​In August 1932, during the Great Depression, the first cooperative house at the University of Michigan was organized by graduate students in the Student Socialist Club. In return for four to five hours of work and two dollars every week, each of the founding eighteen members received room, board, barber, canning, and laundry service. The first house was a rental house located at 335 East Ann Street. The house was run collectively with all members having an equal vote on decisions. 

With the assistance of the Reverend Henry Lynn Pickerell, the student pastor of the Ann Arbor Disciples Church, and his wife Katheryn, two additional cooperative houses were formed in 1936 and 1937. The Pickerells welcomed students to live in their house in exchange for performing household chores. By 1936, eight students were living in the Pickerells’ attic. With the help of a $700 loan from Reverend Pickerell, the students rented a house on Thompson Street, first named the Student Cooperative House and then the Rochdale House. Since the University did not allow men and women to live together, the women who often visited the Rochdale House sought a cooperative house for themselves. The women rented a house at 517 East Ann Street and opened the Girls’ Cooperative House. In 1939, they had to move to 1511 Washtenaw Street, and took on a new name, the Alice Freeman House, named for the women’s rights activist.

The three independent houses, joining together to allow the purchase of items in quantity, formed the Inter-Cooperative Council in 1937. The houses were organized by the Rochdale principles: open membership; democratic control; political neutrality; opposition to discrimination by race or religion; and the promotion of education.

As the number of cooperative houses continued to expand in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the ICC became responsible for the houses’ financing and assignment of personnel to the houses. By 1941, eight men’s and three women’s cooperatives were operating in rented houses. During this expansion, all the houses were rented until 1943, when the A. K. Stevens House was purchased. Professor A. K. Stevens (the father of Ann Arbor’s late city historian, Wystan Stevens) served as a faculty advisor to the ICC and agreed to co-sign the loan to buy the house.

During World War II, many of the male students enlisted in the armed services. The cost of rental housing was increased by an influx of war factory workers. These two factors caused many of the cooperative houses to close. By 1946, only three cooperatives continued in operation. In 1944, during the war, the ICC voted to buy rather than rent property. After the war, the ICC centralized some functions to meet legal requirements and to limit the liability of the members. The titles to the houses were held in common and the charges at the different cooperatives were equalized through the centralization of finances.

In 1951, despite concerns from some students that paid leadership was at odds with cooperative values, the first ICC employee was hired when the cooperative students voted to approve the hiring of a full-time executive secretary. Luther H. Buchele was hired and continued to work for the ICC for nearly thirty-four years. The Korean War, as in World War II, led to a reduction in the number of male students. College students were not exempt from the draft. 

Over the ensuing years, there has been considerable growth in the number of cooperative houses and the number of students living in the houses. The Baby Boom following World War II created additional demand. Between 1967 and 1972, the ICC tripled in size from roughly 200 to 600 members. The number of cooperative houses grew from nine to twenty-two (this number includes the nine “houses”, now called suites, in the Escher house on North Campus). The number of full-time staff increased from one (Luther Buchele) to three and then four. It would be thirteen years before the ICC purchased another property.

In subsequent years, houses were bought, sold, renamed, renamed again, changed from men’s houses to women’s houses, from women’s houses to men’s houses, houses became co-ed houses, some houses became vegetarian. After a long period of planning and contention with the University, a large cooperative housing complex was built on North Campus, one cooperative became substance free, another focused on QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color), one house burned, and some houses combined. Ruth Bluck, who lived in three of the cooperative houses (Rochdale, Owen, and Osterweil) was the first woman to become ICC President, serving from 1946-1947. Forty-two years later, Jennifer Skwiertz (Minnie’s House) was the second woman elected as president of the ICC, 1978-1979.

The Inter-Cooperative Council now has a house at 337 E. William St. (above) that serves as its headquarters, an education center, and sixteen houses. Additional information on the Inter-Cooperative Council is available at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library. The Bentley Library has an extensive archive of materials donated by the Inter-Cooperative Council covering the period of 1932-2015 and the Inter-Cooperative Council at Ann Arbor website includes A Brief History of the Inter-Cooperative Council.
 
Co-op houses north of Central Campus (north of East Huron Street)

MichMinnies (Minnie’s House and Michigan): 307-315 North State Street

MichMinnies consists of Michigan House (blue) and Minnie’s House (purple). Michigan House was the first student cooperative in Ann Arbor and has been in operation since 1932. Minnie’s House is named for Minnie Wallace, the previous owner of the house at 307 North State Street. Her playful antagonism towards the occupants of the Michigan Socialist House next door inspired the ICC to name her former house in her honor after purchasing it in 1970.

Vail (Stefan T. Vail) House: 602 Lawrence Street

Stefan T. Vail Cooperative House was founded in 1960. The Vail house is an historical building constructed in 1848. Also known as the Mitchell-Gregory-Prettyman House, the house is constructed of adobe brick. Vail House was named for Stefan T. Vail (or Stephanos Valavanis), who was an ICC member and president in the mid-1950s. While at the University of Michigan, Vail helped to devise the financial structure of the ICC. After earning his doctorate in economics, Vail was an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. In 1958, while camping near Mount Olympus in Greece, Vail was shot and killed by an army officer who mistook him for a deserter.

Linder (Benjamin Linder) House: 711 Catherine Street

Benjamin Linder Cooperative House was purchased in 1988. Ben Linder was an American engineer and a clown. In 1983 he moved to Nicaragua, where he rode his unicycle into villages dressed as a clown to administer critical vaccinations to Nicaraguans. While working on a small hydroelectric dam that he designed and built, Linder was murdered by the Contras, a loose confederation of rebel groups funded by the U. S. government. 

