Tales of Hauntings in Michigan

by Aubrey Dickens and Sara Daniels

With Halloween soon approaching, there are many fun ways to celebrate the holiday. And if you're a fan of scary stories, Michigan has countless spooky attractions to get your thrills.

Grand Rapids is one of Michigan’s most beloved cities. A hub for art and culture, this city in Western Michigan has plenty to offer, including something for haunted house enthusiasts.

Once located where the Bell Telephone Company currently stands, the Judd-White house was home to young married couple Warren and Vashti Rowland. Having married in 1907, their tragic story in Grand Rapids began when Warren started a job at G.R. and Indiana Railroad, where he lost his leg in a gruesome railroad accident. After Warren’s accident, he was fitted with a wooden leg, a piece of him that would later contribute to the couple’s tragic end.

As the Grand Rapid Press of July 10, 1909 (pictured at right) reports, those who knew the couple said that Warren and Vashti never appeared to be happy with each other. Vashti’s sister expressed a long-held fear that Warren would murder her sister, recalling once seeing Warren chase Vashti down the street with a razor. After months of the couple living unhappily together, the two separated, leaving their residence at the Judd-White house vacant. This would be the last time the room would have any peace.

A short time after the couple separated, Warren called upon Vashti, presumably to make peace with his estranged wife. But the opposite came true.

As Warren and Vashti made their way into their former home, Warren removed his wooden leg and beat Vashti over the head. As Vashti was lying on the floor, unconscious, Warren locked the door to the room and began to seal the windows with towels to close any gaps to make the room airtight. He then went to the gas fixture on the wall and began to fill the room with a noxious gas. Warren, however, was not finished with his task. Using a razor, he attempted to kill himself.

When their bodies were discovered two weeks later, reports show that Warren had not cut himself badly enough to kill himself, and instead most likely passed from the fumes. After hearing of the tragic story, locals speculated that Warren was a mad man who became angry and jealous after believing his wife was seeing someone else. The public maintained this opinion. According to the Grand Rapids Press article, “No note of farewell to the world was found in the room, nor any clue regarding the motive of the crime.”

After their death, the room remained vacant for some time, with no one wanting to stay there due to its horrid past. In 1920, the Judd-White house was torn down, and in its place stands the Michigan Bell Telephone Company building. Although the house is gone, people claim that the spirits of Warren and Vashti Rowland are still there today.

**********

Among the repertoire of haunted places, mental asylums are infamous for being severely haunted by former patients and staff who lived within their walls. In Michigan, Traverse City State Hospital is one of these abandoned places, with a history of suffering and horror that has outlived the hospital itself.

In 1885, Traverse City State Hospital was opened and remained so for a little over a century before it was closed and abandoned.

Northern Michigan Asylum Report, 1908

The stigma of mental health remains an obstacle even now, as it was during the 19th century, when mental hospitals were still in their infancy in the U.S. Although these hospitals aimed for the greater good, many patients suffered cruelty at the hands of doctors and staff who ran these institutions. The practice of lobotomy, the use of straight jackets, and periods of isolation were common in mental hospitals, with the belief that they would help the patient. However, thanks to our better understanding of modern psychology, it is now known these practices created more harm than good.

As the years passed and the state hospital became more decrepit, the building became a spot for vandals and those curious to explore. From these visits come the stories of the ghosts who haunt the building. It is reported that individuals have seen faces appear through windows, radios emit nothing but static, or people sense the feeling of someone lurking. Many patient deaths occurred at the hospital, with the common forms of death being disease and suicide.

Throughout the years, horror stories of the abandoned hospital have emerged. An internet urban legend tells of the story of two young boys who were patients at the hospital and how one disappeared.

Northern Michigan Asylum Tunnels

The two boys were outside playing and had begun to wander. As their trek across the grounds continued, they ventured into the underground tunnels that traveled beneath the buildings. As they continued to walk down the tunnels, they encountered a man who was an escaped patient of the hospital and had been living in the tunnels ever since his escape. Terrified of the man, the boys ran out of the tunnels, but sadly only one would make it out. Having run for some time, one of the boys looked behind for his friend, but he was nowhere to be seen. After reporting the incident to the hospital staff, they searched for the missing boy but could find no trace of him other than his St. Raphael necklace. Over a month later, the boy’s remains were found at what now is known as the hippie tree–a name created from the delinquent activities that took place there.

Northern Michigan Asylum Report, 1908
(click to enlarge)

While this urban legend does not give the time of this incident, looking into a report from the Board of Trustees of Traverse City State Hospital, fourteen men were discharged from the hospital in an unimproved mental state in 1908. Earlier in the report, it is also stated that of 505 patients admitted, “15 were homicidal or had threatened homicidal assaults.” Is it possible that one of the men discharged was also the murderous man in the tunnel? While legend says he escaped, is it possible that he could have taken refuge in the tunnels after being discharged?

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Before even the nation’s first mental hospital opened its doors, and before Michigan became an official state, the territory in the Great Lakes region saw both violence and sweeping changes. Like with the case of Warren and Vashti Rowland and the chilling conditions of Michigan’s mental asylums, colonization and the conflicts between settlers and Indigenous peoples are remembered not just through history books, but through hauntings.

