Ann Arbor has celebrated its 200th anniversary throughout 2024 with numerous citywide events and initiatives. But a recent exhibit drills down to the first 50 years of the town's formation.

The Museum on Main is a two-story yellow-beige house just north of downtown, at the five-point intersection where Main and Kingsley Streets meet with the end of one-way Beakes Street.

The museum is hosting Ann Arbor's Story: The First 50 Years, a revealing look at the beginnings of European settlement in the area, through its first half-century of officially existing as a village, long before it became a city. Photographs, maps, and original documents provide a revealing and humanizing view of a past, which can seem so foreign to 21st-century America, making the exhibit worth the 15 minutes or so most people will take to go through it.

The Museum on Main's website explains the people, places, and things that comprise the exhibition:

If it takes a village to raise a child… what does it take to raise a village? Raising a village takes pioneers whose stories range from inspiring to mysterious, and heroic to heartbreaking. It takes settlers who build homes, operate farms, raise families and connect with each other to form communities. And it takes home-made items, businesses, and occupations that contribute to the quality of everyday life.

Some of those everyday things are documented in the numerous old photographs in the exhibit. We are fast approaching a time when nobody will be old enough to remember the old courthouse: The modern courthouse at Huron and Main is a somewhat drab mid-century modern affair; it replaced a much more monumental, and taller, Victorian edifice, whose main tower used to loom over the then skyscraper-less town like an exclamation point.

The first four cops ever to patrol the city full-time are shown in another photograph. According to the display, their salaries were paid through licenses paid by “saloons and billiard halls, considered ‘sources of disorder.’”

The museum also displays an 1846 census report covering the upper and lower villages of Ann Arbor that shows 3,229 people. Four professors taught 82 students at the time—compared to 51,823 students and 33,356 faculty and support staff now, according to the U of M. (And that doesn’t even include the U of M Hospital.)

Some jobs listed in the 1846 census seem archaic now: There were four “steam boiler shops,” five saddle and harness stores, 56 shoemakers, and 53 coopers—craftsmen who made wooden barrels. Ann Arbor’s literary reputation laid down roots early, as evidenced by three bookstores listed in that census.

The exhibit also displays dozens of early maps of Ann Arbor, providing snapshots of land-use decisions in the area and revealing answers about why certain roads and infrastructure were placed where they were—often due to agricultural reasons. These maps help establish proof of existence for some of Ann Arbor’s oldest established, post-independence families, too, as some of the earliest maps demonstrate a now long-gone practice of printing the last name of the family who first bought the plot.

The lack of Native American views and input on Ann Arbor’s formal beginnings is hard to miss. Their history here goes back thousands of years, as the main atrium of the new wing of the nearby UMMA gallery acknowledges: “Gidayaa Anishinaabewakiing” it says, with an English translation, “You are on Anishinaabe land.”

But this gap is also hardly surprising. This is a collection of documents and artifacts—an old Bible, dresses, home goods, uniforms, etc.—from European immigrants and Americans born of mostly European ancestry performing a very American form of colonization—manifest destiny—as they moved west to find land that they mostly thought of as free to the first taker.

One nook of the exhibit does provide clues about Ann Arbor’s indigenous heritage: a map of Washtenaw County from the era showing Native American village locations and roads.

America’s legacy as a land of immigrants also pops up in the displays in surprising ways. One early document shows British influence in spelling the town’s name “Ann Arbour.” The Bible on display from the 1600s is from the Huguenots, a Christian denomination from France.

Throughout the year, Ann Arbor has celebrated its development, but Ann Arbor's Story: The First 50 Years also makes you ponder alternative histories.

Transportation is a good example. Ann Arbor has been trying to cut down on fossil fuel-powered cars as part of its A2ZERO 2030 goals, and proposals for a light rail system or elevated system have been in talks on and off for decades. But it is easy to forget that Ann Arbor did have a trolley system at one point.

Photographs show trolley tracks down main streets, and interurban trams provided mass transit for the area. They would go out of town on freight train tracks, way out into the country, and to surrounding towns.

As one display explains: “The interurban made it easy to attend stage shows, concerts, and football games in Ann Arbor. ‘Special’ excursion cars brought riders from Ypsilanti to live performances at the Whitney Theater, around the corner on North Main Street.”

Ann Arbor started moving to busses by the mid-1920s, and the streetcars were sent to the scrapyard in January 1925. The interurban ended in 1929, and cars became the dominant form of transportation.

As football fans fight for parking on Saturdays, history shows us how one aspect of Ann Arbor's landscape could have turned out differently. Ann Arbor's Story: The First 50 Years is a simple reminder of what's happened and what could have been.

Drew Saunders grew up in Whitmore Lake and fell in love with A2 when he started going for karate lessons downtown at Keith Haffner’s. Studying journalism at Eastern Michigan University, he began freelancing in 2013 with the Ann Arbor Observer, and then so many other publications. He obtained a Master of Science degree in the field from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2019. In addition to writing for Pulp, Saunders specializes in business and environmental journalism.  

"Ann Arbor's Story: The First 50 Years" is at the Museum on Main, 500 North Main Street, Ann Arbor, through December 29. It is open and free from 12 pm to 4 pm on Saturdays and Sundays, and during the week by appointment. Go to washtenawhistory.org for more information.