German/scale/common carp: The German or common carp was the variety most widely spread in Michigan.

Poppe settled them onto a train. The Transcontinental Railroad linking the West Coast to Iowa and the eastern rail network had been completed only three years earlier. Despite Poppe’s best efforts for those in his care, two more died in San Francisco, and another died on the boat from San Francisco to the coast near Sonoma.

Five had survived the nearly 7,000-mile journey – only the youngest, each about the size of a pen. Poppe placed them in his pond that August, hoping for their survival.

By the following May, the five German carp, also known as scale or common carp, had spawned 3,000 young. They also helped spawn a short-lived nationwide carp craze. In Michigan, state fish officials’ initial enthusiasm turned to alarm as the non-native’s depredations became another one of the state’s late 19th-century ecological disasters.

Poppe sold carp for food and for breeding to his neighbors as well as to Honolulu and Central America. News of his successful venture spread.

U.S. Fish Commission

The U.S. Fish Commission had been created the previous year in order to investigate “the causes of decrease in the supply of useful food-fishes of the United States, and of the various factors entering into the problem; and the determination and employment of such active measures as may seem best calculated to stock or restock the waters of the rivers, lakes and the sea.”

In the commission’s 1872-73 report, commissioner Spencer Baird noted:

 Sufficient attention has not been paid in the United States to the introduction of the European carp as a food fish, and yet it is quite safe to say that there is no other species that promises so great a return in limited waters. It has the pre-eminent advantage over such fish as the black bass, trout, grayling, &c., that it is a vegetable feeder, and, although not disdaining animal matters, can thrive very well on aquatic vegetation alone. On this account it can be kept in tanks, small ponds, &c., and a very much larger weight obtained, without expense, than in the case of the other kinds indicated. It is on this account that its culture has been continued for centuries. It is also a mistake to compare the flesh with that of the ordinary cyprinidae of the United States, such as suckers, chubs, and the like, the flesh of the genuine carp (Cyprinus carpio) being firm, flaky, and in some varieties almost equal to the European trout.

The “genuine” carp encompassed three varieties: the mirror carp, the leather carp, and most commonly, the German carp. The federal fish commission imported carp from Germany in 1877. Some were placed in Baltimore ponds, and others in the Babcock Lakes, a series of ponds adjoining the Washington Monument before the creation of the National Mall. In 1879, over 12,000 federal carp were taken from both sites and distributed to various states and territories, likely including Michigan.

In subsequent reports Baird listed the admirable qualities of carp: they were fecund, hardy, adaptable, and had rapid growth. Carp also showed a “harmlessness in its relation to other fishes,” the “ability to populate waters to their greatest extent,” and “good table qualities.”

By 1870, Michigan fish populations had declined as a result of overfishing, dam construction, pollution, and such habitat destruction as that caused by the timber industry. The waterborne transport of thousands of logs often scarred and eroded riverbanks, Sawmill sawdust dumped into waterways could blanket and choke a fish feeding or breeding ground.

Michigan Board of Fish Commissioners

The Michigan Board of Fish Commissioners formed in the spring of 1873. It did not have regulatory power. The Board could not compel commercial fishermen on Lake Michigan to stop decreasing the size of the holes in their nets, a strategy that led to the capture of immature whitefish before they could breed. The Board could not change timber industry practices. Its strategy was to hatch and distribute fish – those used for food – to replenish depleted populations and introduce new varieties thought beneficial.

The Board opened the state’s first hatchery in Pokagon, Cass County, in 1873. The following year, the hatchery produced whitefish, Atlantic salmon, king salmon, and carp. Aside from restocking commercial fishing areas in the Great Lakes – most notably the lucrative whitefish fishing grounds – the Board also offered shipments of young fish to farmers around the state. Originally the shipments were made in ordinary milk cans loaded on trains.

Railroading Carp

In 1888 the Board secured a specialized railroad car, the Attikumaig (an Ojibwe word meaning “whitefish.”) It combined space to transport fish, five sleeping berths for the men looking after them, a kitchen, and an office. The car traveled between 20 and 30,000 miles per year between February and July, distributing trout, whitefish, black bass, pike, and carp. It was eventually rebuilt and renamed the Fontinalis. Another fish car, the Wolverine, was built in 1913; a replica can be seen at the Oden fish hatchery in Alanson, Emmet county.