From the book, Haunted Houses of Grand Rapids, comes the tale of Big John, an Ottawa fur trapper from the 1850s. In 1936, Grand Rapids homeowners Lillian and Tom Rush encountered a ghostly figure in their basement. While firing guns at their in-home firing range, Lillian saw a man emerge from the furnace, “tall and somber, with a high-crown hat of the type worn by bad men in old western movies” (p. 11-12). Wearing two long black braids and a watch chain, the specter of Big John stood silently in their basement before disappearing as abruptly as he had appeared.

Big John’s apparition was a remnant of the Michigan fur trade. He once lived in a wooden house located where Lillian and Tom’s abode later stood, where he trapped beavers, mink, lynx, wolves, and bears alongside his wife and two sons. In 1857, Big John’s family was rumored to have fought over the furs, a fight that ended in John’s mysterious disappearance. While his body was never found, people of Grand Rapids believe he haunts the area to this day.

Aerial View of Grand Rapids, circa 1910 

Murder-suicides, asylums, disappearances, and apparitions—Michigan has countless chilling tales to offer this October. But its ghost stories also get at something deeper than just raising goosebumps. Our ghost stories serve as ways of trying to understand our struggles through history. Beneath the spectacle of many of these stories lies real lives: women facing violence like Vashti, Michiganders struggling with stigma surrounding mental health before modern psychology, and the bloody history of colonization.

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Bibliography

 

Don Farrant and Gary Eberle, Haunted Houses of Grand Rapids: chilling, authentic local ghost stories .... Ada, Mich.: Ivystone Publications. ca. 1979-82.

 

Northern Michigan Asylum, Report of the Board of Trustees." Lansing, Michigan: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Company, State Printers. 1908.

"Used Wooden Leg To Stun His Wife," Grand Rapids Press. Grand Rapids, Michigan. July 10, 1909.

Lest we Forget: Remembering September 11

 by Gillian Macdonald

As the news media around the US girds itself to mark the somber occasion of September 11, we take a moment to reflect on this tragedy. Twenty years ago, the September 11 attacks sent shock waves through the nation and the world. Thousands lost their lives when four commercial airplanes were used to target prominent US buildings, including the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Here in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, the Morning Sun and Central Michigan Life reported on the tragic events. The Morning Sun’s headline read: “Under attack: Outrageous attacks claim thousands.” Susan Field and Linda Gittleman reported on a Western Michigan University student’s grounding by Federal Aviation officials in Mount Pleasant that Tuesday. Jason Schilling was on a routine flight for his aviation class when he was grounded by the FAA. Entering the terminal in Mount Pleasant, Schilling and his friend were confronted with the unfolding attacks on a television mounted on the wall. Schilling commented “We were up there flying. We couldn’t even believe it.” In Isabella County, the Michigan State Police were on high alert and the emergency management center was on partial activation status.

Heather Sonntag from CM Life reported that senior Kristina Bukoski thought “the devastation on her television was staged,” she didn’t quite know how to comprehend the tragedy. Students from CMU’s campus were left speechless and relied on each other and counseling support to deal with the overwhelming loss. In response, the University organized meetings at the dining halls and Bovee University Center allowing students and counselors to meet and lean on each other. CMU President Rao formed an emergency ad hoc crisis management team in effort to control safety concerns across campus. The attacks themselves had forced the cancellation of classes on September 11; by September 12, President Rao followed President Bush’s lead by urging a return to normalcy on campus. The faculty were also instructed to be considerate of individual reactions to the tragedy; students were not excused from class but allowed to leave campus if they wanted.

Twenty years later, we can still abide by President Rao’s words to campus: “It is important that, in the face of tragedies such as this, humans come together in support of and respect for one another, and I feel sure that this will be the case at CMU because of our long tradition of caring for one another.” Life has never been the same, nor should it be. The first memorials to the attacks came in the immediate aftermath and each year, two bright columns of light shine in New York city near the site of where the World Trade Center once stood. Here on CMU’s campus, the September 11 attacks are marked every year with a memorial flag garden situated next to the Park Library. Lest we forget those who lost their lives.

Unintended Consequences

By Frank Boles

Historical documentation is often an afterthought. People “in the moment” are usually not thinking about history or historical documentation – they are thinking about and recording things they need or learning about things they want to know. One of the primary examples of this phenomena is local newspapers. No one publishes or buys a local newspaper for historical reasons, but one of the Clarke Historical Library’s premier projects has been to preserve and distribute historical copies of Michigan’s local newspapers, which almost always serve as the most complete record of community history.

How fully local history is recorded in daily papers is the result of a wide variety of things; things no one would often connect to local history. The amount of local history found in newspapers is often an unintended consequence.

One example of this situation is the often proclaimed death of the newspaper as we have known it. I have read many a story proclaiming the end of printed newspapers. Others who read those same articles told me that if the trend continued the Clarke would soon be out of the “historical newspaper business.”

What we have seen, instead, is that many newspapers have remain financially successful, and that the vast majority of those financially successful papers have adopted a laser focus on local news. Although they can’t compete with CNN to report the latest events in Washington, they can make money covering local government, local schools, and local sports, things CNN never talks about.  

