1st 100 years
Jackson: The First One Hundred Years, 1829-1929
Written by Dr. Laura B. DeLindFunded through a grant from
The Michigan Council for the Humanities
JACKSON'S EARLY SETTLEMENT
Over one hundred and fifty years ago, a young New Yorker named Horace Blackman, a frontiersman from Ann Arbor and a Pottawattomie Indian guide, camped on the west bank of the Grand River at the intersection of what is now Jackson Street and Trail Street in the city of Jackson, Michigan. Blackman had been 'spying out the land' looking for a 'location.' Satisfied with what he saw, he purchased a quarter section and registered his one hundred and sixty acre claim. Several months later, he built himself a log cabin and then went home to collect his family, having become the founder of a future city.While Blackman may have been Jackson's first white homeowner, he did not stumble on his 'location' accidentally, nor would the place have suffered obscurity if he hadn't arrived in 1829. Both Blackman and his incipient city were moved by, and interacted with, many larger economic, social, cultural and political currents of the times.
Prior to the late 1820's, Michigan-- or more accurately the Michigan Territory-- was sparsely settled. The westward migration of pioneering easterners had largely by-passed Michigan. This was due in good part to difficulties in transportation, for Michigan was rather inaccessible by land. Surrounded by Great Lakes on the east, north and west, it was also bordered by marsh lands, bogs and mud holes on its southern approach from Ohio. Indeed, the 'Black Swamp'-- as this vast, soggy region was known-- presented innumerable problems for wagon wheels, horses and oxen. One early pioneer claimed-- perhaps exaggerating only a little-- that as he was crossing the 'Black Swamp' his team went in out of sight. Undaunted, he kept whipping and hallooing at the hole, and to his relief they eventually came out all right at the other side. (DeLand 1904:222)
The lack of easy access both to Michigan and through Michigan also meant that supplies could not be shipped in, nor local products shipped out, without expending great amounts of energy and money. Whatever resources the territory had-- and there were many who were willing to write it off as an agricultural wasteland-- without a dependable and financially competitive transportation system to link the territory to eastern populations and markets, settling in Michigan held little economic promise.
But Michigan was not to be put off forever. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825-- which connected Lake Erie at Buffalo with the Hudson River at Albany and thus New York, the eastern seaboard and Europe-- and with the perfection of the steamboat as a means of lake transportation, Michigan's future began to look rosier. It also helped along by the territorial governor, Lewis Cass, who had wisely initiated internal improvements in an attempt to encourage settlement. Not the least of these improvements was the surveying and building of a serviceable road, north of the Old Sauk Trail, through the Michigan interior. This was the 'territorial road' which began in Detroit and eventually ended at the mouth of the St. Joseph River. From there it was but a steamboat ride to Chicago.
With these advances in transportation and communication, the pioneer business in southern Michigan began to grow brisk. It was estimated that "during the summer of 1836 a wagon left (Detroit) from the interior every five minutes between day light and dark." (Havighurst 1942:124) Apparently this did not even include those persons traveling by stage coach, ox-cart, on horseback or by foot. The traffic was good for local business and small towns quickly grew up along the major migration routes-- much like service oasis along modern highways. By 1837, Michigan had become a state.
Returning then to Blackman's location, it appears to have had a number of things going for it. Among them was its proximity to the Grand River which was both navigable and a workable source of water power. Importantly, the river was also fordable at the spot where Blackman had camped, a fact well known to the Indians whose numerous paths intersected the area. In addition, the location was within a hard day's ride of Ann Arbor which, with its population of about 500, was the last settlement of any size west of Detroit. The location also commanded a rather central position within the territory. And it was in the projected path of Mr. Cass's territorial road. Such assets could hardly have escaped Horace Blackman's attention, particularly since a territorial surveyor, and friend of the family, had initially recommended the area. Neither was the potential of the spot apparent only to these two men, for within months of Blackman's claim, a party from Ann Arbor settled alongside land began damming the river, construction a mill and laying out a village.
