The Founding on the River

You are standing near the confluence of two creeks and the Huron River, and this is where everything in Ann Arbor began.

In the spring of eighteen twenty-four, two land speculators arrived on horseback from the East. John Allen had come from Virginia. Elisha Walker Rumsey had come from New York. Both men were looking for opportunity in the Michigan Territory, a place so new that Michigan would not become a state for another thirteen years. They found it here, on a low bluff above the Huron, surrounded by cathedral groves of bur oak.

On May twenty-fifth, eighteen twenty-four, they registered a plat with Wayne County under the name Annarbour. The spelling varied in those early years but the intention was clear: the town was named for their wives, both of whom were named Ann, and for the oak openings that surrounded their campsite. Six hundred forty acres, purchased from the federal government at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre. The total cost was eight hundred dollars.

Within a year of the founding, Allen could report thirty to forty families had settled here. Saw mills and grist mills appeared along the Huron. By eighteen twenty-seven, a traveler passing through noted three inns, four stores, two tanneries, two blacksmith shops, and about twenty dwelling houses. The village was moving fast.

The settlers came mostly from New England and upstate New York, though a scattering came from the South and from Ohio. They were looking for good farmland and a fresh start. What they found was a landscape already shaped by thousands of years of Anishinaabe stewardship, with trails worn smooth by generations of travel and oak savannas maintained by controlled fire.

What you see around you now bears little resemblance to that clearing in the bur oaks. But the city grew from this spot, by this river, in eight hundred dollars of speculation and two women named Ann.