A Life Worth Living: Benjamin Linder, 1959-1987, by Alan Wald (Agenda, June 1987)

Ruths’ House: 321 North Thayer Street

Ruths’ House was organized in 1993 and purchased in 1994. Ruths’ House is named for two women. Ruth Buchanan was the house mother for the first cooperative house in Ann Arbor, the Socialist House (or Michigan Socialist House), which opened in 1932. She worked six and one-half days a week as a receptionist at the Exhibit Museum. During World War II, she wrote to U-M students, faculty, staff, and alumni serving in the war. She wrote 17,828 letters, 6952 birthday cards, and 7398 get-well-cards. She sent more than 57,000 copies of the Michigan Daily to servicemen and women. She requested that they call her Aunt Ruth.

Ruth Bluck, who lived in three of the cooperative houses (Rochdale, Owen, and Osterweil) was the first woman to become ICC President, serving from 1946-1947. Forty-two years later, Jennifer Skwiertz (Minnie’s House) was the second woman elected as president of the ICC, 1978-1979.

King (Coretta Scott King) House: 803 East Kingsley Street

Coretta Scott King Cooperative House was organized in 1983. The house was purchased by the ICC in 1953 as the first married student housing cooperative. The house was first named Couples House, then Roosevelt, and last, as Brandeis House. Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader. The wife of Martin Luther King Jr., she was a leader for the civil rights movement, a voice for peace, the founder of the King Center, and organizer of the Coalition of Conscience. The Coretta Scott King Cooperative House is no longer designated as family housing. It has six separate units, with less common space than other cooperative houses.

Co-op houses south of Central Campus (mostly south of Hill Street)

Nakamura (John Nakamura) House: 807 South State Street

Nakamura House, founded in 1948, was one of the first houses to be purchased by the ICC. John Nakamura was a member of the Inter-Cooperative Council at the University. Nakamura was drafted into the army in October 1941 and assigned to the Signal Corps. After President Roosevelt issued orders that Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the United States were to be classified as 4-C/aliens, he was honorably discharged from the army for “erroneous induction.” In February 1942, he registered for the draft and visited his Senator and Congressman to advocate for re-enrollment in the army. On April 15, 1945, in an assault on the German Gothic Line in Italy, he was killed in action during a barrage from German mortars and howitzers. Less than a month later, his unit broke through the Gothic Line with the German Army surrendering on May 2. He was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Debs (Eugene V. Debs) House: 909 East University Avenue

Debs House was acquired and established by the ICC in 1967. Previously, this house had been the site of two other Ann Arbor co-ops, Congress House and Lester House. Screenwriter and director Lawrence Kasdan lived at Debs Cooperative in the late 1960s. Eugene Debs was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, and one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). One of the best-known socialists living in America at the time, Debs was prosecuted by the administration of Woodrow Wilson for his opposition to World War I. He ran for president of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket four times. His last run, in 1920, was from his prison cell. He received 3.4% of the vote.

Johnson-Rivera (Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera) House: 900 Oakland Avenue

The Johnson-Rivera House began as the Muriel Lester Cooperative House, founded in 1940 as an all-women’s cooperative. In 2019, ICC members voted to change Lester House’s name to Rivera House after queer activist Silvia Rivera and rebrand the house as the ICC’s first QTPOC (Queer & Trans People of Color) house. These changes went into effect in 2021. Rivera is a designated safe space for the QTPOC but all interested students can apply. Muriel Lester was a social reformer, pacifist, and non-conformist. Sylvia Rivera was an American gay liberation and transgender rights activist and a noted community worker in New York. Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women. Marsha P. Johnson, whose birth name was Malcolm Michaels Jr., was an African-American gay liberation activist and self-identified drag queen. She was an outspoken advocate for gay rights, was prominent in the Stonewall uprising of 1969, was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front, and was known as the mayor of Christopher Street.

Owen (Robert Owen) House: 1017 Oakland Avenue

Robert Owen Cooperative was purchased in 1947. Before the property was officially purchased, Owen House was located in a rented house on State Street and began operating in the 1940’s. In 1945, Owen House changed to a women’s house because of the scarcity of male students during World War II. It changed back into a men’s house a year later as soldiers returned from the war, and went co-ed in the 1960s. Owen House also housed the ICC office until it moved into the Student Activities Building in 1957. Robert Owen was a Welsh manufacturer turned social reformer and the founder of utopian socialism and the co-operative movement. 

Baker (Ella Josephine Baker) House: 917 South Forest Avenue

Ella Baker Graduate Cooperative has had several names throughout its colorful history, included Mark VIII, Pickerell, Joint House, Tri-House, and the James R. Jones House. Baker originally operated as two separate houses; Mark VIII, a women’s co-op, purchased in 1961, and Pickerell, a men’s co-op, purchased in 1965. The two houses were connected via the addition of a large central room and functioned as a single co-op. After being remodeled in 2007, the co-op adopted its current name and shifted focus to attracting graduate students. Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a grass roots organizer. She was the director of branches (and the highest-ranking woman in the organization) of the NAACP. She was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and an inspiring force in the creation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

Luther (Luther Buchele) Houses: 1510 and 1520 Hill Street

Luther Buchele Cooperative House is made up of two houses on Hill Street, 1510 (photo at left) and 1520 Hill. The buildings were purchased by the Inter-Cooperative Council in 1986. Previously, the buildings were home to John Sinclair, the band MC5, and the White Panther Party. Located behind the two residential houses at 1522 Hill is the ICC’s Moses Coady-Paulo Frieire Cooperative Education Center, where many ICC events and house officer trainings are held. Luther Buchele was hired in 1951 as the executive secretary of the ICC, the first full-time staff member. At the time, he was living in Nakamuru House, one of five co-ops on campus. When he retired after 34 years in 1985, the ICC had grown to 18 houses with 600 students living in the houses. He is widely credited with professionalizing the ICC and ensuring its long-term viability.

Black Elk House: 902 Baldwin Avenue

Black Elk was acquired along with Luther in 1986, as part of a deal with the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, who used to live there. The house has a long tradition of vegetarian and vegan cuisine. Heħáka Sápa, commonly known as Black Elk, was a holy man of the Oglala Sioux. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told to John G. Neihardt, was a popular book at the time. 

