Michigan’s sesquicentennial celebration was highlighted in Lansing, Marquette, and Detroit on 26 January 1987 with glittering balls recognizing 150 years of statehood. For nearly two years, parades, festivals, school programs, historical markers, magazine and newspaper articles, local histories, and conferences explored the state’s past and probed into its future. No single work, however, attempted to summarize Michigan’s heritage.

Initiated by its Historical Observances Committee, the Michigan Sesquicentennial Commission recognized this need. Through the Statehood 150 Fund, support was provided to produce this book. The result was to be a lasting memorial of the sesquicentennial, a gift to the people of...

In 1917 with the few words, “... history furnishes a foundation for enduring patriotism and better government:”¹ former governor Woodbridge Ferris put into perspective the important work of the Michigan Historical Commission which was organized during his first year in office. Today the understanding and appreciation of thewhatandwhenperspectives of history remain essential for progress in a democratic society faced with global competition and interdependence. Yet, without a sense ofwhere—geography—one is easily disoriented and history loses some of its relevance. George Fuller, the early twentieth-century Michigan historian, advanced this point in his insightful quote...

Long before Étienne Brulé became the first white man to come in contact with the natives of the upper Great Lakes, diverse groups of peoples lived in the region. The earliest known inhabitants of the area are called Paleo-Indians. Their appearance in the upper Great Lakes is dated from 12,000 B.C.; and, most likely, they migrated into the region from the south as the glaciers receded. The Paleo-Indians hunted large mammals and gathered natural foods from the land. Over time, though, the climate in the Great Lakes began to change as the glaciers continued to recede to the north.

The...

From the early seventeenth century until 1760, the land we now call Michigan was within the sphere of influence of France. Though Michigan was not a defined area, the upper Great Lakes, which surround Michigan, was a significant part of the expanding territory of New France. French politicians, geographers, and religious leaders were concerned about events taking place in North America as the nation of France and the Catholic Counter Reformation expanded. The average French peasant had no desire to emigrate to the far and formidable land, and few French emigrants ever went to New France. Only ten thousand or...

The defeat of the French troops at Montreal, and the subsequent capitulation by the governor of Canada, yielded to the British all claims to that province which included the western Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. The long struggle between these two nations came to an end on 8 September 1760. A few days later, Maj. Robert Rogers, under orders from Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief of the British forces, started for Detroit and Michilimackinac with two hundred men in fifteen whale boats.

Major Rogers stopped en route at Presqu’Isle to take on additional supplies and to report to...

On 12 January 1835, acting Michigan Territorial Governor Stevens T. Mason announced to the legislative council that Michigan faced a crisis. Michigan’s effort to join the Union as a state had failed. Its request to Congress for an enabling act—congressional permission to call a constitutional convention—had been rejected. The twenty-three-year-old governor declared that Michigan had a “right” to be admitted to the Union, and he asked the legislative council to call a constitutional convention. Twelve days later the council concurred; delegates would be elected in April and gather in Detroit in early May.¹

Born in Virginia and raised...

Throughout the summer of 1836, an army of land hunters, several thousand strong, thronged the dusty streets of the frontier boom town newly renamed Kalamazoo. Every house became a hostelry where men gladly paid for a spot on the floor. Others found shelter amid the sea of white canvas tents that billowed over vacant downtown lots. They had journeyed by canal boat, Lake Erie steamer, stage coach, horseback, and on foot to Kalamazoo, the site of the territory’s western branch of the federal land office, to purchase tracts of Michigan’s virgin wilderness at one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre....

In 1835, Edward W. Barber of Vermontville recalled that his father and neighbors in Vermont began talking about the Great Lakes, “about magnificent forests ... [and] the wonderful richness of the soil, which only needed to be tickled with the hoe to yield a bounteous harvest.” His father, Edward H. Barber, made several “land looking” expeditions to Michigan, and in September 1839 the Barber family “bade adieu to the old Vermont home” and set forth for Michigan, never to see many of their loved ones again.¹

Having succumbed to the “Michigan fever” in 1839, the Barber family joined one of...

In many respects Michigan was a microcosm of the political and social milieu prevalent in the northern United States during the thirty-five years following the American Civil War. Dominated by the Republican party (GOP), Michigan could be relied on to deliver faithfully its votes to the Republican candidates for president, Congress, and state legislators who, in turn, would select members of their party to the United States Senate.¹ In fact, Michigan’s reputation as the “most Republican state in the Union” actually kept its native sons from being considered for nomination as president or vice president, since both major parties chose...

