The University Comes to Town

The University of Michigan predates the state itself. It was chartered in eighteen seventeen as the Catholepistemiad of Michigania, a grandiose name for what was essentially a school in Detroit with ambitions far beyond its means. But the institution struggled, and when Michigan became a state in eighteen thirty-seven, legislators reorganized it and started looking for a new home.

Ann Arbor wanted it badly. The town had fewer than two thousand people and an economy built on milling and farming. Having a university would change everything. Local land developers put together a gift of forty acres, a stretch of high ground just southeast of downtown, and offered it to the new Board of Regents. The offer was accepted. The forty acres became the Diag, the central gathering ground of the campus you see today.

The first classes in Ann Arbor were held in eighteen forty-one, four years after the university was formally established here. There were seven students and two professors. In eighteen sixty-nine, the institution opened the first university-owned hospital in the country, a converted house that served both teaching and patient care.

The arrival of the university remade Ann Arbor's social and economic character permanently. It drew faculty, students, and eventually a research economy that had nothing to do with the mills on the Huron River. The town and the university have been intertwined ever since, sometimes contentiously. The students brought ideas about politics and society that were not always welcome. The university brought prestige that made the city more than a market town.

Today Ann Arbor consistently ranks as one of the most educated cities in the United States. More than half of its adult residents hold bachelor's degrees or higher, a figure that trails only a handful of places in the country. The forty acres given to lure a struggling school to town turned out to be one of the most consequential gifts in Michigan history.