Gregory (Karl D. Gregory) House: 1617 Washtenaw Avenue

Karl D. Gregory Cooperative was originally built in 1909 for the Tau Gamma Nu fraternity and was purchased by the ICC in 1995. Gregory House is the only house in the organization that is expressly substance-free. No tobacco, alcohol, or illicit drugs are allowed on the property. Gregory was an African-American professor of Economics at Oakland University and an alumnus of Nakamura House. Before he joined the faculty of Oakland University he worked for the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) in Washington, D.C., and was the chair of the Congress of Racial Equality. Gregory donated $20,000 to the ICC, which served as a down payment to acquire a new coop. The house was named in his honor.

Truth (Sojourner Truth) House: 1507 Washtenaw Avenue

Truth House was purchased by the ICC from the Phi Sigma Sigma Sorority in 1970. Originally it was named Bruce House, after comedian Lenny Bruce. It was renamed Truth House in honor of Sojourner Truth. It is the largest cooperative on Central Campus. Truth House has many international students and a large proportion of graduate students. Sojourner Truth was a formerly enslaved woman, who became an outspoken advocate for abolition, temperance, and civil and women’s rights in the nineteenth-century. Born Isabella Baumfree, in 1843, she said that the Spirit called on her to preach the truth, renaming herself ‘Sojourner Truth’.  In 1851, at a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio, she delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. She was involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau and lobbied against segregation.

Co-op house west of Central Campus

Osterweil (Harold Osterweil) house: 338 East Jefferson Street

Harold Osterweil Cooperative House was the third house bought by the ICC. The first residents were men during the summer of 1946, but in the fall of 1946, Osterweil House became a women’s house, and, in 1970, became co-ed. Osterweil House is the smallest in the ICC, with four single rooms and four double rooms, and the nearest to campus. Osterweil lived in one of the cooperative houses and was the chairman of the personnel committee of the Inter-Cooperative Council. Osterweil was admired for his brilliant scholarship and his high sense of responsibility as a citizen. He won a scholarship to Harvard Law School and was awarded the Sears Prize for being first in his class. He enlisted in the United States Army and was a lieutenant during World II. He was sent overseas in March 1944, and killed in action at Normandy, France, while serving with the 9th Infantry Division, on July 31, 1944. The Osterweil Prize in Economics at the University of Michigan is given to a senior with the most outstanding academic record and the greatest social awareness.

Co-op house on North Campus
 
 

Escher (MC Escher) House: 1500 to 1520 Gilbert Court

Escher House is the only building in Ann Arbor built specifically for cooperative housing. When the University of Michigan was developing the North Campus in the 1950s, the ICC persuaded the university to set aside three acres on a hilltop off Broadway for a “cooperative village”. When the federal government made low-interest loans available in 1958, the ICC started planning. Initially, the loan would have required the University of Michigan to co-sign and it was reluctant to do so. In 1964, Congress removed the co-sign requirement and the ICC procured a $1.24 million, 50-year low-interest loan from HUD in 1968. The opening was scheduled for the fall of 1970. The building was not quite ready and the future residents slept on the floor of the fraternity house next to the building site. Escher House is a single building comprised of nine suites: Valhalla, Bertrand, Karma, Falstaff, Trantor-Mir, Walden III, John Sinclair, Bag End, and Zapata. These nine suites initially operated as nine distinct co-ops but were consolidated due to perceived inefficiencies in administration.

MC Escher was a Dutch draftsman, book illustrator, tapestry designer, muralist, and printmaker. Inspired by the tile work of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, Escher developed “the regular division of the plane” and often created complex architectural mazes with perspectival games and impossible spaces.

Three University of Michigan students, Alex Deighton, Curtis Hunt, and Paul Rizik, as part of the course Understanding Records and Archives: Principles and Practices (UMSI 580), in the University of Michigan’s School of Information, created a house-by-house history of each of the houses in the Inter-Cooperative Council at Ann Arbor. Some of that information helped in the writing of the descriptions of each of the houses.

For more information about the Inter-Cooperative Council at Ann Arbor, consult the 1994 book published by the council: In Our Own Hands: a History of Student Housing Cooperatives at the University of Michigan, by Amy Mericle, Suzanne Wilson, and James Jones.

The following excerpt is from the book's Afterword, "How This Book Came to Be," by Jim Jones:

“Until now, this history has largely been hidden away in filing cabinets, basements, and libraries. Of course, the current members are not totally ignorant of the past. Past written histories, stories of past exploits, and oral traditions – some of them apocryphal – have all given members a sense of how the co-ops came to be. This book, however, is the first attempt to exhaustively research and compile that rich heritage.”

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“My life has been full of adventures but this sounded like the ace of them all.”

Elzada Clover, Nevills Expedition, 1938. (Photo courtesy of the Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, p0077n011380)
With a name like Elzada Urseba Clover, you’re either born to botanize or you're born for adventure -- and it turns out she was born to do both. Clover marked several firsts in her lifetime: She was the first recorded woman (with University of Michigan graduate student Lois Jotter) to run the Colorado River through the full length of the Grand Canyon. She was the first botanist to catalog the flora along the river in the Canyon. And she was the first woman to become a full professor in the University of Michigan Botany Department.

I happened upon Melissa Sevigny’s wonderful 2023 book, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, and to my surprise, I learned that both Clover and Jotter were from the University of Michigan. I’ve lived in Ann Arbor for four decades yet this was the first I’d ever heard of them. As with many stories of women in science, their pioneering work was largely overlooked in their time and was unrecognized for decades.

Clover was 42 at the time of her Grand Canyon expedition, the oldest member of a six-person crew. She was born in Auburn, Nebraska on September 12, 1897, and later moved with her family to the southwest where she became fascinated by the plants of the region, especially cacti. Before coming to Ann Arbor, she taught public school in rural Nebraska and was the principal of a Native American mission school in Texas. Sevigny described her as “...a tall woman, active, robust, dramatic, daring, perhaps just a little bit wicked. She drank whiskey. She could swim, fish, hunt, and ride a horse. She preferred to describe her own code of behavior as ‘gentlemanly’ rather than ‘ladylike.’”

Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, 1938. (Photo courtesy of The Huntington Library.)

“Elzada isn’t wanted because she is a woman.”

Clover graduated from the Nebraska State Teachers College in 1930 and earned her Master of Science degree at the University of Michigan in 1932, followed by her PhD in 1935. Not long before the Grand Canyon trip, she’d been denied a faculty position at U-M. Her departmental appointment was no more permanent than instructor and her department chair Harley H. Bartlett confided in his diary that “Elzada isn’t wanted because she is a woman.” Yet Clover wasn’t the kind of person to give up easily. So when she set her sights on cataloging the plant life of the Grand Canyon -- one of the few frontiers left to botanize -- she was determined to do it. “It has never been explored botanically and for that reason everything collected will be of interest,” she wrote. Clover’s goal was to gather specimens and document changes in plant life through the various elevations along the route into the river’s side canyons. 

Headlines from national newspapers.
Since hiking and riding horseback weren’t viable options, she knew she would need to raft the river. However, the prevailing viewpoint in 1938 was that the Colorado River was far too dangerous for anyone, let alone a woman. It had killed plenty of men who’d tried to run it, and the last woman to attempt it, Bessie Hyde in 1928, had disappeared with her husband on their honeymoon. Their bodies were never found. Perhaps because of these serious risks, the University of Michigan refused to sponsor the expedition. Still, Clover applied for a $400 grant from the Rackham Graduate School (they gave her $300) and chose a partner in Norman Nevills, an entrepreneur river runner she’d met by chance the previous summer. Nevills was living along the San Juan River near the remote outpost of Mexican Hat, Utah, and was looking to boost his profile as a river guide for tourists. Clover would therefore get to do her botanizing, yet it would be a commercial, rather than a university-sponsored, expedition. And she -- along with each crew member -- would need to come up with $400 to fund it.

Clover and Neville struck a deal: He would build and guide the boats, help drum up publicity, and bring a couple of men to help -- LaPhene “Don” Harris, a 26-year-old river runner for the US Geological Survey, and 24-year-old Bill Gibson, an amateur photographer who would film the trip. In turn, Clover would bring two students she was mentoring - a woman, Lois Jotter, age 24, in part for propriety since it would simply not do to be the only woman on an otherwise all-male trip; and 25-year-old Eugene Atkinson, a taxidermist working on his PhD in paleobotany at U-M. (At Lee’s Ferry, roughly halfway through the trip, tensions between the crew threatened to upend the expedition and led to the replacement of Harris and Atkinson with 44-year-old Del Reed and 24-year-old Lorin Bell.)

“The best man of the bunch”

The Colorado River was wilder and more unpredictable in 1938 than today. At the time of their trip, it was a raging torrent flowing at 70,000 cubic feet per second, full of scouring silt that clung to the body and clothes. The crew would drink unfiltered water and eat mostly canned food, though Atkinson would also shoot geese and deer along the way. They would face scorching 100-degree heat, risk rattlesnake bites and other potential life-threatening accidents with no feasible means of rescue -- as well as face the looming specter of the great unknown. As Sevigny points out, this was a period when people suspected there might still be undiscovered species of flora and fauna - potential primordial monsters - hidden down corridors of the Canyon. Clover and Jotter decided to don overalls (they considered jeans too masculine) and would take face cream and apply makeup through much of the journey before finally giving it up. 

A page from Clover's journal of the expedition, 1938. "The moon was brilliant and looked beautiful on the deep canyon wall." (Elzada Papers, Bentley Historical Library)

The story of the two adventurous women spread quickly across the country, with breathless predictions and sensationalized front-page coverage -- some of it misleading or cynical. Several accounts failed to mention the science, focusing instead on the danger of the river and suggesting Clover and Jotter were attention-seeking “school ma’ams” willing to risk the entire crew for their notoriety. A male river runner interviewed by the press even worried that a successful run by women might diminish his reputation. Over 100 newspapermen and gawkers saw the expedition cast off at Green River, and when they were late for a midpoint rendezvous at Lee’s Ferry, there was a media frenzy and a search by a Coast Guard plane. Even a commercial TWA flight out of Los Angeles rerouted its course to look for the river runners. 

Yet on the river, Clover would leave the outside world behind. In the smooth-water section during the early part of the voyage, she floated along playing her harmonica, and her journal of the expedition delights in the beauty of the moon rising over the canyon wall or the wonder of a rainbow after a terrific electrical storm. She would prove to be the most reliable crew member -- Nevills referred to her as “the best man of the bunch” -- keeping her cool even as personalities clashed and tension built as they made their way deeper into the gorge and the more treacherous rapids known as the graveyard of the Colorado River. But despite Clover’s role as the scientific leader of the expedition, traditional sexism persisted: A typical 24-hour cycle saw her and Jotter setting up camp at night, waking up early the next day to gather and press their plant specimens -- all before the men were up and the journey continued. And it was just understood the women would do all the cooking. “The men depend on Lois and me for so many little things. Mirrors, combs, finding shirts, first aid, etc. Just as men always have since Adam,” Clover wrote.

From the Michigan Daily, July 8, 1938

The 43-day trip, lasting from June 20 through July 29 and covering over 600 miles, was a scientific success: Clover and Jotter mapped five different plant zones and were responsible for four first-discovered species (the Grand Canyon claret cup, the fishhook cactus, the strawberry hedgehog cactus, and beavertail prickly pear). Their survey is the only comprehensive one of the Colorado River’s riparian species before the building of Glen Canyon Dam. Nevertheless, Clover fretted over the quality of the specimens, as well as a plant press that went missing temporarily with over a third of the specimens gathered (it was found later that year and mailed to Ann Arbor). In a phone interview with Sevigny, she notes, “[Clover and Jotter] had some scientific complaints about the quality of the work they did. And I think that may have unintentionally contributed to this perception that their work wasn’t important. That [impression] lingered for decades. But this was absolutely untrue. They cataloged 400 species of plants. That’s half of all the plants we know along the river corridor today.”