Although newspapers adopted a local-news focused business model as a way to survive financially, we at the Clarke quietly smiled at the unintended historical consequences of the change. Local papers with rich local coverage become a rich local historical resource. From our point of view, the often advertised “death” of the newspaper has resulted in a renaissance of local reporting in newspapers and a resurgence of material for local history. Times have been good for those of us in the historical newspaper business!

Workmen positioning newsprint

rolls in a warehouse.

But unintended benefits bestowed by one set of circumstances can be taken away by another. One ingredient of the plethora of local news appearing in today’s newspapers is cheap newsprint. Newsprint, however, has become a casualty in the growing trade war between the United States and Canada.

In the United States today there are only five paper mills which still make newsprint. The last newsprint manufacturer in Michigan, Manistique Paper, closed in 2011. American capacity to produce newsprint has atrophied because most American paper mills now produce other, more profitable paper products, particularly cardboard. Online purchasing has been very profitable not only for Amazon, but for the people making the cardboard and the boxes in which those purchases are shipped.

This migration of American paper mills away from newsprint production resulted in unmet demand that was answered by increased Canadian production and sales of newsprint in the U.S. Today about 60 percent of U.S. newsprint needs are met by Canadian paper mills. Given our state’s geographic nearness to Canada and easy access to Canadian markets over three international bridges, Michigan newspapers have usually turned to Canadian sources of newsprint. New tariffs on imported Canadian newsprint have significant financial implications for Michigan newspapers.

By way of example, Stafford Printing and Publishing, located in Greenville, which publishes a number of local newspapers, including the Grand Haven Tribune, the Lansing Pulse, the Ann Arbor Observer, two Spanish language newspapers (one distributed in Detroit and the other in Grand Rapids) and a newspaper for the Amish community, has seen newsprint prices soar. Stafford’s newsprint costs have increased about 30 percent; by about $2,400 for each truckload of paper they purchase. They purchase about ten loads a month. The papers they print, to which these costs are passed along, are cutting page count and taking any other steps they can think of to reduce the amount of paper they use.

A cartoon about the Tariff of 1842.

The unintended consequence of tariffs imposed on Canadian newsprint is less local news now, and less information for future local historians.  Unintended consequences are everywhere – even in things so seemingly different as a trade war between the U.S. and Canada and documenting Michigan local history.

Give to the Clarke Microfilm Project on Giving Tuesday

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO THE MICROFILM PROJECT ENDOWMENT

2017 marks the golden anniversary of Clarke Historical Library Microfilm Program. And there is no better time than Tuesday, November 29, 2016, also known as Giving Tuesday, for you to help keep this program going strong for years to come. We hope you will help us reach our goal of establishing a $50,000 endowment to be used for preserving and making accessible the history of our state as told by our local newspapers.

Frank Boles, Director of the Clarke, recently explained in a blog post the history and significance of the Microfilm Project - click here to read it. He also mentioned the difficulties faced because of increasing costs of modern microfilming and digitizing technologies. 

How to donate

If you would like to be part of preserving and making Michigan’s history accessible, we ask that you click on the link at the top or bottom of this post in order to donate.After you click on the link, you will be taken to the Central Michigan University Giving Form. In step one, simply type Clarke Historical Library in the “search for funds” box and select “Clarke Historical Library Associates Program.” Then enter the amount you would like to give. In steps two and three, you can fill in information about yourself, your gift, and your contact information. In step four, type “Please use this gift for the Microfilm Project Endowment” in the “Additional Comments” box. From here, you can submit your donation and arrange for payment via credit card.

If you prefer to make you gift in the form of a check, please send a check made out to Central Michigan University to Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, 250 E. Preston Street, Mount Pleasant, MI 48859. Please be sure to note the Microfilm Project Endowment on your gift.

Again, we hope you will support the Clarke in our goal to preserve Michigan’s history in the form of newspapers and make that history available to anyone who is interested.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO THE MICROFILM PROJECT ENDOWMENT

DigMichNews Grant Finalists Announced

The Clarke is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2017 DigMichNews Grant. In alphabetical order, the five communities vying for the opportunity to have 10,000 pages of newspapers on microfilm digitized and placed on-line (or 2,500 pages of un-microfilmed newspapers) are:

• L'Anse (Baraga County)
• Leelanau (Leelanau County)
• New Baltimore (Macomb County)
• Shelby (Oceana County)
• Sterling Heights / Utica (Macomb County)

Read the proposals of all five communities on the Clarke's site and get ready for January 16, when postcard voting opens (Twitter voting opens January 23)!

Follow the Clarke Microfilming on Twitter (@DigMichNews) and Facebook (DigMichNews) for more information.