By 1920, Michigan was one of the great industrial centers of the world. Though the automobile is the critical factor in this reputation, there were other industries as well. To understand the emergence of these other industries is to understand the process that ultimately led to the development of the auto industry in the state. The story of industrialization in Michigan during the period 1850 to 1920 is an important part of the story of industrialization in the nation as a whole. While much of the credit for the growth of business firms in industries such as furniture, food products,...

In the twentieth century, automobiles have been understandably the first thing most people have thought of when Michigan, or especially Detroit, has been mentioned. As early as 1902, the country’s largest automobile manufacturer was located in Michigan; and during the next quarter century, three great Detroit-based auto makers gained total dominance of the auto industry, not only in the United States but in the entire world. No other development has had as great an effect on Michigan, and yet it is one whose history is a subject about which many Michiganians are poorly informed.

In spite of what many assume,...

The state was Michigan. The year was 1890. A young man of twenty-seven years of age by the name of Henry Ford was living with his new wife, Clara, on forty acres of farmland in Dearborn next to the farm of his parents. But young Ford described farming as “too much work” and instead tinkered with steam engines and sawed up the trees on his farm for cordwood. By 1890 he had begun to sketch out on paper his ideas for a “mechanical buggy.” By September of the following year, Ford moved to Detroit where he soon became chief engineer...

In many ways, Michigan mirrored the nation in the tumultuous years between America’s entry into the Great War (or World War I, as it came to be known) and the end of World War II.¹ But, as in other eras, the Michigan experience during these dramatic decades had particular characteristics and peculiar shadings. The Great Lakes state weathered the end of twentieth-century America’s ‘teen’ years, the rip-roaring 1920s, the bitter decade of the depression, and the fierce war years with a style all its own. Michigan’s social and political life matured between 1917 and 1945, and the developments in these...

Black Thursday, 24 October 1929, made instant economists of Michiganians who rarely thought about economic principles, and who trusted in conventional wisdom and sought their own pot of gold. Black Thursday forced reassessment of conventional economic wisdom about the role of the community in economic life. The transformation of attitude and action stands clear in the contrast between two demonstrations to demand direct relief and an end to unemployment. On 6 March 1930, such a demonstration in Detroit was dispersed by mounted police wielding clubs. Thirty-one demonstrators were arrested and scores injured.¹ Nine months later, on 24 October 1931, two...

The lumber barons of Muskegon who gathered around the green felt tables in the card room of the exclusive Occidental Hotel in the spring of 1882 should have been looking forward to another profitable year. It had been four years since the Panic of 1873–78; and five years since the bloodshed and coast-to-coast rioting of the great railroad strike of 1877. In those intervening years the lumbermen had revolutionized the lumber business. Muskegon had changed from a stump-strewn, frontier logging town into a mechanized, industrial city in the wilderness. Logging railroads stretched into the hinterlands and brought timber to...

Michigan has a remarkably diverse economy. Too often we think of Michigan’s fate as tied exclusively to the fortunes of the auto industry. Yet, it would be misleading and unnecessarily worrisome for us to focus on that aspect of our recent past. Michigan-and Detroit-is more than automobiles.

Noting the high trends in unemployment, especially among highly paid union workers, we assume things today are in a way they have not been before. We assume that somehow, somewhere, there was a Golden Age of continuously employed, well-paid, prosperous workers.

By taking a longer view of our immediate past, even though barely...

The mid-and late-twentieth century produced profound change in the state of the state of Michigan and in its political parties. It also produced some remarkable political leaders, including governors whose careers rode the roller coaster cycles of boom/bust/rebound that affected Michigan government and politics throughout the first 150 years of statehood. Dominant political figures of the 1945–1988 period included:

Republican United States Sen. Arthur G. Vandenberg, who served from 1928 until his death in 1951 and who abandoned his leadership of isolationism to become an internationalist and leader of postwar bipartisan United States foreign policy.

Six-term (1949–1960) Democratic...

Many trends and movements affected the lives of Michigan's people and the nature of Michigan society in the years following World War II. Major trends included economic prosperity occasionally dampened by recession, increased labor union membership and greater benefits for workers, population growth due to a higher birthrate and migration, expansion of educational facilities and student enrollment, increased sub urbanization, social unrest and social protest, two foreign wars, and changing federal policies toward states and cities. Any discussion of Michigan society during this time period should begin with population growth, urbanization, and the development of suburbs. These trends established the...

Historians do not always think of history as a discipline to be “used” in the sense that a knowledge of the past can assist in making decisions today and planning for the future. The academic attitude is often that the challenge of research and interpretation is sufficient reward. Likewise, the amateur history buff, or genealogist, is not searching for guideposts to the future; nostalgia and curiosity are sufficient. For public officials, legislators, teachers, and corporate executives, however, not paying attention to the lessons of the past may mean decisions made without an understanding of their impact on society or the...