EARLY JACKSON AND HOW IT GREW
Jackson-for this is what the village would be called, after brief encounters with the names 'Jacksonburgh' and 'Jacksonopolis'-- had location. As the Indian trails clearly indicated, it was a cross-roads-a point through which people, ideas, information and materials going in various directions passed. Now, at a time when transportation had become a critical organizational link between the nation's eastern populations and the frontier's seemingly limitless resources and wealth, Jackson was in a position to benefit.The potential was there. However, it did not have to be realized. For while the Erie canal barges and the Great Lakes steamers carried people to Michigan, the people themselves carried ideas of what was important in life and how best to go after it. From the beginning, it appears that Jackson fell heir to a set of residents and a set of operating principles which were Eastern in outline and might best be described as-Yankee.
Like Blackman, Jackson's early settlers came mainly from New York or New England. While few were wealthy, they tended to have considerable formal education, many had professional training, and sufficient capital or credit to purchase land, build residences, lay in supplies and begin rudimentary businesses. They were people who believed in themselves, in work and in self-made men. They believed in continual growth, in progress and in profit. They were individuals with the means to speculate in the fortunes of a nation on the verge of rapid expansion and technological change. They also had the willingness to do so. They were entrepreneurs on their way to becoming capitalists.
Jackson grew guided by these interests. Romantic notions not with-standing, its experience as bucolic, homogeneous and self-contained community was all but non-existent. From the first, Jackson was formally planned as a village complete with numbered lots, named streets and a public square, though within approximately twenty years the square's public status succumbed to the demands of private enterprise. The village was designed to intercept travelers, provide a service center and market for an outlying agricultural population, function as the county seat and possibly even the state capitol. This last expectation unfortunately never materialized, the honor going to a little known spot in interior.
Public disagreement and debate-personal, political, religious-were at home in Jackson. Indeed, the village plat itself was the resolution of what must certainly have been a 'heated' discussion between Blackman and the Ann Arbor party, each group having initially platted the village to their own best interests. Business competition, likewise, was almost instantaneous. Partnerships were many and varied, and business 'leapfrogging' was a typical Jackson pattern. A local entrepreneur might, for instance, start in the dry goods business, then invest in a livery, then purchase a flour mill and end up speculating in blocks of village real estate. With financial success came Jackson society and transported eastern elegance. Silks and many-storied homes made short work of log cabins and homespun.
"JACKSON PRISON"
These Jackson characteristics were made possible, in large part, by two externally controlled, though locally encouraged, additions to the village landscape. The first of these was the appearance, in 1838, of the Southern Michigan Prison, located north of the village on 60 acres of land donated by several wealthy Jackson residents. At a time when capital was scarce and labor even scarcer, the prison, or more accurately its inmates, were an economic asset to would-be manufacturers. This was because the prison had adopted a penal system modeled after one begun in Auburn, New York. This system, in the name of prisoner rehabilitation, contracted convict labor to private enterprise at roughly half the cost of free labor-- anywhere, as it turned out, from 37 1/2 cents to $1.00 per man per day. While the actual reform or humanitarian value of this basically involuntary program remains questionable, it did neatly fit the immediate economic needs of the area. It provided a young and financially insecure State with a means to at least partially support its penal institution and it promoted an environment hospitable to local entrepreneurs. Among those Jackson manufacturing concerns which availed themselves of the opportunity were: Austin, Tomlinson and Webster Manufacturing Company, which produced wagons; William Gilbert and Son, who manufactured furniture; the Sutter Brothers and Charles Hollingsworth, both of whom produced cigars; Walter Fish and later Pingree and Smith, who manufactured barrels; Waters, Lathrop and McNaughton and later Withington, Cooley and Company, who manufactured farm tools. Indeed, the most successful relied predominantly on contract labor, eventually employing between 100 and 200 prisoners to work in state built and supervised workshops. This contract system was abolished in 1909, the result of mounting pressure from competing industry and free labor.THE RAILROADS
A second addition to the local landscape was Jackson's connection on the Michigan Central Railroad completed in late 1841. Its significance was underscored by Michigan's uneasy courtship of this rather revolutionary form of transportation. Initially, railroads were financed through the stock subscriptions of private investors. There were few Jackson residents, for instance, who did not hold some stock in railroads like the Jackson-Palmyra or the Detroit and St. Joseph which promised to link the village with larger territorial markets. Unfortunately, the combined effects of wildcat banking, financial panics, a general lack of capital and little experience with railroad costs and construction were quite debilitating. Private property and business enterprise were often forfeit while little in the way of useful track ever materialized. When the state took over the railroads as part of a larger program of internal improvement, it planned three roughly parallel, 'no-nonsense' routes across Michigan-the Northern, Central and Southern Railroads. This too proved a financial disaster. Nevertheless, after ten years of State ownership, the Michigan Central was completed from Detroit to Kalamazoo. The line finally reached Chicago in 1852 but under private ownership.Jackson, then, was one of only a few towns with a railroad connection and for three years--between 1841 and 1844-- it was also in the enviable position of being the Central's western terminal. It took only six hours to travel from Jackson to Detroit by rail. Toll or plank roads and stage coach lines quickly appeared to transport people and goods to and from Jackson while hotels and warehouses accommodating them during their stay. Adding further to this good fortune was the completion in 1858 of the Jackson branch of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad. The competition between these major lines was of direct benefit to Jackson businesses.