New CMU Libraries Digital Collections Website Now Available

We are excited to announce that our new digital document interface is up and running. For the past eight months, staff members from the Clarke Historical Library, the CMU Libraries, and DL Consulting in New Zealand have been working to convert all of the digitized documents found in the CMU Online Digital Object Repository (CONDOR) to a new interface. This new interface, powered by Veridian collection management software, separates the digital collections found in CONDOR into four broad groups:

• Digital Michigan Newspapers
• Documents related to the history of Central Michigan University
• Scholarly and Creative works of the CMU Community, including dissertations and theses
• Selected documents from the Clarke's collections pertaining to Michigan history and children's literature

The CMU Libraries Digital Collection (digitalcollections.cmich.edu) gives you access to over 30,000 documents - that's nearly 450,000 digitized pages! If you were used to getting to digital documents by typing "condor.cmich.edu" into your web browser, you can continue to do so and you will be automatically redirected to the new site. While "condor.cmich.edu" will still work, other links will be affected. If you have saved links to specific documents or titles in CONDOR, you will have until the end of December to update them to the new Veridian interface. After December, the links to documents in CONDOR will no longer be available.

We are pleased to bring you this exciting new website. We invite you to jump in and explore. For users and for staff at the CMU Libraries, there may be some stumbling blocks with our new setup. Please let us know if you are having any trouble, any technical issues, or you have any comments. We will address them as soon as we can.

Highlights of the New Interface 

 

Click on the image for a larger view

Some of the highlights of the new Veridian interface include the opportunity to customize your experience with several options available at the top of the page (see number 1 in the image above). You can also register your own account, which will allow to save your searches for future reference (number 2). Also, because computers are not perfect when it comes to interpreting typed words on a digital page (called text recognition or optical character recognition), you can correct the errors made by computers when you are registered. Statistics about the number of text corrections made by individual users are logged and displayed on the front page of the Veridian interface via a Text Corrector Leaderboard (number 6).

The Veridian interface also uses a standard library search bar that many users are familiar with in order to do keyword searches of the full text (number 3) or you can select the Advanced Search function to limit by date or title as well. And now, searches for phrases can be wrapped in "quotation marks" to search for that exact phrase. If you are interested in seeing a random document in the holdings, take a look at the random item for the collection (number 4). For the Digital Michigan Newspapers, this random document is actually a newspaper from this day in history. Finally, if you have an idea of a title or date range of interest to you, but you don't want to search for keywords, you can browse the entirety of the collections by date or title (number 5).

When viewing a document, the Veridian interface lays out the pages in order horizontally, allowing you to view the document by scrolling to the right, or virtually turning to the next page. You can also search for a specific keyword within a document and you can view the transcript of the recognized text to the left of the reading pane (which allows you to correct the text if you are registered and logged in).

Newspapers are Dying, You Say?

[editor's note: Tomorrow, February 4, Dr. Joyce Baugh will speak about her book, The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over Desegregation, at 7:00 pm in the Park Library Auditorium. A reception will follow in the Clarke.] 

 

Newspapers are Dying, You Say?

by Frank Boles

You hear it almost everywhere; newspapers are either dead or dying. Everything is migrating to the Internet and old-fashioned, printed papers are a thing of the past.

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the annual meeting of the Michigan Press Association. Turns out a funny thing happened on the way to the cemetery. Profits. In some cases, record profits. This profitability is not evenly distributed. The big-city, metropolitan papers, about ten percent of the newspaper titles in America, are losing subscribers and income. But newspapers in small communities are doing well. Many are setting profit records. How is this possible to lose money in the big city but make it in small towns?

America has about 20,000 newspapers. A bare majority are small, independently-owned publications, with an additional sizable minority in relatively small newspaper groups – less than five newspaper titles. Most of these independent papers or small chains are weeklies or dailies in small markets. Those that are most profitable relentlessly focus on local news. They realize that their readers can turn to CNN or the New York Times for national and international coverage. But CNN and the New York Times won’t have much to say about last night’s city council meeting or the prospects for the local high school football team. To find out about those stories, people who live in these communities still buy a newspaper.

Some of the local newspapers collected by the Clarke

Also interesting are two additional characteristics of the most successful of these small papers. The trick is not just local news. It is well-written, well-laid-out newspapers. When non-subscribers are polled about why they don’t buy a paper, their two biggest complaints are not enough local news (38%) and poor writing (22%). This survey corroborated what another speaker had said earlier in the conference, there is still money to be made in print newspapers, but only if you display journalistic excellence, with interesting, well-written stories, displayed in an easy-to-read manner.

Thousands of reels of Michigan
newspapers on microfilm
in the Clarke stacks

For more than fifty years, the Clarke Historical Library has worked to preserve and distribute Michigan’s historical, local newspapers. I have been asked, more than once, what happens when all those papers go out of business? The answer it seems is that they aren’t going to go out of business. Better yet, the way to stay in business is not to cut staff and pages, but to devote time and energy to excellent coverage of local events. Newspapers with that emphasis are not only performing an important community service, they are creating the next generation of newspapers that will, in a few years, become important community history.

Having spent two days with journalists, editors, and publishers, I came away with the feeling that this aspect of the Clarke Historical Library mission, preserving and making available Michigan’s historical newspapers, will grow, especially as the smaller regional newspapers the Library documents thrive by engaging in quality local journalism. The better each paper is, the better the history we can eventually share with communities around the state.