“I’m so lonely for it now I can hardly stand it.” 

When the trip ended, Clover fell into a melancholy funk. She missed her companions, retreating to her motel room to watch the films, dreaming of further adventures. And she missed the river adventure fiercely, noting in her diary, “I’m so lonely for it now I can hardly stand it.” Almost immediately, she joined Nevills for another excursion, this time down the San Juan River, and she would continue her travels in the following years, surveying the region’s flora on foot and horseback while also making excursions to Texas and Guatemala. Regarding Clover’s wanderlust, Sevigny notes, “I think she belonged out in wild places and that’s where she was happiest.”

Despite the trip’s success -- and perhaps because of its notoriety -- Clover’s work prospects didn’t immediately improve upon returning to Ann Arbor. Sevigny continues: “I think the sensational nature of the publicity did quite a lot of damage to Elzada’s career. She wanted any publicity to be very dignified and very focused on the scientific work.” Clover gave lectures and showed her films to several groups -- women’s clubs, schools, and church groups -- and in 1944, she and Jotter finally completed their species list and published it in the American Midland Naturalist, an influential paper on Southwest plants. Some of their specimens were also given to the Smithsonian’s National Herbarium. 

Grand Canyon Claret Cup, one of the species discovered by Clover and Jotter in 1938. (University of Michigan Herbarium)

But there was a notable lack of recognition for Clover’s pioneering work at the University of Michigan, and both she and Jotter were somewhat disinclined to discuss their trip with either family or friends. “I think they were proud of what they did,” said Sevigny. “But I think it wasn’t in Elzada’s personality to go around and crow about it. There were little things like, for example, she didn’t insist on being called Dr. Clover in the press. I think their honesty about the scientific challenges they faced and their reluctance to speak publicly about what they had accomplished might have contributed to people not knowing what an extraordinary thing they had done.” As to their being the first known women to successfully take a boat down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, Sevigny points out that Clover was always careful to say she and Jotter were the first non-indigenous women to boat the Canyon. She was respectful of and interested in the indigenous cultures that preceded her in the places she visited, including the Havasupai and Navajo peoples. 

Elzada U. Clover, circa 1938 (Ann Arbor News)
To Clover’s great frustration - one that followed her all her life - national wire stories would depreciate her and Jotter's scientific achievements and continue to focus on their gender and age. A former river runner described Clover as a “middle-aged woman who has lost her way in life” and a 1946 Saturday Evening Post article described Clover as a spinster looking for a last adventure. “The story depressed and infuriated Clover,” Sevigny writes. “Her work as a respected university professor had been reduced to bedtime stories for children, and instead of an accomplished scientist and explorer, she was depicted as an aging spinster with a life empty of meaning.” 

“Everything is so big and timeless there it makes so many worries and things here seem so petty.”

Yet Clover would funnel her passion into further botany, travel -- and teaching, eventually rising through the ranks at the University of Michigan. She became a curator at the University’s botanical gardens in 1957 (as well as the first U-M instructor to teach a class there) and she became the first woman in the U-M Botany department to earn a full professorship, serving from 1960-1967. By all accounts, she was excellent at her job. One of Clover’s former students, Jane Myers, penned an eloquent tribute to her in the Ann Arbor News when Clover died, and she recalled Clover’s infectious passion for plants and her memorable teaching style: “She was somebody with such intense interest in all things botanical that you did not want to disappoint her. She was not tough on her students—just always intense. Very quietly.” Clover also held small gatherings of students at her upstairs apartment at 1522 Hill Street.

Dr. Clover holds a frozen flower specimen at the University of Michigan, March 1952 (Ann Arbor News)
Meyers further notes: “In my class out at the greenhouses of the Botanical Gardens in their old 1950s setting, Dr. Clover had us make wire balls with soil in the middle into which we stuck many African violet plants. My mother loved it! There was nothing academic about it; it was just an imaginative use of plants. I think she was ahead of any educational trend by years. She wanted us to enjoy plants as much as she did.” During a book talk at the U-M Biological Station in Pellston, Michigan, where Clover frequently taught, Sevigny met two other former students of Clover’s, and their recollections echo Myers: “Her whole life was about plants. They both said that it changed their lives to absorb some of that passion for the natural world.”

After retiring from the University of Michigan in 1967, Clover moved to San Juan, Texas. On November 2, 1980, she died in McAllen, Texas, close to the Mexico border. Despite all the obstacles she faced, Elzada Clover dared to undertake both an epic adventure and a career path that up to that point had been exclusively the domain of men. “Before them, men had gone down the Colorado to sketch dams, plot railroads, dig gold, and daydream little Swiss chalets stuck up on the cliffs,” writes Sevigny. “They saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system made up of flower, leaf, and thorn, lovely in its fierceness, worthy of study for its own sake.”

The same can be said of Elzada Clover herself. Her legacy is the cacti and succulent room at the University’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens, which was seeded by her southwest collections, and her over 300 specimens in the University of Michigan Herbarium.

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(Michigan Daily, January 15, 1947)

Origins: From J-Hop Raffle to Functional Memorial

It was December 1946 -- just over a year after the end of World War II -- and University of Michigan students were excited to bring back the highly popular Junior Hop (J-Hop), a glittering three-day student formal started by fraternities in the 1860s that included dancing, morning-after breakfasts, hayrides, and house parties. This year's lineup featured big band leader and saxophonist Jimmie Lunceford, and former star trumpeter with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, Ziggy Ellman. However, many students were concerned that such frivolity clashed with the tenor of a world so recently ravaged by war. As a result, the J-Hop Committee persuaded the Student Legislature to turn its traditional J-Hop raffle into a fundraiser for a living memorial, and a student committee urged the University regents to adopt a resolution to pursue the idea of such a functional memorial.