Carp were on the Attikumaig for a reason. “Several marked advantages are claimed for the German carp for profitable cultivation,” noted A December, 1880 issue of the Marshall Daily Chronicle. The article continued:

Any kind of a pond, no matter how restricted, can be used. Difficulties of temperature or purity of water are scarcely factors in carp culture. Providing the water is not too cold, carp thrive rapidly. In fact, no natural water has yet been found too warm for them. Being vegetable feeders, carp thrive on plants growing in the water, or may be given offal, like pigs, or boiled grain, like chickens. A large pond may be dug on arable land, allowed to grow carp for two or three years, the fish marketed and the ground brought under cultivation again.

In the same month and year the Kalamazoo Telegraph chimed in. “The farmers of Michigan should prepare ponds for the German carp which the fish commission is introducing into this country. It is one of the most prolific of fishes and among the best that can be supplied to the table.”

The table was a big one at the 1887 annual dinner of the American Carp Culture Association, based in Philadelphia. The group’s secretary noted:

 “The caterer carried out our instructions to the letter, and the result was that a select party of acknowledged epicures not only tasted but ate several pounds of carp without condiments or seasoning of any description whatever. The verdict seemed to be unanimous that carp raised and treated according to the system prevailing in this region is a first-class food fish … their flavor will be second only to the salmon family, certainly fully equal to the far-famed shad …

Perhaps the most enthusiastic carp-booster was Alliance, Ohio editor and publisher Lambelis Logan (he preferred the abbreviation “L. B. Logan.”) Logan was editor of the monthly magazine “American Carp Culture,” published from 1884 to 1888. Chapter 3 of Logan’s 1888 book “Practical Carp Culture” was titled “The Economic, Philosophic, Patriotic, and Sanitary Reasons for Carp Culture.” The chapter trails off before probing the connection between patriotism and carp, but it does extol the benefits of having a farm pond.

Ohio editor Lambelis Logan was a driving force behind the monthly magazine “American Carp Culture.”

Aside from raising carp, “water farming,” wrote Logan, provides beneficial vapors that “will moisten and purify the air, destroy disease germs and contribute to better health.” The pond supplies emergency water during a drought, he added, gives beauty to the farm, and provides a place to bathe, to ice-skate, and to harvest ice for the ice-house.

Logan went on to detail the multiple-pond system used in European carp culture, including the hatching pond, the stock pond for older carp, and the market pond for mature fish. A series of carp ponds was a feature, for example, of a Cisterian Catholic monastery, founded in 1186, in Reinfeld, a German town in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein. The Reinfeld town crest displays a carp to this day. Though the abbey was destroyed in the sixteenth century, the carp-ponds once tended by monks are still visible.

Reinfeld was the town that Julius Poppe had visited in 1872. He procured his fish from a town miller and carp culturist. Poppe had left Sonoma on May 3, 1872, traveled through the Panama Canal to New York, and crossed the Atlantic twice and the entire American continent once on an expensive three-month journey. He had faith in German-raised carp. Europe had had centuries to refine the art of breeding and maintaining carp in a controlled series of ponds.

Reinfeld’s coat of arms displays a silvery German carp

Michigan farmers would have to learn on the fly.

“A method of systematic carp culture in a series of proportioned ponds as detailed in the preceding pages would be entirely too extensive and costly a luxury for beginners, as most farmers must be,” wrote Logan in “Practical Carp Culture.”  “… [In this case,] a single pond must answer all the purposes.”

Leon Cole agreed in his 1905 book “German Carp in the United States.” “With a few possible exceptions carp culture has never been attempted in this country after the lines which it is carried on so extensively in Germany,” he wrote. “[Most carp culturists] merely dumped the fish into any body of water that was convenient, or into any pond that could be hastily scraped out or constructed by damming some small stream, and thereafter left them to shift for themselves . . . “

Cole was a 1901 graduate of the University of Michigan. As a junior, he already worked for the school as a zoological assistant, living nearby at 703 Church Street. After receiving his bachelor’s, he stayed on at the university to conduct zoological research, some involving carp that he maintained in an aquarium. Cole later received his doctorate from Harvard and became a zoologist and professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin.