In less than thirty years after Blackman's arrival, Jackson had officially become a city with a population of close to five thousand persons. It had actualized its potential as a point of access and communication. It had, so to speak, cultivated important outside connections.
JACKSON POLITICS AND THE CIVIL WAR
These connections together with the general attitudes and ambitions of leading Jackson citizens encouraged an active interest in state and national government. Politically, Jacksonians tended to be pragmatists. They supported government policy and accepted government assistance when it was in their best business interests. They opposed it when it was not. Underlying this pragmatism was a belief in equality-- not of individuals but of opportunity. Good government, it was felt, afforded the individual freedom to pursue his private enterprises to the limits of his personal abilities. At the same time, Jackson residents were also staunchly nationalistic. Both the Union and the Constitution upon which it rested were to be protected and preserved at all costs. Together, they were felt to constitute the bedrock of American life, its liberties and its collective happiness.These attitudes, though certainly not unique to Jackson, were instrumental in the emergence of a new political organization-the Republican party. It was a party which united under one banner a variety of political persuasions-- Free Soilers, Whigs Abolitionists, Prohibitionists-- in opposition to the extension of slavery, the South's 'peculiar institution'.
While slavery was regarded as morally wrong, few northerners-- with the notable exception of the Abolitionists-- were willing to cast aside the Constitution and the rights it guaranteed the Southern states of the Union. Their strategy had been to legally contain slavery. The Missouri Compromise provided one such legal constraint.
The South, however, continued to use its power in Congress to pass legislation in support of slave-holding interests. Finally, with the Kansas-Nebraska bill designed to override the Missouri Compromise and extend slavery into previously free territory, events were brought to a head. More accurately, they were brought before a series of people's conventions.
One such convention was called for 1:00 p.m. on July 6, 1854 in Jackson, Michigan. It was here, according to numerous historians, out "under the oaks" on Morgan's Forty amid a crowd of some 3,000 persons that the name, the initial organization and general political platform of the Republican Party originated.
The Party's first presidential candidate was defeated. Its second, Abraham Lincoln, was not. But by then, the North and South had reached an impasse. Secession from the Union was the South's final act of self-preservation, and it was followed by civil war. For the next four years, the North supplied men and materials for 'Mr. Lincoln's army'.
As might be expected, Jackson carried out its patriotic duty. The city raised hundreds of volunteers for union troops and home militia. It was distinguished by units such as the Jackson Greys, the 9th and the 13th Michigan Infantry and by commanders such as Col. W.H. Withington, Col. Michael Shoemaker, and Col. C.V. DeLand. Toward the close of the war, Jackson was also the home of Camp Blair which served as a central location for training new recruits, tending to the wounded and mustering out veteran soldiers.
But the civil War and Republican leadership had still another effect on the North. They were a boon to business. With policies such as the Homestead Act, government support for transcontinental railroads, protective tariffs, the standardization of currency and banking, in combination with the technological 'know-how' afforded by the industrial revolution, ways and means were available to wholeheartedly exploit the nation's frontier resources and to promote commercial and manufacturing interests. As one historian put it, there existed "...a climate in which the new entrepreneurs of the Gilded Age flourished mightily." (Deglar 1959;196.)
BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY-- JACKSON'S MIDDLE NAME
Jackson was immediately at home in the war and post-war environment. Jackson-grown capitalists invested in local railroads, coal mining, manufacturing and utilities and the success of these speculative ventures attracted new inventors, investors, business and industry. 'Progress' and 'expansion' were understood to be synonymous-- and infinite. Bigger was better. Faster was better. Newer was better. In less than a decade, Jackson's population had almost tripled and would continue to grow rapidly, reaching over 25,000 by the turn of the century. It ranked as the third largest city in Michigan and had become known by its nicknames-- "Hub City" and "Central City."These changes were largely the result of Jackson's romance with the railroads. It was a case of love at first sight-or perhaps first toot-- and by the 1870's the city sat at the intersection of six different lines. Two more would be added by 1900. Indeed four of these lines, the Grand Valley Railroad, the Airline Railroad, the Jackson, Lansing and Saginaw Railroad and the Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw Railroad, had been organized, financed and built almost entirely by Jackson citizens, though they were later leased to Michigan Central. The city also lured Michigan Central's railroad manufacturing and repair shops, not to mention some 1,000 employees, with 30 acres of land previously designated as a city park.
Jackson's Union Depot was the largest between Detroit and Chicago. Jackson's passenger trade reflected the city's success as a convention center and the freight shipped from, to and through Jackson offered few barriers to any business enterprise. City promotionals were quick to explain that "a network of steel rail opens up to the merchants and manufacturers of the Central city the markets of the whole civilized world..." (Jackson Daily Citizen 1889:14). As always, Jackson took full advantage of its situation, and its products were soon competing in national and international markets. A partial listing of local manufacturing activity went something like this-- "Jackson makes ink and hats and rugs and beds and saws and sash and kegs and coke. Jackson makes soap and files and flour and guns and malt and tents and paint. Jackson makes boots and shoes and stairs and canes and pipes and boats and doors. Jackson makes axles and drays and spices and plows and chairs and gloves and pumps. Jackson makes chains and cheese and roofing and corsets and frames and barrels and carpets. Jackson makes bustles and sleighs and cradles and springs and scythes and brooms and sherbet. Jackson makes lumber and baskets and mittens and banners and overalls and tinware and purifiers. Jackson makes cornices and coal gas and balloons and crackers and awnings and soda-ash and uniforms. Jackson makes carriages and fire brick and drain tile and cigarettes and cosmetics and perfumes and hay forks. Jackson makes fertilizers and water gas and log trucks and windmills and gun cases and ginger ale and birch beer. Jackson makes spectacles and feed mills land road carts and showcases and knit goods and wood pulp and cardboard and hair goods. Jackson makes mouldings and underwear and parachutes and hoop skirts and sewer pipe and flower pots and buckboards. Jackson makes butter tubs and dump carts and hay cutters and horse rakes and monuments and cigar boxes and spring beds. Jackson makes stove polish and paper boxes and pork barrels and barn brooms and corn shellers and cider barrels and paving brick and corset covers and light wagons and heavy trucks. Jackson makes pocket books and garden rakes and corner stakes and canned goods and carriage tops and stove fittings and manure forks. Jackson makes manilla paper and steam heaters and whisk brooms and parlor brooms and building and meat tubs and steel hoes and sporting goods. Jackson makes spring wagons and concrete walks and buckwheat flour and freight wagons and express wagons and hose supporters and artificial flowers. Jackson makes fire buckets and fruit evaporators and wood engravings and horse-blocks and heating furnaces and patent medicines. Jackson makes fire extinguishers and fire clay and oil tanks and electrical batteries and automatic engines and rheumatic plasters. Jackson makes wash tubs and woolen goods and hitching posts and furniture and throat and lung balsam and agricultural implements and cyclone dust collectors and sweet goods and confections." (Jackson Daily Citizen 1889:7.)
JACKSON'S EXPANDING POPULATION
Not only did this manufacturing activity rely on abundant resources and good transportation, it also depended on a sizeable labor force. The majority of Jackson residents were skilled and semi-skilled workers and a large portion of this working population was made up of immigrants. Canadians, Scots and English, for example, tended to work as masons, carpenters, roofers or in white collar occupations. The Welsh were predominantly coal miners or worked in the chemical industries. The Irish tended to laborers. The Germans were frequently employed as artisans- shoemakers, potters, blacksmiths, tailors. Some ran breweries or worked in cigar manufacturing industries. The Poles were often employed in mining or in the railroad industries. Black Americans generally worked as cooks, barbers, on the railroad or in construction. By contrast, a Jackson historian has pointed out that "the community's financial, managerial, political and professional positions were controlled by native old-stock Americans" (Santer 1970:88).What this meant was that a small, monied elite was largely responsible for making the decisions which affected the city's development. It is hardly surprising that in Jackson the interests of labor took a back seat to those of business, that local strikes and labor unions were generally ineffective and that they were officially regarded as restrictive of growth and the ultimate welfare of the city and all its residents.