It is  certainly an exciting time to be working with Michigan’s local newspapers. If you are interested in joining in, take a look at our blog post explaining how you can help to bring historic Michigan newspapers online for people all over the word to explore.

Please Help Digitize Newspapers

by Frank Boles

Last week proved many of you are as excited as we are about digitizing and placing online Michigan’s historic newspapers. In the course of a week, more than 110,000 Tweets and 8,000 postcards were received casting votes for your favorite city. The Clarke staff congratulates Alpena on their victory. But now what?

The truth is all five finalist newspapers in last week's election deserve to be made available online. The truth is there are many other papers, equally important, that should be available online. The truth is, without your help, there is no money to make this happen. For more than fifty years, the Clarke Historical Library has been microfilming Michigan newspapers to ensure their preservation. For the last decade, we have added the ability to digitize newspapers and we have invested in the software to make them freely available online. But over all this time, we have had to charge people to do this. In University budgeting terminology, this project is “self-funded.” There are no tax dollars helping make this happen; there are no student tuition dollars being used to support this work. There is just a small library with a passionate commitment to Michigan newspapers, which works with friends and neighbors whose dollars help us move toward the goal of saving Michigan’s newspaper heritage and making it available online.

Two dedicated endowments help support this work. Through the generosity of Robert and Susan Clarke, and the family of Gail D. Knapp, our library has the means to annually digitize and upload about 20,000 newspaper pages online. It’s a start, but it’s a small start. There are well over a million pages that we know of, waiting to come online – and likely other newspapers are hiding, waiting to be discovered, preserved, and made available.

A Clarke student assistant works to digitize
historic newspapers from microfilm

If you have participated in the contest, or if you share our passion to see Michigan’s historic newspapers freely available online, please consider making a financial contribution to either the Robert and Susan Clarke Endowment, or the Knapp Family Genealogical Endowment. If everyone who voted gave us one dollar for every tweet or postcard they contributed, the endowments would grow enough so that next year, when we again offer Michigan communities a chance to have their newspaper placed online, we could digitize closer to 100,000 pages. It would still take a long time to make all the state’s historical newspapers available – but the job might be done in something like a decade, instead of a century.

Please mail a check made payable to Central Michigan University – Robert and Susan Clarke Endowment or Central Michigan University – Gail D. Knapp Endowment to the Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859. Your contribution is tax deductible.

Please help. Every gift, small or large, will allow us to carry on this important work.

DigMichNews Grant Finalists Announced

The Michigan Digital Newspaper Grant Program has announced the five finalists vying to receive a grant that will allow them to have their historic newspapers digitized and placed online. The winning community's newspaper will be available through the Michigan Digital Newspaper Portal. The grant, a $2,500 award to digitize 12,500 pages of previously microfilmed newspapers or 4,500 pages of unfilmed newspapers, is made possible by the Robert and Susan Clarke Endowment.

This year's finalists are:

• Alpena (Alpena News, 1899-1905; 1909-10 and Michigan Labor Journal, 1884-90)
• Clinton County (Clinton County Republican News, 1920-30)
• Houghton Lake (Houghton Lake Resorter, 1940- )
• L'Anse and Baraga County (L'Anse Sentinel, 1896- )
• The Polish Mission (Polish Daily News (English Edition) 1970-89)

To learn more about these newspapers and what they have to offer, read their proposals on the Clarke Historical Library's DigMichNews Grant website.

Be Sure to Vote

To select the community that will be awarded the grant, we are asking you to decide which newspaper should win. Cast your votes between January 19 and January 26, 2016 via Twitter using the appropriate hashtag (the DigMichNews Grant site has links to generate a Tweet for you) or via a stamped and posted Michigan picture postcard indicating which community you are supporting. All votes must be posted or tweeted during the week-long voting period and all postcards must be received by the Clarke Historical Library by January 26 to count (No early or late votes will count).

To keep up with the latest about the DigMichNews Grant and for other information about the Clarke's historical preservation microfilming program, follow the Michigan Digital Newspaper Program on Facebook and Twitter.

“Best Use of Newspaper” in Michigan History Day Competition

Every year, students from across the state compete in Michigan History Day, an opportunity for middle and high school students to share what they have learned about Michigan in a variety of ways. Consistent with our support for the preservation and use of local newspapers, this year the Clarke Historical Library sponsored an award for the best use of a newspaper in the Senior (high school) and Junior (middle school) Divisions.


The Senior award was given to Caroline Yapp from Hackett Catholic Central High School in Kalamazoo for an individual exhibit entitled “John E. Fetzer: Legacy of a Broadcast Tiger.” The Junior award went to a group website, created by Andrew Schilling, Thomas Westrick, and Ben Wozniak entitled, “The Pre-Chinese Exclusion Era: a Leader in Racism that Left a Legacy of Hate.” The three students attend Forest Hills Eastern Middle School in Ada.

We congratulate all the students who participated in Michigan History Day, both the award winners, and the many others whose hard work made the event possible.

Michigan Digital Newspaper Grant Finalists

One of the following five cities will have their chosen newspaper digitized and placed online through the Clarke Historical Library’s Michigan Digital Newspaper Grant Program. The winning city's paper will be available on the Michigan Digital Newspaper Portal at condor.cmich.edu.