Carp Falls out of Favor

By the time Cole graduated, carp had already fallen out of favor in Michigan. Their habit of eating by slurping up tidbits on the bottom of a river or pond and spitting out detritus made the water turbid. Such native predator fish as the pike had difficulty seeing prey through haze. In feeding, carp dislodged or damaged aquatic vegetation, a food source for some waterfowl and shelter for other fishes. They could cause riverbank erosion in scouring for food. Sportsmen suspected that they were crowding out more desirable fish. By the turn of the century, the carp’s reputation was in tatters.

The Jan. 1, 1897 Marshall Daily Chronicle said, “German carp are becoming more numerous in the Kalamazoo river each season, and it is feared that they will sooner or later drive out all other species of fish. There should be no restriction placed on their destruction. They bring but two cents a pound in the market.”

“Some years ago the cries went up all over Michigan that the German carp be planted in our rivers,” wrote the August 24, 1899 Benton Harbor Daily Palladium. “Now that we have them the lovers of game fish are wishing they could be exterminated, for it is said that they are destroying the spawn of our best river fish, and that they themselves are scarcely fit to eat. Carp are depopulating the Kalamazoo River of its best fish.”

In “German Carp in the United States,” Cole summarized possible reasons why carp culture had failed. People had rushed into the venture without knowledge of the procedures involved. They ate carp during the spring spawning season, when the flesh was of poor quality. It was cooked incorrectly, without the European techniques that rendered it palatable. Finally, escaped carp became so numerous in waterways that it wasn’t necessary to maintain a private pond.

Carp Compared to Sturgeon

The story of carp in Michigan is roughly a mirror image of the history of Michigan sturgeon. The sturgeon is indigenous; the carp is invasive. The sturgeon needs many years to mature before breeding; the carp is fertile at a young age. The sturgeon was originally regarded as a trash fish and later as extremely valuable due to its eggs, made into caviar. The carp arrived in this country lauded by government fish experts and is now considered a trash fish.

The sturgeon’s decline and the carp’s ascent crossed paths in the 1880s. The 1887-88 Michigan Fish Commission report notes that there is “an increasing demand for carp” – there were 3,485 applicants for state hatchery carp in 1886 alone. In addition, between 1880 and 1890, over 50,000 federal carp had been planted in Michigan waters. The state report also noted “one of the most valuable fish is the worthless sturgeon of a few years ago, and so assiduously is it sought for that the supply will become exhausted in a very short time …”

Not so the carp. As a speaker at the 1901 meeting of the American Fisheries Society said, “We hear a great deal from sportsmen’s clubs and from other sources as to how the carp can be exterminated. It cannot be exterminated. It is like the English sparrow; it is here to stay.”

Mystery Artifact

In the last column, I stupidly neglected to obscure the patent number on the patent drawing of the mystery artifact.

Mystery Artifact

Commenters (adept Internet-scourers all!) wrestled with the moral dilemma this posed, but proved honorable of course – no one spilled the beans!

That means I have the pleasure – it is was shepherd’s crook invented in 1884 by one Sumner D. Felt of Jackson, Michigan.

Because this column’s Mystery Artifact is about as obscure as a Mystery Artifact could be, I feel bound to drop a hint. This is something you could use in conjunction with the carp pond on your farm, in order to protect your investment. I look forward to your guesses!

Laura Bien is the author of “Hidden Ypsilanti” and “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives.” Contact Laura at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

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Twenty thousand dinosaurs live in the river system bordering Detroit. They’re rugged descendants of the few who survived one of Michigan’s worst ecological disasters, against which one University of Michigan  professor battled – in vain. His efforts were crushed by Michigan’s short-lived yet feverish caviar industry.

The snaggletooth scutes along the lake sturgeon are visible on this depiction of the lake sturgeon (public-domain image).

Among the most primitive of fish, sturgeon first appeared when the Earth had just one continent. Millenia later the lake sturgeon thickly populated the Great Lakes and was fished by native peoples.

A young adventurer of noble French birth described the fish in his 1703 bestseller whose English title is “New Voyages to North America.” Baron de Lahontan’s book detailed the experiences gleaned from a decade of travel in New France, the onetime colony that encompassed most of present-day eastern Canada and the U.S. He wrote of Lake Erie, “[I]t abounds with sturgeon and whitefish, but trout are very scarce in it as well as the other fish that we take in the Lakes of Hurons and [Michigan].”

Sturgeon remained common over a century later, as noted by James Lanman in his 1839 book “History of Michigan.”