At the same time, Jackson's commercial success contributed to its being a fascinating mosaic of contrast and diversity. It was a city within which existed distinct social strata and life styles. On the west side of Grand River, particularly along Wildwood Avenue and West Main, were the large elegant homes of some of Jackson's most prominent citizens. Indeed these were typically individuals who could afford the most modern conveniences, could send their children to boarding schools and could take occasional trips to Europe. They were also the residents who left behind numerous written histories of their families and achievements.
On the east side of Grand River could be found the more 'modest' homes, boarding houses and rental units of a less financially endowed population. Here were located many ethnically-based neighborhoods- German, Polish, Irish, Black-- each maintaining, to different degrees, their own ethnic shops, foods, native languages and other culturally-based institutions.
The city's numerous religious persuasions were represented by dozens of places of worship. Likewise, differing social and political views were expressed through a variety of area newspapers. Musical groups, literary societies, fraternal orders, horseracing, boat clubs, ball clubs, public taverns, a public library, and the like, all provided residents with opportunities to interact with persons of similar situation and interest. Additional color was added by the opera houses, vaudeville houses and theaters and the 'one night stands' of actors, singers, musicians, dancers, comics, magicians and such, who were literally rolled in and out of town to the tune of a steam whistle.
URBANIZATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION - ANOTHER DIMENSION
Jackson around nineteen hundred was a most modern city. It has acquired blocks of attractive, three and four story brick buildings, warehouses and factories. It was thoroughly acquainted with such things as telephone service, a city water system, electric street lighting and electric street cars. Together technology and industry had changed the nature and pace of life. Speed in transportation and communication had grown familiar. Excusing the pun, Jackson entered the twentieth century with an impressive track record.But while the momentum of the Gilded Age carried Jackson through the next several decades, the city began to realize the consequences of its earlier, unrestricted entrepreneurial activity. It began to realize that there were limits to nature, space and human endurance.
Perhaps most immediately evident was the pollution of the city's natural resources. Industrial and residential wastes poured into the Grand River and into the atmosphere. The condition received little remedial attention until after the 1930's, thought it could hardly have gone unnoticed. A poem published as early as 1904, for instance, called Grand River "Jackson's Chief pride! Earth's perfumed artery." Somewhat more graphically it rhymed:
And where the prison adds its prismy ooze
Which to the fish and frog proves 'knock-out booze',
Full gorged no wonder there the current mopes
Like some poor fool the bland dive-keeper dopes;
While up and down on weeds fermenting lie
The 'sewer creams' whose smells refuse to die. (DeLand 1904:437)
Yet another blight was the conspicuous absence of parkland within the city-- real estate proving much too valuable to leave undeveloped. Indeed by the 1920's skyscrapers of some 10-15 stories were capitalizing on the city's vertical space. It was only through the gifts of several wealthy and civic-minded residents-- the Ella Sharp Park acquired in 1912 and Sparks Park acquired in 1929-- that Jackson regained woodlands and grassy expanses.
But flora and fauna aside, it was also growing apparent, not just in Jackson but throughout the nation, that the urban environment could be humanly debilitating. Disease, malnutrition, overcrowding, poverty and the basic disenfranchisement of large portions of the population-- women, children, immigrants, Blacks, the poor, the laboring-- generated fear and anger and social reform. Welfare agencies and government institutions, charitable societies and organizations as diverse as the Consumer League, the Salvation Army, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the American Federation of Labor and the Ku Klux Klan all responded to these felt needs and growing inequities. All found supporters in Jackson.
