On Broadway at Swift, there is a marker where several Indian trails meet. In 1825, as the Potawatomi were forced out, they cursed the area. They said that nothing within sight of where the trails meet would ever prosper. And it never has. The events of 1904 provide evidence that the curse was in effect then. And the failures of Kroger’s, CVS, and the late unlamented Broadway Village shows that the “Lower Town Curse” is still working

The path is not messed up, it’s intact. I ran by with a curiuos group Sunday morning — we stopped briefly to investigate and speculate. I figured I’d follow up here, that someone on this site would know. Voila!

kt

Their task is to see how well the footing drains are working.

Getting them installed messed up the path, I understand. I also understand the path has been fixed. I’ll look forward to the results of the test — which will be public.

they look like either electrical outlets or maybe some type of ground water testing instrument? there is a latch at the top that opens but a padlock prevents you from opening it up to look.

thanks,
kt

The pond now called Argo has been a fixture of the local landscape since 1832, when Anson Brown, erected a grist mill beside an early wooden version of the Broadway Bridge, and built the first dam to hold water back to power the mill. (Born a New Yorker, Brown started the settlement known as “Lower Town” Ann Arbor, calling Broadway and Wall Street after thoroughfares in New York City. Brown owned the mill, but was not the miller, and he died in the cholera epidemic of 1834.)

An internet search won’t find early 19th-century references to Argo, because the pond didn’t have that name until 1892, when a group of Ann Arbor businessmen, investors in the Michigan Milling Company, took over the operation (then known as the Sinclair Mills) and rebuilt the structure that they then named the Argo Flouring Mills. The dam and pond took their name from the mills, but no one knows where that name came from. Did the mill’s golden grain suggest a comparison to the brave ship Argo of Greek myth, which bore Jason and his men in search of the Golden Fleece?

(The Michigan Milling Company had its offices at the Central Mills on First Street, where the Blind Pig is now — and where, I’m told, a certain golden liquid flows — a beverage made from grain.)

Through the decades, the dam was rebuilt a few times (and probably made a little higher, after the Eastern Michigan Edison Company acquired the water rights). But in a freak calamity that drew a crowd of spectators, the Argo mill exploded and burned on January 4, 1904. Firemen came, and the water that doused the flames left a white pall of icicles on the tall building’s ruined skeleton, a scene captured in dramatic photographs. The company’s plutocrat investors decided not to rebuild, and a picturesque milling era — we might call it the “Flouring of Ann Arbor” — came to an end.

From Argo’s ashes rose the Phoenix of a new era of power generation. Within a few years, the company later known as Detroit Edison had erected a power generating station on the mill site, running its turbines and generators with water from the millrace.

Three weeks after the mill disaster, on January 27, 1904, the Ann Arbor Railroad’s trestle collapsed, dropping a heavy freight train and its cargo onto the ice of Argo Pond. In the days that followed, parties of gawkers turned out for that spectacle too, including small boys like the late Ray Spokes, who looted water-soaked crates of Beeman’s Pepsin Gum. The inadequate early trestle — which stood close to the dam — got replaced that year with another of thick steel, on massive concrete piers, a landmark still in place.

(That year, 1904, was a bad one at both ends: on the last day of December, the Ann Arbor High School burned to the ground.)

Throughout the 19th century, and early decades of the 20th, winter ice was harvested on Argo Pond, and stored in great blocks in straw-lined ice houses on the Main Street riverbank. Some of the ice buildings were owned by downtown caterers like Jacob Hangsterfer, whose big emporium depended on a steady supply of ice to preserve meat, and to refresh thirsty customers at his ballroom, year ’round.

Another enterprising German immigrant was Paul G. Tessmer, who in 1898 sold his grocery business and opened a boat livery — the “U. of M. Boat House” — on the pond’s Main Street side. By 1906, Tessmer had a stock of 160 canoes and 40 rowboats, all built by himself. He and his big family lived in a house on Sunset hill, overlooking the pond — a building that became the Elks’ Pratt Lodge. Tessmer’s docks and boathouse later were moved across the pond, to the foot of Longshore Drive, and became William J. Saunders’ canoe livery, then Jack Wirth’s, until 1969, when the Ann Arbor parks department took over.

On moonlit evenings in June, the pond was jammed with U-M students in canoes, boys in blazers treating their sweethearts to a mandolin serenade. Around 1900, these romantics began calling the path along the headrace embankment “Lover’s Lane.” (In the 1930s and ’40s, the embankment became part of Ann Arbor’s hobo jungle.)

One of the city’s public works projects during the Depression years was the building of a public bathing beach at the foot of Longshore Drive, where the canoe livery is now. Tons and tons of Lake Michigan white sand were hauled in and spread around, to make the beach comfortable and pretty. Repeated summer polio scares in the 1940s eventually led to its closing.

The pond was drained in 1930, when Edison built a new dam, and again in the early 1970′s, when Joe O’Neal’s construction company built the present dam for the city — a project completed in 1972. Treasure hunters prowled the muck for artifacts, and collectors found old Ann Arbor bottles for their collections. Construction workers pulled a particularly heavy souvenir out of the mud: a set of ribbed steel wheels, from one of the boxcars that fell off the old railroad trestle in 1904!

Argo Pond is an essential element of the history of Ann Arbor; it helps define our city’s character. In historical terms, Ann Arbor has always had that pond, has grown up around it, and would not be the same without it. Some folks commenting above have called it “stagnant,” but of course that is absurd. It is a dynamic body, as dynamic as the city itself. The waters of the Huron have flowed since time began, and they have been flowing through the pond and over the dam, ever since Ann Arbor was a tiny village in the wilderness west of Detroit.

By all means let us maintain momentum, improve the pond’s surroundings, clear out shabby factory buildings on North Main Street, and replace them with an attractive multi-use facility, one which includes cafes and a dining terrace that overlooks trees and water. It is a view to be enjoyed in every season.

But let us not rashly sacrifice our beloved Argo Pond, Ann Arbor’s urban waterfront. Argo is an asset, an amenity of the type that other communities long for. We should consider every means of enhancing access to it, and keeping its shining surface intact. Don’t pull the plug on Argo — don’t let it go down the drain.

My enjoyment of the river has been passive. I haven’t been out in a boat, haven’t stopped to watch the oarsmen, never even dipped a toe in Argo Pond — but I appreciate Argo’s contribution to the quality of life in this place, and I like to see it now and then, and know that it is there. I hope that it will forever remain in the heart of our city, where it has been bubbling and rippling for 177 years.

Wystan Stevens