These lakes abound also with fish, some of the most delicious kinds. Among these are the Sturgeon, the Mackinaw Trout, the Mosquenonge [muskellunge], the white fish, and others of smaller size peculiar to fresh water. The Sturgeon advances up the stream from the lakes during the early part of spring to spawn, and are caught there in large quantities by the Indians.

In the first half of the 19th century, Michigan settlers were beginning to catch sturgeon too, to their irritation. In trying to net the prized whitefish, fishermen in lakes Michigan, Erie, and Ontario viewed sturgeon as unwelcome bycatch, too fatty and rank to eat. Six to nine feet long or longer, the fish bore five rows of pointed scutes, or toothlike scales along its body that ripped holes in fishing nets. Fishermen killed sturgeon and dumped or buried their carcasses on shore. In Ontario at Amherstburg, the oily fish were stacked like firewood and left to dry. The mummified bodies were burned to heat the boilers of wood-burning steamboats on the Detroit River.

Sturgeon as Bycatch

In 1873 the state took note of the rapidly-growing Michigan fishing industry as a whole and created the Michigan Fish Commission.

Its first president, 55-year-old New York-born George Jerome, had previously worked around the Midwest as a lawyer, real estate agent, newspaper editor, chairman of a state Republican committee, and tax assessor before building a comfortable home in Niles, Michigan. Jerome was a gentleman of “peculiar charm and magnetism of his individuality,” read one later remembrance. “He impressed everyone with his overflowing good humor and jollity, while his genial wit, fund of anecdote, and skill as a story teller, made him one of the most companionable of men.”

Jerome was also a man of action. Upon hearing that the creation of a state board of fish commissioners was pending, Jerome sped to Lansing to support the measure. His considerable efforts were rewarded with a position on the board. Soon after he became its superintendent.

Jerome wrote the Commission’s inaugural 1873-74 report. More literary than bureaucratic, the work championed artificial fish breeding. “It is as distinctively an art as is glass or iron manufacture,” he wrote, “ . . . [n]ot, perhaps, one of the ‘liberal’ or ‘fine’ arts, yet the century may not close ere the adjectives ‘liberal’ and ‘fine,’ shall not inaptly qualify our rising and cherished art.”

Jerome reflected that increasing demand in the 1870s was straining the Michigan fish supply. “Indeed, this is the fish problem,” wrote Jerome, “nothing more, nothing less. And to the solution of this problem, the veteran band of fish culturists, with the appliances at hand, and with a will and courage equal to every conceivable emergency, have gone to work, resolved not to lay down their tools till every promise of theirs is redeemed and every prophecy fulfilled.”

One goal of the “pisciculturist,” wrote Jerome, was to artificially breed valuable whitefish, trout, grayling and black bass, and stock them in waterways to replace fish he regarded as “too worthless to dwell on,” including suckers, catfish, and sturgeon. But the worth of the sturgeon was about to change.

Sturgeon Fortunes Change

In the 1860s it was found that smoking the fish reduced its oiliness and made it tasty. Often sold as halibut, smoked sturgeon became popular. Other sturgeon products emerged. The swim bladder was processed into isinglass, a gelatine used in applications that included beer-brewing. Sturgeon hide was made into leather. Sturgeon oil, refined, was sold to watchmakers and sewing-machine dealers. Sturgeon oil also found its way, according to a single secondary source, into many Michigan lighthouses, where it burned with a brighter, less smoky flame than the whale oil then in use.

A news tidbit in the April 19, 1887 Ypsilanti Commercial urged people to go and see the 150-pound sturgeons at Bradley's meat market.

Despite Jerome’s lofty aims, budget restraints, a lack of manpower, and a then-rudimentary grasp of fish ecology ensured that the Commission never kept pace with, much less regulated, the Michigan fish industry. Read as a whole, the late 19th-century Commission reports merely document, aside from some fish-stocking experiments, a growing disaster the bureau was helpless to prevent.

Perhaps Jerome foresaw this calamity. He retired after his first term, and the state promptly slashed the Commission’s budget from $7,000 to $5,000 [from $133,000 to $95,000 in today’s dollars].

Just a few years later, the 1877-78 Commission report warned, “there is one most alarming fact, that confronts us and must be confessed. It is this: these Great Lakes … the common food store-houses of the people, are being plundered, robbed, impoverished.”