The finalists are:

• Cheboygan (Cheboygan Democrat, 1880-1927)
• Grand Rapids (The Grand Rapids Herald, 1916-18)
• Lansing (Lansing State Republican, 1859-66)
• Marquette (Mining Journal, 1868-88)
• Muskegon (News and Reporter, 1870-99; Muskegon Record & Muskegon Daily Record, 1901-04)

Be Sure to Vote

You get to decide which community will get their papers digitized and placed online. Cast your vote between April 1-April 15 at digmichnews.wufoo.com. To keep up on the vote tally, follow us on our Facebook and Twitter.

Read what the nominators said about these papers:

Roosevelt Storms Marquette

By John Fierst

Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican Party when he ran as a Progressive in the election of 1912. The split led to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson taking the White House. It was an unusual campaign, to say the least, which included an attempt on Roosevelt’s life. John Flamming Schrank, who shot Roosevelt as the candidate was leaving the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee, claimed the ghost of William McKinley had directed him to do so. Roosevelt shrugged off the wound as not serious (though the bullet remained in his chest the rest of his life). What he could not shrug off so easily were the many attempts at character assassination that dogged him throughout the campaign, especially the repeated charge that he was a drunkard.

Roosevelt finally decided to do something about the charge of drunkenness and to silence, once and for all, the libelous press. He made his stand in, of all places, Marquette, Michigan, where he brought suit against George Newett, an Ishpeming newspaper publisher. Newett had charged in the local paper, The Iron Ore, that Roosevelt lied, cursed, and drank to excess. Roosevelt gathered together a host of supporters, and they made their way to the small shipping port on Lake Superior. There, Roosevelt’s lawyer, James H. Pound, took command of the courthouse and overwhelmed the defense with character witnesses and expert opinion.

Pound began his defense of Roosevelt’s moral character by examining Roosevelt himself:

Q. Now, I wish you would describe in your own way to the jury, what, if any, use you make of liquors, spirituous or malt, since your manhood, in your recollection.

A. I do not drink either whiskey or brandy, except as I shall hereafter say, except as I drink it under the direction of a doctor; I do not drink beer; I sometimes drink light wine.

Q. Let me ask you right there, have you ever indulged in porter on any occasion?

A. I never drank liquor or porter or anything of that kind. I have never drunk a high-ball or cocktail in my life. I have sometimes drunk mint juleps in the White House. There was a bed of mint there, and I may have drunk half a dozen mint juleps a year, and certainly no more.

Then followed a train of twenty-five character witnesses. Among them were: two former Rough Riders; an admiral and an ex-secretary of the Nary; a member of the Associated Press; a naturalist from the Smithsonian; members of the United State Secret Service; the social reformer Jacob A. Riis; President Garfield’s son James, who had once served as Secretary of the Interior; Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the United States Forest Service; Dr. Alexander Lambert, Roosevelt’s family physician, and Dr. P.M. Rixey, Surgeon General of the United States; All these and many more either took the stand or, like Roosevelt’s butler and his former barber, submitted written depositions, testifying to TR’s abstemiousness.

Under this barrage of high-mindedness Newett was brought low—bully!—and he recanted. Roosevelt then waived his right to damages. He had waged this battle on moral grounds and had achieved his purpose before God and the electorate. Hence forward U.S. presidential campaigns would be free of gossip and slander.

One of the witnesses, the New York banker W. Emlyn Roosevelt, a cousin and close friend of Roosevelt, later had the transcript of the successful suit privately published. Recently the Clarke Historical Library acquired a copy of this publication: Roosevelt vs. Newett: A Transcript of the Testimony Taken and Depositions Read at Marquette, Mich. It is 361 pages long. A letter signed by Roosevelt and addressed to Dr. Albert Shaw, the editor of the “Review of Reviews” and one of the men who submitted a written deposition at the trial, is tipped into the front of the book, indicating that originally this was Shaw’s own copy.

Portion of the testimony of Jacob Riis
in Roosevelt vs. Newett

The book has value beyond being a description of the trial. Pound fashioned his questions to establish the credibility of the witnesses. He asked questions that explored their backgrounds and explained their relationships to Roosevelt. Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives was a great admirer of Roosevelt, and earlier he had praised Roosevelt in a campaign biography: Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. Riis’s firsthand testimony, given in Marquette, reveals more than his distant respect for Roosevelt. It makes clear the strength of the bond of friendship between the two men.

With the Clarke Historical Library’s interest in Michigan history and presidential campaign biographies, Roosevelt vs. Newett has found a welcome home in the Clarke collection.

Michigan Digital Newspaper Grant Finalists Named

by Frank Boles and Kai Niezgoda

One of the following five cities will have their chosen newspaper digitized and placed online through the Clarke Historical Library’s Michigan Digital Newspaper Grant Program. The winning city's paper will be available on The Michigan Digital Newspaper Portal at clarke.cmich.edu.