A NEW FORM OF TRANSPORTATION
As the city became a difficult place to live, those residents with the means moved to the outskirts of Jackson-- particularly to areas south and south west of the city. This movement helped to create what would later be termed a 'suburban fringe'. It also helped to create what would later be termed an 'inner city'.Somewhat ironically, this mobility was made possible by the same technology and industry which made it necessary-- in this case by two new forms of transportation, the interurban and the automobile. The interurban was an electric rail system, which connected population centers with those by-passed by the railroads. It allowed for a greater, and a mutually beneficial, exchange between rural and urban residents, their products, their leisure-time pursuits and environments. While the interurban was an immediately popular system of modern transportation, it also had the dubious distinction of being the shortest lived and the most financially unprofitable ((Walmsley 1965:1). After operating little more than twenty years, it became virtually obsolete-- a casualty of the growing automotive industry.
But the automobile had other effects as well. Jackson with its affinity for improved systems of transportation showed considerable interest in the 'horseless carriage'. The city's extensive wagon manufacturing industries, the existing factory space and immediate access to shipping lines all encouraged local experimentation in automobile construction and production. For may years, Jackson was the home of numerous car companies-- among them the Jackson Automobile Company, the Standard Electric Car Company, the Clark-Carter Company, the Imperial Automobile Company, the Briscoe Motor Company and Earl Motors, Incorporated. Nevertheless, local finance was difficult to obtain. Production was limited and the automobile remained an intriguing but expensive toy. Even so, Jackson might have managed if it hadn't been for a Mr. Henry Ford and his moving assembly line-- the latter being a revolutionary system for mass producing low cost automobiles. Mr. Ford also guaranteed his workers a minimum daily wage of $5.00, far in excess of wages offered elsewhere. Thus, with the financial backing, the production system and a corner on the labor market, Ford secured for Detroit title to the auto industry.
While a few Jackson companies chugged into the 1920's, their future unfortunately had been decided as early as 1914. Cars like the 'Jackson' which boasted "No hill too steep. No sand too deep" and the 'Briscoe' with its "half million dollar motor" could not compete. They soon became metal monuments to wishful thinking.
There was, however, nothing wishful about Jackson's emergence as a car parts town. Even while the city contended with Detroit as a manufacturing center, local entrepreneurs were busy designing and producing such 'incidentals' as automobile radiators, wheels, tops, horns, gears, axles, cushion springs and motors. The major automobile companies contracted for these Jackson-made products and while no fortunes were made the size of Ford's, several local fortunes were built nonetheless. In turn, these fortunes underwrote, at least for a while, a high society in Jackson.
THE FIRST 100 YEARS
But this was to the twilight of the relatively small and independently financed business venture. Large national and international corporations were emerging which eclipsed and absorbed local companies. The business world had begun to centralize and markets and production were controlled from major cities such as New York, London, Paris. In addition, a stock market crash in the late 1929 would usher the United States into a great and global depression. Life styles, fortunes and speculative ventures would be drastically altered.It is perhaps fitting that Jackson celebrated its on hundredth birthday June 30 through July 6, 1929-- before these things came to pass. The city had grown to some 55,000 persons though now it ranked as only the eighth largest city within Michigan. For one week Jackson residents paid elaborate tribute to a remarkable, though costly, history-- a history grounded in what had been unquestioned natural abundance and its uncritical use in promoting endless individual interests. It was a celebration which symbolically marked the end of an era. This was true, however, not just for Jackson, for many of the attitudes, institutions and activities which had made themselves at home in this Midwestern city had also belonged to the nation as a whole. Much would have to change. Like the nation, Jackson's first one hundred years were remarkable. The second hundred would also be remarkable, but they would never be the same again.
WORKS CITED
Degler, Carl L.1959 Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America. New York:
Harper and Row.
Deland, Colonel Charles V. (Compiler)
1903 DeLand's History of Jackson County, Michigan. Na. B. F. Bower.
Havighurst, Walter
1945 The Long Ship's Passing: The Story of the Great Lakes. New York:
The Macmillan Company.
Jackson Citizen Daily
1889 Industrial Edition. Jackson, Michigan.
Santer, Richard Arthur
1970 A Historical Geography of Jackson, Michigan: A Study on the Changing
Character of an American Community 1829-1969. Unpublished Ph.D.
Dissertation, M.S.U.
Walmsley, Mildred M.
1965 The Bygone Electric Interurban Railway System. he Professional Geographer XVII: 1-6.
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The Ella is on the National Register of Historic Places, listed as a State of Michigan Landmark and accredited by the American Association of Museums.