Functional - or living - memorials were becoming increasingly popular after World War II as a more palatable alternative to the traditional statue or obelisk associated with memorials of earlier generations. The J-Hop committee’s initial idea was to build a chapel or recreation building in the Arboretum.

By January 1947, there was considerable enthusiasm for the project -- especially among the burgeoning World War II student veterans taking advantage of the G.I. Bill (of the 18,000 U-M students at the time, 12,000 were WWII veterans) -- and this prompted the creation of a significantly larger joint student-faculty-alumni fundraiser and the J-Hop raffle funds were turned over to this effort. An executive committee was formed that included a central committee of all student organizations; a sub-committee of the student legislature; and a faculty-alumni advisory group.

Thus began the University’s first major fundraising effort to date.

On May 17, 1948, the Michigan Daily published a full page dedicated to the memorial project.

The Board of Regents unanimously approved this yet-to-be-named project upon the recommendation of U-M President Alexander Ruthven. Ralph Sawyer, Dean of the Rackham Graduate School, took up the initiative by appointing a War Memorial Committee. Among this committee's members were three WWII veterans: Arthur DerDerian, an aviation cadet; Arthur Rude, a first lieutenant in the Army; and E. Virginia Smith, a nurse in the Pacific Theater.

Harnessing Atomic Energy for the Greater Good

But what would this memorial look like and how would it function? What would it be called?

War Memorial Committee chair and Dean of Students, Erich A. Walter, approached several friends and former alumni. The University also sent letters to world leaders, authors, and stars -- figures such as Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, E. B. White, and Orson Welles -- seeking advice and input.

But it was Fred Smith, a 39-year-old U-M alumnus and New York publishing executive, whose proposal for the memorial most engaged U-M’s student body and administrative leadership. His idea? To harness the power of the atom for the greater good. He wrote, “As vital to the future of mankind as the continuation of religion; and the devotion of the people involved in it should be no less unstinted... We have named the memorial The Phoenix Project because the whole concept is one of giving birth to a new enlightenment, a conversion of ashes into life and beauty.” 

The Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project (MMPP) would be "a living, continuous memorial" - a unique endeavor dedicated to exploring ways that the atom could aid mankind rather than destroy it. The MMPP was created by action of the U-M Board of Regents on May 1, 1948, and in his Memorial Day address that year, U-M President Alexander Ruthven called it “A memorial that would eliminate future war memorials.” 

The idealism was matched only by its danger: To bring such a destructive force to a college campus with the intent of harnessing its power for the benefit of mankind was a radical idea requiring a radical approach.

"The most important undertaking in our University's history." 

Phoenix Memorial Local Committee, May 1950 (Photo by Eck Stanger, Ann Arbor News.)

Under the leadership of National Executive Chairman Chester Lang, the Phoenix Campaign grew into a national effort that would be the first significant fundraising campaign initiated by the University -- at the time "the most important undertaking in our University's history," according to Ruthven. The Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project Laboratory would eventually be funded by over 30,000 alumni and corporate donors. By 1953, the campaign raised $7.3 million for a research building and endowment eventually amounting to over $20 million.

The project would mark many firsts:

* The first fundraising effort in U-M history
* The first set of laboratory buildings on the new U-M North Campus
* The first university in the world to explore the peaceful uses of atomic energy
* And it would initiate the U-M’s new Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences, the first such university program in the world

“M Glow Blue!” Henry Ford Donates a Nuclear Reactor

The Ford Motor Company alone donated $1 million to build the Ford Nuclear Reactor (FNR) as part of the Laboratory.

Ford Letter acknowledging the donation of a nuclear reactor (Bentley Historical Library Image Bank)

In February 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) licensed the Ford Nuclear Reactor (FNR) and construction on the reactor began later that summer. The reactor would be built in a special unit at the north end of the Laboratory and it was the first reactor ever requested for construction by an agency other than the AEC. The FNR was dedicated on November 16, 1956, reaching its first critical mass on September 19, 1957, and level 1 megawatt on August 11, 1958. Eventually operating at two megawatts of power, the “icy blue glow” of the more than 55,000-gallon reactor pool inspired the motto of the reactor workers: “M-Glow Blue!”

Moreover, the Department of Energy would fabricate, transport, and dispose of the fuel at no cost to the University.

Professor Gomberg at the Phoenix Memorial Lab, August 1961 (Ann Arbor News)

U-M professor of electrical engineering Henry Gomberg was the first director of the Phoenix Project. And the College of Engineering was responsible for developing its instructional and research program. The FNR would operate 24 hours per day for the next 50 years. 

Bubble Chambers and Mummies: Research at the Phoenix Laboratory

Schematic of Ford Nuclear Reactor (Bentley Historical Library Image Bank)

Research at the Laboratory took place across multiple disciplines, helping to fund studies on the applications of nuclear technology in fields as diverse as medicine, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, archeology, engineering, zoology, anthropology, and law. It saw uses for cancer treatment, bone grafts, medieval coins, and even an Egyptian mummy.

Former MMPP director David Wehe remembers, “I recall lively lunchroom discussions with engine researchers from GM and Ford discussing measurement techniques with the nuclear chemists inventing new diagnostic pharmaceuticals and archeologists testing the authenticity of ancient relics -- all of them working within the Phoenix Memorial Laboratory.” 

Project highlights include Gamma ray sterilization; carbon-14 dating; radioactive iodine for cancer treatment and detection; gravitationally-induced quantum interference, as well as the bubble chamber design allowing rapid, easily interpreted photographs of rare atomic interactions that won Donald Glaser a 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics. The laboratory also included a greenhouse and saw foundational research on the effects of radiation on plant life.

Oppenheimer visits. (Michigan Daily, Feb 9, 1962)

The FNR was also used to train utility workers in nuclear instrumentation and reactor operation and was visited over the years by world leaders and distinguished scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe. MMPP leadership was also instrumental in founding the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) arm of the AEC.