The finalists are:

• Cheboygan (Cheboygan Democrat, 1880-1927)
• Grand Rapids (The Grand Rapids Herald, 1916-18)
• Lansing (Lansing State Republican, 1859-66)
• Marquette (Mining Journal, 1868-98)
• Muskegon (News and Reporter, 1870-99; Muskegon Record & Muskegon Daily Record, 1901-04)

You, the voters, get to decide which community will get their papers digitized and placed online. Cast your vote between April 1 and April 15 at digmichnews.wufoo.com. To keep up on the vote tally, follow us on our Facebook and Twitter.

The voting site will include a description written by the paper’s nominator and reasons the nominator believes it should be digitized. Read excerpts from the nomination applications below. To view the full applications, visit digmichnews.wufoo.com on or after April 1.

In total, 31 nominations were received, demonstrating the widespread need to make historic Michigan newspapers available online. Funding for this program is made possible through the Robert and Susan Clarke Endowment, found in Central Michigan University’s Clarke Historical Library. To see our newspapers online, visit condor.cmich.edu.

Library Application Highlights

The Cheboygan Area Public Library, who nominated Cheboygan Democrat (March 1880 to December 1927):

For many immigrant groups to this area from places such as Quebec, the Northeast, and places like Sweden, France, Poland, and Germany these newspapers provided a solid link for those for those in the present to connect with their past. Those of Native American heritage will also find valuable information in their pages. What is more, these newspapers provide what is essentially the only reliable source of information about Duncan City, a lumbering community of over 500 people that was once the seat of Cheboygan County. This town had the largest lumber mill north of Bay City; today, there is almost no trace that this community ever existed.

The Grand Rapids Public Library, who nominated The Grand Rapids Herald (1916 to 1918):

The special features or unique aspects of The Grand Rapids Herald are many. First, future Senator Arthur Vandenberg was the Editor in Chief of the Grand Rapids Herald from 1916-1918. Second, the Grand Rapids Herald was one of the two primary newspapers of the city of Grand Rapids. Third, the Grand Rapids Herald was the Society newspaper of Grand Rapids. Fourth, from 1916 to 1918, Grand Rapids saw the emergence of several important political figures who were to figure prominently in city, state and national politics. Finally, during this time period, Grand Rapids was to see its very political structure change. It is these features and aspects that are unique to the Grand Rapids Herald.

The Capital Area District Libraries of Lansing, who nominated the Lansing State Republican (January 1859 to September 1866):

The Lansing State Republican reflected the views of the Republican Party just prior to and during the Civil War. The editors and owners made their views on slavery and the abolition movement very clear in this capital city newspaper and these views were then carried throughout the state.

Marquette’s Peter White Public Library, who nominated the Mining Journal, published in Marquette (November 1868 to circa 1898):

We believe that people have an interest in the industrial age of our country. Iron mining, copper mining, and timber harvesting are a part of this history. There is a resurgence of mining in the north-central Upper Peninsula. As a country, we seem to be keenly interested in regaining some of our lost industrial might. In addition to the human side, and the local history aspect, the stories found in historic Mining Journal issues are an excellent resource to tie the past into our present and future ambitions.

The Hackley Public Library in Muskegon, who nominated the News and Reporter (1870 to 1899) and the Muskegon Record and Muskegon Daily Record (1901 to 1904):

Muskegon County has a unique and rich history in its demographics, labor migration, industrialization, logging, nautical activity and transportation. As the only Michigan deep water port on Lake Michigan and as the largest coastal city, Muskegon was very important in the development of the west side of the slate from the 1850s until after World War II.

Fall 2013 Speaker Series Wrap Up

by Frank Boles

During the fall semester, the Library sponsored four programs, including a discussion of WCMU Radio’s popular show, “Our Front Porch,” a presentation by noted children’s illustrator Peter Sís, a remembrance of famed musicologist Alan Lomax's 1938 tour of Michigan, and a presentation by Deborah Thomas regarding the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America website, which features fully searchable newspapers from across the United States.

The Clarke's Digital Newspaper Program

Today, Deborah Thomas, the Library of Congress coordinator for the National Digital Newspaper Project, is visiting Central's campus as part of the Clarke Historical Library’s involvement with the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). This evening at 7:00 pm, Ms. Thomas will present "Digitizing Newspapers in Michigan and Across America" at 7:00 pm in the Baber Room of the Park Library. This presentation, made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is free and open to the public.

The Clarke has been working on the Michigan Digital Newspaper Program as part of the NDNP since August 2012. The MichDNP team is charged with choosing material to digitize from historically important Michigan titles. These digital copies will then be permanently maintained by the Library of Congress in the Chronicling America database. Chronicling America is targeted to any user that could possibly find access to historical newspapers useful -- teachers, genealogists, and historians among others.

Some titles from Michigan already available in Chronicling America are the Cass County Republican, Constantine Republican, the Grand Haven News, Grand River Times, Northern Tribune (Cheboygan), Weekly Expositor (Brockway Centre - now known as Yale, Michigan), and Ypsilanti Sentinel. The current digital runs of these newspapers range from 2 to 22 years and the dates of publication fall between 1836 and 1892. More issues are being processed and uploaded on a regular basis and the date ranges for each individual title will continue to expand.

