohio. The company buildings were owned by Lansky's junkyard until 1978, when they were purchased by the Michigan Automotive Research Corporation. MARCO, which does contract testing of engines, transmissions, and vehicles, has adapted the buildings to its own uses. According to MARCO's Mike Boerma, the only indoor remnants of the buildings' original function are the welding outlets on the walls. The exteriors have been modernized, except for the structure closest to the river. It is still stucco, as it was in 1916, and the name painted on the wall is still discernible: "Economy Baler Company."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Economy Baler founder George Langford believed in promotion: he spent $4,900 of his first $5,000 in capital on advertising. By developing a line of machines capable of baling everything from cardboard boxes to junk cars, Langford built Economy Baler into the largest manufacturer of its kind in the world--an achievement he boasted of in a rooftop sign so large that it was used as a landmark by early pilots.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Twenty years after it closed, a single fading sign identifies the former Economy Baler complex, today home to the Michigan Automotive Research Corporation.

Between them, Philip Bach and Bertha Muehlig furnished the community with dry goods and notions for 115 years

Today's Main Street is dominated by destination restaurants and specialty shops. But for most of the city's life, Main Street was a regional shopping center catering to the county's everyday needs: hardware, clothing, food, farm supplies. No store served this market longer than the dry goods store at South Main and Washington. It opened in 1865 as Bach and Abel and closed in 1980 as Muehlig's. Dry goods--a term no longer used in the Yellow Pages--denoted a business that sold both fabric for home sewing and items manufactured of cloth.

Philip Bach built the store in 1865, part of the post-Civil War building boom. He replaced a much lower wooden storefront that looked like a set for a western. Bach came to the United States from the Duchy of Baden (now part of Germany) at the age of nine and began working in the dry goods business when he was fifteen. When Bach's first partner, Peter Abel, died he was replaced first by his brother, Eugene Abel, and later by Zachary Roath.

At that time, before mass production, Ann Arbor supported as many as fifteen dry goods stores at a time. Housewives sewed nearly all of their families' clothing and even household items like sheets. In the early days, the only ready-made item in Bach's store was cloaks.

Downtown's retail market was volatile in the nineteenth century. As early as 1881, Bach had been in the same business longer than anyone else in town. He worked for fourteen more years, selling his store only months before his death in 1895 to Bruno St. James, co-owner of Goodyear and St. James, the competing store next door. Along with the business, St. James acquired the services of Bach and Roath's young bookkeeper, Bertha Muehlig, who had joined the staff in 1891 at the age of seventeen.

St. James altered the street-level windows and installed an innovative spring-operated cash carrier to send money and sales slips to a cashier on the mezzanine at the back of the store. After St. James died in 1911, Bertha Muehlig bought the business.

"There wasn't an article that was usable that she didn't sell," remembers Hazel Olsen, a former Muehlig's saleslady. Muehlig supplied the everyday things homemakers needed--mattress pads, linens, blankets, drapes, towels, aprons, tablecloths--in addition to everything needed for home sewing. She also sold clothes and accessories, primarily for her women customers--house dresses, underwear, purses, baby supplies, and children's clothing. The three floors were filled to the brim, with products hanging from the walls. Fay Muehlig, Muehlig's niece by marriage and herself an employee, remembers that people would say, "If you can't find something, go to Muehlig's; they'll have it."

Muehlig's combination of high quality and reasonable prices brought a loyal clientele. The stock remained the same year after year, regardless of fashion. Even after paper tissues were widely used, she continued to sell handkerchiefs, as one former employee remembers, "by the bushel full." She carried women's long underwear (called Tillie Open Bottoms) long after central heating made houses more comfortable in the winter.

Personal service was a hallmark of the store. Stools in front of the long counters allowed customers to sit while they were being helped. Frieda Heusel Saxon, who just celebrated her hundredth birthday, remembers twirling around on a stool as a little girl while her mother, Mary Heusel, shopped. When she was busy, Heusel would telephone her orders. Despite her sometimes vague requests--"enough blue material to make an apron," for instance--the store managed to fill them satisfactorily, according to Elsa Goetz Ordway, the neighbor girl who was sent to pick up Heusel's orders.

As Bertha Muehlig aged, her stock appealed more to mature women. "Owners buy what they need themselves," explains former employee Chuck Jacobus. Her store was the best place to get service-weight stockings, support hose, and step-in dresses without buttons or zippers. Corsets and girdles were fitted by a specially trained woman. The sales staff mirrored the customers: many worked there for years and simply cut back their hours when they reached retirement age. Muehlig herself worked even after she needed a wheelchair: she came in every day and was carried up to her mezzanine office, where she sat, wearing a visor, going over the books.

Muehlig, who never married, lived out her life in the home where she was reared, at 315 S. Main, a block and a half from her store. With no children to leave her money to, she gave lavishly to local churches, scout troops, and hospitals, earning the nickname "the Santa Claus of Ann Arbor." Her pet charities were the Donovan School, later Northside, and the Anna Botsford Bach home. In her store, Muehlig gave discounts to anyone with a hard luck story or a worthy cause. She was also good to her regular customers, giving them presents at Christmas.

When Muehlig died in 1955 at eighty-one, she left the store to two longtime employees, Alfred Diez, a German immigrant whom she had hired in 1926, and Margaret Jones, her bookkeeper since 1937. A third share was left to her nephew, who sold it to Raymond Hutzel. Muehlig's home, the last house on the block, was torn down in 1962 and replaced by a modern storefront building (now Stein and Goetz). Many mourned the loss of this landmark house.

The store continued largely unchanged after Muehlig's death. Jacobus, who was Diez's assistant, remembers that people from out of town were "flabbergasted" at the old-time feel of the store and that chil≠dren were fascinated watching the spring-loaded cash carrier whiz to the mezzanine and back. While Diez worked to broaden the stock to bring in younger customers, he never would go so far as to sell jeans. Jacobus remembers Diez's wife, Dorothy, saying, "I don't like them, I won't wear them, I won't sell them."

Diez died in 1976, and Muehlig's was sold to Tom and Nelson DeFord, who ran it until 1980, when they moved down the street and renamed their store DeFord's. The building lay empty for a year until Hooper, Hathaway, Price, Beuche & Wallace, one of Ann Arbor's oldest law firms, bought and renovated it. Using an 1867 picture, they restored the facade to its original appearance. They kept as many of the store's internal features as possible, including the pressed-metal ceiling, the mezzanine, the elevator, and the oak staircase.

[Photo caption from original print edition: Muehlig at age eighty, accepting a candy replica of her Main Street home made by grateful students at Northside School.]

[Photo caption from original print edition: Celebrating Muehlig's 60th anniversary in 1971: l. to r.) Alfred Diez, Dorothy Diez, Cora Schmid, Irene Howell, Gladys Lambarth, Fay Muehlig, Frieda Volz, Emma Schairer, Helen Coon, Elsa McGee, Lillian Hewitt, and Chuck Jacobus.]