By June 1997, however, the Ford Nuclear Reactor Review Committee estimated the reactor was costing the university an average of $1 million a year and requested input from university departments, as well as organizations outside the university community, on continued use of the facility. Although many groups actively campaigned to keep the reactor operational, the decision was made to close it. The reactor took nearly a decade to dismantle and was officially decommissioned in 2003.  

Rededicating the MMPP 

After extensive renovations, the former Phoenix Memorial Laboratory in 2013 became the home of the U-M Energy Institute, which continued to support the Project’s unique memorial mission. In spring 2017, after a decade of dismantling the FNR and clearing the building of radiation, the building was rededicated as the Nuclear Engineering Laboratory with a focus on advancing nuclear security, nonproliferation, safety, and energy. In 2021, the Energy Institute was disbanded and the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences (NERS) program regained proprietorship. In April 2019, the department launched the Fastest Path to Zero Initiative, with the mission of “identifying, innovating, and pursuing the fastest path to zero emissions by optimizing clean energy deployment through energy innovation, interdisciplinary analysis, and evidence-driven approaches to community engagement.” The Fastest Path offices are now housed within the MMPP. 

A rededication of the MMPP took place in 2022. The labs and offices are occupied by two groups: NERS and the Materials Research Institute (MRI).

According to former MMPP director David Wehe, “Today, the MMPP continues its legacy of honoring WWII veterans by providing seed funding to researchers seeking to harness the atom for the public good. While the building also serves other purposes now, the hall still echoes those exciting discoveries that came from the MMPP.”

Historical photos and articles about the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project

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Although an affluent community like Ann Arbor was hardly the culture in which ‘The Beat’ movement (theoretically) thrived and was designed for, nonetheless the influence of ‘The Beats’ was present and very much felt in Ann Arbor back in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, student poets and hanging out.

The peace rally at Michigan Stadium on October 15, 1969, was the largest of all the anti-war protests in the 1960s in Ann Arbor. Including some 20,000 attendees, the rally was the culmination of Ann Arbor’s participation in a nationwide event -  The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam - that took place that day, with many businesses, churches, and colleges across the country closing to protest continued involvement in the War. Related events at the University of Michigan included teach-ins and forums, and the day concluded with a 6 p.m. torchlight parade winding from the University of Michigan central Diag to Michigan Stadium, followed by a rally inside the Stadium. 

The 1969 South University Riot was a series of confrontations between local law enforcement and factions of Ann Arbor’s counterculture population that extended over three nights, from June 16-18, on or near the four-block South University Avenue shopping district in Ann Arbor.

Monday, June 16

Harper's weekly on Prof. Adams.

Under the caption "The new president of Cornell," Harper's Weekly has the following on Prof. Adams' recent good fortune:

Charles Kendall Adams, professor of history in the University of Michigan, was on Monday, the 13th, elected president of Cornell University, in the room of the retiring President White, by an almost unanimous vote of the trustees, the numbers being 13, to 3 for General Morgan. The new president, who is a native of Vermont, in which state he was born in 1835, owes this flattering election to the influence of the late president, between whom and him the most intimate relations existed during their acquaintance at Ann Arbor, where Professor Adams graduated in 1861, and where Professor White is the chair of history when the latter accepted the presidency of Cornell. Professor Adams id the author of "Democracy and Monarchy in France," and of the "Manual of Historical Literature," comprising descriptions of the most important histories in English, French, and German, together with practical suggestions as to methods and course of historical study, and of which the philosophic character, the profundity of learning, and judicious historical conclusions have given him high standing as a author. At the meeting of the trustees numerous tributes were received, speaking in the strongest terms of testimony to his executive ability and his thorough knowledge of educational systems both in this country and in Europe. The new president, indeed, is generally conceded by scholars to posses qualities of that sterling and lasting kind which, although not showy or brilliant at first sight as those which might be possessed by others, would yet tend to impress the board of trustees and alumni more and more as they know him better and more closely, and through his new position, with an increasing conviction of his scholarship, executive ability, and wide range of educational thought and experience. He has really been the responsible promoter of most of the successful plans of higher education at Michigan University, though others have received the larger share of the credit, and it was entirely through his exertions that the library system at Ann Arbor was built up; and those -- and they are many -- who are not willing to give him credit for the necessary force of character, will find themselves most grievously mistaken.

Ann Arbor today would be just another small Michigan town- no bigger, perhaps, than Saline or Chelsea- had it not been for one crucial event: in 1837, just thirteen years after its founding, it was designated the site for the University of Michigan.

The initial campus, situated on forty acres donated by the Ann Arbor Land Company, was a tiny affair, consisting of one combination classroom building and dormitory along with four professors' houses. The president's house on South University is the lone survivor from that first generation of campus buildings. Though still used as a residence, it has been vastly altered over the intervening 160 years.

The "Diag" took its name from the diagonal walk that crossed what was then largely an open field. But the campus grew quickly, particularly under dynamic presidents Henry Phillip Tappan (1852-1863) and James Burrill Angell (1871-1909).

Except for Tappan's observatory and Angell's Catherine Street hospitals, almost all of the nineteenth century construction took place on the Diag. By the turn of the century, campus was thick with structures, most built of a red brick in a weighty Romanesque style.

Almost all were swept away as the U-M's growth accelerated in the twentieth century. The Diag was completely rebuilt, and surrounding properties were acquired to extend the university's presence far beyond the original campus borders. Today only tiny Tappan Hall, hidden away between the art museum and the president's house, survives as a reminder of the red-brick campus of 1900

When James Burrill Angell arrived as president in 1871, the U-M had nine buildings. He oversaw the addition of fifty more before stepping down in 1909. The elegant oval shape of Angell's 1883 University Library had been truncated by the turn of the century with the addition of new book storage "stacks" at the rear of the building (left), but a gracefully curved reading room still looked out on the center of the Diag. Though the older portions of the building were torn down in 1918, the stacks were incorporated into the present Graduate Library, completed in 1920.