The Caviar Threat

Around this time, an additional threat appeared. In the 1860s, the Schacht brothers in Sandusky had begun producing caviar from Lake Erie sturgeon. The profitable practice spread to Michigan, likely led by other immigrants from homelands with a tradition of caviar production.

S. Von Haller's ad in the March 1886 issue of the Normal News advertised smoked sturgeon. (Image links to higher resolution file.)

Up to a third of an adult female sturgeon’s body weight can be roe – a harvest of 70 pounds from one fish was not uncommon. Formerly the roe from Michigan sturgeon was sold as cheap fish bait, hog slop, or soil fertilizer. In the mid-1880s the Michigan caviar industry exploded and prices began to soar. A 135-pound keg of caviar that cost $12 in 1885 [$287 today] climbed to $40 in 1894 [$1,000] and $100 in 1900 [$2,600].

Makers tried to keep their manufacturing process secret, though it was simple – the roe was gently rubbed through a screen to free it from surrounding membrane, then salted and packed. “[Local resident] Mr. Haas has a peculiar process for curing the caviar, which he keeps a secret” reported the Sept. 26, 1890 Benton Harbor Weekly Palladium, “and he seems to be making money …”

Newspapers in distant states took notice of Michigan caviar. “Among the many industries peculiar to Detroit,” read a Jan. 5, 1886 article in the New London, Connecticut newspaper The Day, “not the least important is the traffic in the sturgeon and its products. The sturgeon is the whale of the lakes, weighing ordinarily from 40 to 100 pounds, but often reaching 150 or more.”

There were now five factories in Detroit, said the article, devoted exclusively to smoking sturgeon filets, and several major Detroit fish dealers who made and exported caviar to Germany and Russia. One dealer said that his annual export was 60,000 pounds. A Detroit Free Press article said of sturgeon caught at the mouth of the Detroit river, “The caviar is sent to Berlin where it is sold at enormous prices to wealthy Germans … They say that the caviar from Detroit river sturgeons is the best and that it is reserved for the German nobility.”

Around the same time, the Galveston News published an article that suggests a Detroit caviar urban legend:

There is a Russian who keeps a hotel in Detroit, and he is fond of caviar. As he always insisted that the caviar sold there would not compare with what could be had in Russia, he finally wrote over to Russia and asked his friends to send him a can of the caviar that was most popular at that time in St. Petersburgh. After a long interval the caviar arrived. On taking off the wrappings he saw on the label of the can that it was put up by a canning company in Detroit, and was warranted to be made of the best roe of Lake St. Clair sturgeon.

Fisheries in other Great Lakes states were also rapidly producing caviar. “Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin rival all Muscovy and Scandinavia in the production of caviar, that for the most part is exported to Europe,” said an August 1886 Scientific American article.

Lower-grade caviar was consumed domestically, to the extent that the open-faced “caviar sandwich” became a standard item available at lunch counters, taverns, and train station restaurants. The December 1908 issue of “The Spatula,” a druggists’ magazine, suggested possible food items to druggists thinking of adding a soda fountain counter to their shop. They included a ham sandwich for 5 cents [$1.20], oyster stew for 20 cents [$4.80], a chicken salad sandwich for 20 cents, and a caviar sandwich for 20 cents.

The caviar sandwich even became a meme to describe the appearance of crowds. Ohio-born politician-author Edward Townsend in his circa 1895 short story “No One in Town” wrote, “The children there would astound you, my dear, by their number. They were spread over the sidewalk as thick as sturgeon eggs over a caviar sandwich.” Indiana-born Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist and author John McCutcheon in his 1920-1921 novel “The Restless Age” wrote of a crowded theater, “looks like a bird’s-eye view of a caviar sandwich. If they expect to crowd any more in here they’ll have to let out a tuck in the opera-house.”

Demand was causing a crisis. The Michigan Fish Commission reported in 1888 that “in our own state today one of the most valuable of commercial fish is the worthless sturgeon of a few years ago, and so assiduously is it sought for that the supply will become exhausted in a very short time unless the fish-culturist comes to the rescue.”

Scientific Response

It was too severe a crisis, however, to be solved with a few bottles of fertilized eggs. Missing and desperately needed was a better, more holistic understanding of aquatic ecology. Professor Jacob Reighard helped the University of Michigan become one of two leading universities pioneering this emerging science.