The Clarke currently works with a vendor who processes the raw electronic images created by the Clarke to create derivative files and metadata. This information is then returned to the Clarke, where it is verified. It is then sent to the Library of Congress, where it is again processed and verified. Finally, the fully searchable digital newspapers are ingested into the Chronicling America repository and website.

The current project will be complete in August of 2014. The newspapers expected to be available by then are the Copper Country Evening News, the Calumet News, Dearborn Independent, Charlevoix County Herald, East Saginaw Courier, the Owosso Times, the True Northerner (Paw Paw), and the Yale Expositor.

National Digital Newspaper Conference

by Frank Boles

Annually, the awardees responsible for the National Digital Newspaper Program meet at the Library of Congress to discuss projects and possibilities in this nationwide effort to bring millions of newspapers online and make them freely available to the public. The Clarke Historical Library is the focus of the project in Michigan, and thus Kim Hagerty and Frank Boles spent several days in Washington last week, discussing online newspapers with their colleagues from more than thirty states.

Historical Detroit Free Press Available at CMU

by Bryan Whitledge

The Clarke Historical Library and the Central Michigan University Libraries are pleased to announce that we now carry the historic Detroit Free Press. This database, provided by ProQuest, contains digitized copies of every issue of the Free Press published between May of 1831 and December of 1922 -- 90 years of Michigan history!

The Entire Run of Central's Student Newspaper is On-line

by Bryan Whitledge

For several years now, the Clarke Historical Library has been working to digitize documents relevant to the study of Central Michigan University history. The Board of Trustee Minutes (1964-99), the entire run of Chippewa Yearbooks (1910-2003), and historical materials from the Student Government Association (2003-09) are just three examples of digital documents that are freely available to anyone in the world via the CMU Online Digital Object Repository (CONDOR) website. We are always adding to these great resources and currently, we are in the process of digitizing each and every Bulletin - undergraduate, graduate, Global Campus, and even the early Bulletins from Central Normal, as the University used to be known. As of this posting, Undergraduate Bulletins from 1986 to 2011 can be accessed via CONDOR.

Among all of these digital records is a major resource for studying Central's history - the CMU student newspaper. We are happy to announce that we have recently completed the digitization of the entire run of Central Michigan Life (and its previous incarnations - Central State Life and Central Normal Life). All of the issues from 1919 until 1999 are now available on the CM Life page of the CONDOR website. For over two years, our Preservation Microfilming unit, led by Kim Hagerty, has digitally scanned the microfilm of CM Life, cleaned up the images, used computer software that "reads" the text, attributed identifying information to the files, and finally uploaded the completed issues to CONDOR.

The result is a full searchable collection of 80 years of newspapers chronicling the major and minor events in Central's history. There are first hand accounts of the fire that burned the Old Main building and CMU's Division II National Championship in football, which led to the ascension to Division I status as well as campus reaction to national and World events, such as the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (pp. 3,4) and the Kent State shootings.

This source now enables researchers far and wide to dig into CMU history from the comfort of their own computer. Whether it is CMU news, Mt. Pleasant News, or the local reaction to global news, the Clarke Historical Library and CONDOR are the home of the historical Central Michigan University student newspapers.

Expansion of Clarke's Digital Newspaper Holdings

The microfilming unit of the Clarke Historical Library has had a busy summer, which means that there are more digitized resources available to the public.

One project is the digitization of the historic Saline Observer. We are in the midst of uploading all of the available editions from 1880 through 1963 to the CMU Online Digital Object Repository (CONDOR). Currently, all of the editions that we hold on microfilm through 1926 have been uploaded to the Clarke Historical Library Newspaper Collection on CONDOR and we are adding more items every week. This is your source for historic Washtenaw County news.

Another project that is just starting is a National Digital Newspaper Program funded initiative to digitize 100,000 pages of local Michigan newspapers. To be a candidate for digitization, the newspaper run must date from before 1923, it must be a Michigan newspaper, and it cannot be currently digitized by another source. The final result will be the addition of the newspapers to the Library of Congress's Chronicling America site for historic American newspapers As this project kicks into high gear in the fall, we will keep you up to date with its progress.

As always, the Clarke Historical Library is working to improve the resources that we can provide to research the rich history of the State of Michigan and beyond. If you have any questions about any of our research resources, or if you would like further information about our digital newspaper initiatives, please contact us at clarke@cmich.edu.

Preservation Microfilming Services at the Clarke

By Kim Hagerty

Photograph by Hannah

Microfilm creation is vital to the Clarke Historical Library’s Newspaper Collection. We are fortunate to have an in-house Preservation Microfilming Service that uses a Zeutschel microfilm camera. In 2010 over 100 reels of various Michigan newspaper titles with dates ranging from 1835 – 2010 were added to our collection. Many of these reels were created through our Continuing Program, which is a partnership with a publisher, library, historical society or other entity that wishes to preserve their local newspaper on microfilm. Each partner in the program receives a service copy of the microfilm created which makes the newspaper available in its community as well as here in the Clarke. We would like to thank all of our partners for a successful 2010 and we look forward to having a productive 2011. To see if your local newspaper is in our collection use our online catalog CENTRA. For further information about our services please click on Preservation Microfilming.