The Waterman and Barbour gymnasiums, at the comer of North University and East University, were the longest-lived of Angell's great red brick buildings. Their demolition was also a turning point in campus interest in historic preservation. In 1976, when the university announced its intentions to tear down the historic complex, a group called the Committee for Reuse of the Barbour-Waterman Buildings was established and lobbied hard for the university to take another look at alternative uses for the structures, which dated to the 1890s. Petitions were circulated and signed by thousands, citizens wore buttons saying "Recycle Barbour-Waterman," and many spoke before the regents to urge reconsideration.

The regents were not swayed, and the buildings were demolished in 1977 (their site is now part of the chemistry building). But the university has since shown greater sensitivity to historic buildings. And one unexpected result of the regents' intransigence on Barbour-Waterman was the listing of the entire original Central Campus, and other significant buildings such as Rackham and the Law Quad, on the National Register of Historic Places.

President Tappan's Law Building stood at the corner of State and North University. It was completed in 1863, the same year that the U-M's visionary founding president was fired by the regents (see "President Tappan Fired" in "The Top Ten Ann Arbor Stories of the Millennium," p. 31).

The formidable turret was added in a remodeling in 1893 but didn't quite make it to 1900—it was removed during another expansion in 1898. After completion of the Law Quad in the 1920s, the building was renamed Haven Hall and used for LS&A faculty offices. In 1950, a disgruntled student determined to obliterate a bad grade burned it down.

The modern Haven Hall is closer to the center of the Diag. The place where Tappan's Law Building stood is now a lovely, tree-shaded lawn.

When it opened in 1881, the U-M's natural science museum was the first owned by a public university. Designed by architecture prof William LeBaron Jenney—later
famous as the "father of the skyscraper"—the museum had a collection ranging from stuffed animals to Asian manuscripts.

The exhibits moved to the present Ruthven Museums Building in 1928. Jenney's building housed the Romance language departments for three decades before being demolished in 1958.

Exceot for the crowning dome, this long, massive building parallel to State Street bears an uncanny resemblance to Angell Hall. University Hall, completed in 1871, was the U-M's first great classroom building. The impressive dome shown here was actually the building's second- the first was deemed structurally unsound and replaced in 1896. Hidden from State Street when Angell Hall was built directly in front of it in 1924, University Hall lingered on for another twenty-six years before being torn down in 1950.

Stretching the tum-of-the-century date slightly, this multipanel postcard shows the U-M's hospitals as they stood following completion of the Palmer children's ward in 1904. One of the two hospitals flanking the Palmer ward had been built for the U-M's medical doctors, the other for its homeopathic physicians. By 1900, however, the homeopaths had moved out to a new hospital on North University.

The low, many-windowed "pavilion" hospitals reflected the emerging medical thinking of the nineteenth century before the role of germs was understood, disease was thought to be spread by "morbid" air exhaled by sick patients. It wasn't a bad guess, since it led to the division of hospitals into isolated, well-ventilated wards—steps that did help reduce the rate of hospital-induced infections.

By the turn of the century, the germ theory and antiseptic surgery were fueling great strides in health care. The homeopaths soon faded, while the M.D.'s moved into a succession of huge new hospitals—on Ann Street in the 1920s, and overlooking Fuller Road in the 1980s. The site of the old pavilion hospitals is now occupied by the Victor Vaughan Building, Med Sci II, and the Taubman Medical Library.

An impressive testimonial to the growing importance of the physical sciences, the 1885 Engineering Laboratory bore a striking resemblance in both style and scale to the University Library just to the north. It was designed by Gordon Lloyd, the celebrated Gothic architect best known locally for his work on two prominent churches, St. Andrew's and First Congregational.

The engineers expanded into larger quarters bordering the southeast comer of the Diag (home of the famous "Engin Arch"), then leapfrogged East University, and finally relocated en masse to a still-growing complex on North Campus. By then the 1885 laboratory was long gone—it was torn down in 1956.

As the university expanded in the early twentieth century, it acquired and demolished many of the buildings that had bordered the original campus. Between 1909 and 1920, the university gained title to some 114 separate parcels of land, including the Arboretum, the Botanical Gardens off Packard Road, and the site of the power plant on Huron Street. But perhaps its most dramatic acquisition was professor Alexander Winchell's spectac-ular octagon house on North University.

Winchell served at various times as professor of geology, zoology, botany, physics, and engineering. The strong-minded Winchell was one of president Tappan's most vociferous opponents but also a powerful advocate of opening the university to women, and perhaps America's most influential supporter of Charles Darwin's then-novel theory of evolution. His unusual octagon home, built according to the tenets of Orson Fuller, a well-known phrenologist and prolific writer on health, happiness, and sex, was surrounded by extensive gardens that complemented his collections of flora and fauna, some of which are now at the Smithsonian.

After Winchell left the university in the mid-1870s, his home was rented by various fraternities. Acquired by the university in 1909, it was demolished shortly afterward to make way for Hill Auditorium.

The original professors' residences from the 1840s found new uses as the campus grew. This one facing South University housed the Dental College from 1877 to 1891, adding a wing (right) in the process. The engineering department took over in 1892 and stayed until 1922. when the building was demolished to make way for the Clements Library.

The U-M Law Quad has a timeless feel, but in fact it is of comparatively recent construction. Two entire blocks of residences were demolished in the 1920s to make room for it. One of the more spectacular of the buildings lost was the 1880 Psi Upsilon fraternity house, which faced South University at the comer of State. A newspaper account from June 30, 1923, noted that "since the beginning of the second semester men have been tearing down the former fraternity houses on State Street, which occupied the land needed for the new [Lawyers] Club. Practically all of the work of the demolishing of the Psi Upsilon house has been completed and the steam shovel will clear away the remainder of the ruins. . . . Practically all of the homes in this block are now being torn down."

Until recently, it seemed that the same fate might befall the row of four nineteenth century houses the U-M owns on Huron across from the Power Center.But after years of designating the location as a future building site, the university is now renovating and rehabbing the houses—an encouraging sign that it has finally begun to develop a preservation ethic.