Reighard initially worked with the Fish Commission at a small makeshift laboratory near New Baltimore on Lake St. Clair, studying whitefish and sturgeon. “Concerning even the most important of the food fishes of the Great Lakes our knowledge is very meager,” Reighard wrote. “[W]e do not know enough of the spawning habits and spawning places of the sturgeon of the Great Lakes to be able to procure the eggs for artificial propagation. The sturgeon is rapidly disappearing.”

Reighard did not know that sturgeon are extraordinarily long-lived and late to mature sexually. Males can live for 55 years, with females living 80 to 150 years. Females do not usually become sexually mature until they are in their mid-20s. Once sexually mature, both sexes are fertile only once every few years afterwards. As a result, during any given spawning season, only 10 to 20 per cent of the entire adult population is sexually active, one reason why sturgeon numbers fell so quickly once intensive fishing began.

Reighard needed a better research station. He was instrumental in the creation of a permanent research facility, UM’s present-day Biological Station on Douglas Lake in Cheboygan County. Reighard became, and remains, nationally known for his insights and work regarding aquatic ecology.

Tragically, by the time the Biological Station was built in 1909, Michigan sturgeon populations and the sturgeon industry had largely collapsed.

“Some years ago, sturgeon were abundant in the waters of our state,” noted the 1895-96 Michigan Fish Commission report, “but since 1891 the decrease in each year’s catch has been rapid, with slight hopes of their restoration . . . [i]n 1891 the sturgeon catch was 831,606 pounds, going down each subsequent year to 1897, amounting in that year to 184,881.” In an October 1908 Popular Science Monthly article titled “The Passing of the Sturgeon,” Walter Sheldon Tower wrote, “Lake St. Clair, which alone gave nearly a million pounds in 1880 has not produced more than 10,000 pounds in recent years, while the catch in Lakes Michigan and Erie has fallen to about one sixtieth of its former proportions.” By 1929, the state enforced a total ban on harvesting any sturgeon whatsoever, for fear of complete extinction.

However, you can fish for them today.

Sturgeon Today

Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers are home to Michigan’s largest population of lake sturgeon. When recreational divers just a few years ago reported seeing sturgeon spawning under the Blue Water Bridge, the DNR investigated. Scattered anecdotal reports over the years of sturgeon sightings had been made, but no one dreamed that a large and breeding sturgeon population had been living in the water system for years.

Catch-and-release hook-and-line fishing with a sturgeon permit is legal in Michigan. Harvest is possible at only three Michigan locations: The St. Clair and Detroit river system, Otsego Lake in Otsego County, and Black Lake in Cheboygan County. Each place has its own specific season. Earlier this February, nearly 200 anglers gathered at Black Lake. Its season was only a few hours long, with a total harvest of only two fish allowed. The St. Clair harvest season is July 16 to September 30, and with a permit the annual limit per angler is one sturgeon.

Strict seasons and limits and tough penalties for poachers are not the only protectors of modern sturgeons. In the fall of 2010, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality water resources district supervisor and Grosse Pointe resident Andy Hartz helped found the St. Clair and Detroit River chapter of Sturgeons for Tomorrow. The non-profit conservation group is open to all, with a yearly membership fee of $20. It now has about 45 members, and helps fisheries managers in the ongoing rehabilitation of local lake sturgeon populations. Many members enjoy fishing for sturgeon, with the vast majority practicing catch-and-release.

“It’s such a neat fish,” says Hartz. “And they live for so long that it’s the only fish that three generations of a family can catch. You can catch it, and then years later your son can catch it – the same individual fish – and then your grandson can catch it.”

With luck and careful management, that will remain true as populations of the venerable sturgeon continue to recover from their indiscriminate exploitation over a century ago.

Grateful thanks to Andy Hartz for contemporary sturgeon population data.

Mystery Artifact

Last month’s column presented a new acquisition of the Ypsilanti Historical Museum.

Mystery Object (image links to higher resolution file)

As Irene Hieber, Eleanor Pollack, Jim Rees, TJ, and Bear all guessed, this is a dictation machine, made by the Edison company.

I was about to add that you could say it’s an early tape recorder before realizing that that comparison unfortunately dates me. A recording device, let’s say.

This column’s mystery artifact is a device in use in Michigan for much of the 19th century. Reviled by some and overused by others, it had a major impact.

What might it be?

Take your best guess and good luck!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and “Hidden History of Ypsilanti.” Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists like Laura Bien and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.