difficulties resulting from the erection of a new building. The library eventually passed into the hands of the Public Library. In July, 1831, the Detroit Athenaeum was organized with Lewis Cass, president; John Biddle, vice-president; R. S. Rice, treasurer, and H. S. Cole, secretary. This society was organized to conduct a library and reading room and occupied quarters on the west side of Griswold Street, just in the rear of the present building of the Michigan Mutual Life Insurance Company. Usually it is only when some famous literary celebrity visits a city that the inhabitants have the opportunity to see themselves as others see them. Mrs. Anne Jameson visited the Great Lakes region in 1837 and remained in Detroit several days while waiting for a steamboat to carry her to Mackinac. She stopped at the American House and, finding the weather bad and the town rather dull, she visited one of these institutions in search of books. This is her account of the experience: "I read in the papers of long lists of books received which the public were invited to inspect. I asked for a circulating library and was directed to the only one in the place. I had to ascend a steep staircase so disgustingly dirty that it was necessary to draw my skirts around me to escape pollution. On entering a large room, unfurnished except with book shelves, I found several men sitting, or rather sprawling, on chairs and reading newspapers. The collection of books was small, but they were not of a common or vulgar description. I found some of the best publications in French and English. The man who stood behind the counter neither moved his hat from his head nor bowed as I entered, nor showed any officious anxiety to serve me. "When I asked on what terms I might have some books to read he told me to take any book I wished and not to think about payment or deposit. I remonstrated that I was a stranger whose stay was uncertain. He replied that from a lady and a stranger he could not accept remuneration. Then he gave himself some trouble to find the books I wished and I took them away with me. He did not even ask the name of the hotel at which I was staying, and, when I returned the books, persisted in declining payment from 'a lady and a stranger.' Soon after 1833 the Athenaeum was merged into the Young Men's Society. A few days before the arrival of Mrs. Jameson another famous English woman, Harriet Martineau, visited Detroit. She afterward wrote: "We landed at Detroit from Lake Erie at seven o'clock on the morning of June 13, 1836, and reached > the American House just in time for breakfast." (The American House was remodeled from the residence of Gov. Hull, built in 1807 and converted into a hotel in 1835. It stood on the south side of Jefferson Avenue near Randolph Street.) "At that long table I had the pleasure of seeing the healthiest set of faces that I beheld since leaving England. The breakfast was excellent and we were served with much consideration, but the place was so full and the accommodations of Detroit are so insufficient for the influx of people that strangers must put up with much delay and inconvenience until new houses of entertainment are opened. We had to wait until one o'clock before any of us I could have a room in which to dress. The streets of the town are wide and airy but the houses, churches and stores are poor for the capital city of a territory or state. Wooden planks, laid on grass, form the pavement in all the outskirts of the place. The deficiency is of stone, not of labor. "Thousands of settlers are pouring in. Many of these are Irish, German and Dutch, working their way into the back country and glad to be employed for a while at Detroit to earn money to carry them further. The country about Detroit is as flat as can be imagined. A lady of Detroit remarked that if she were to build a house in these parts she would build a hill first. "The society of Detroit is very choice. It has continued so since the old colonial days and there is every reason to think that it will become, under its new dignities of statehood, a more and more desirable place of residence. A gentleman remarked in the reading room in our hearing that 'lynching was the only way to treat abolitionists'; but the most enlightened society is, I believe, equal to any to be found in the United States. Here we began to see many of the half-breed Indians of whom we afterward saw so many farther north. I never have seen such imps and flibbertigibbets as the half-breed boys that we saw rowing, paddling and diving in the waters and playing pranks along the shores. It was wholly unexpected to find ourselves in accomplished society on the far side of Lake Erie. "Our road out of town toward the west was for several miles thronged with Indians. Residents of Detroit told me they found it impossible to be romantic about these people. We, however, could not help feeling the excitement of the spectacle when we saw them standing in their singularly majestic attitudes by the road-side; one with a bunch of feathers tied at the back of the head; another with arms folded in his blanket; a third with her infant lashed to a board and thus carried on her shoulders. “As soon as we entered the woods the road became as bad as I suppose roads ever are. Something snapped and the driver cried out. The kingbolt had given way. Our gentlemen and those of the mail stage which happened to be at hand helped make repairs. We ladies walked on gathering an abundance of flowers and picking our way along the swampy corduroy road. In less than an hour the stage took us up. No more accidents occurred before breakfast. We were abundantly amused while our meal was preparing at Dearborn. One of the passengers took up a violin and played for us. The lady of the house sat by the window fixing her candle-wicks in the molds. On the piazza sat a group of immigrants who interested us. The wife had her eight children with her, the youngest puny twins. She said she had brought them in a wagon 400 miles and if they could live through the 100 that remained to be traveled before they reached her husband's land she hoped they might thrive. Her bundle of baby things had been stolen from the wagon. "After a good meal we saw the stage passengers stowed into a lumber wagon and we presently followed in our more comfortable vehicle. Before long something else snapped. The splinter-bar was broken. Juggernaut's car would have 'broke to bits' on such a road. We went to a settler's house to refresh ourselves. Three years before he had bought 80 acres for a dollar an acre. He could now sell it for $20 an acre. We dined well nine miles before we reached Ypsilanti. At Ypsilanti I picked up an Ann Arbor newspaper. It was badly printed but the contents were pretty good. It could happen nowhere out of America that so raw a settlement as Ann Arbor, where there is difficulty in procuring decent accommodations, should have a newspaper.” Miss Martineau proceeded via Tecumseh, Jonesville, White Pigeon, Niles and Michigan City to Chicago, where auction sales of wet prairie land were a sort of craze. From there she traveled southward into the heart of Illinois, then back to Lake Michigan and around the lakes by boat, stopping at Mackinac. She spent two years traveling about the United States, saw many prominent people and all the principal cities in spite of the hardships of travel and the crude accommodations for travelers in the crowded taverns, hotels and log cabins of settlers. F CHAPTER LIX YOUNG MEN'S SOCIETY OREMOST among the literary societies of Detroit in the 1830's was the Young Men's Society. Young men of the town were accustomed to meet in the evenings at certain stores in the lack of any club room. One of these places was the store of John Clark & Company on Jefferson Avenue, between Woodward and Griswold Street. In the winter of 1832 this little group began agitating the formation of a literary and debating society. Several meetings were held and then a formal meeting in the session house of the First Presbyterian Church, which adjoined the church, on the northeast corner of Woodward and Larned Street. There on January 13, 1833, the society was organized in due form. Dr. Douglass Houghton was the prime mover. He was a brilliant young man who, although only 21 years old and very small of stature, had already earned a reputation as one of the biggest minds in Michigan. He was a native of Fredonia, N. Y., and a graduate of the polytechnic school at Troy, who had been sent here to deliver a series of lectures on science. He liked Detroit so well that he formed a partnership with a local doctor-for he was also a graduate in medicine-and besides attending the sick he pulled the teeth of the community. But Dr. Houghton was a scientist of very wide learning and about him gathered a group of the brightest young men of Detroit who soon became known as "Dr. Houghton's boys." "The boys" naturally wanted Dr. Houghton for president of the society, but he promoted the election of Franklin Sawyer, a local newspaper man and printer, and accepted the vicepresidency for himself. Under such leadership the Young Men's Society attracted to its membership the flower of the community and became an important factor in the promotion of local culture. Its early meetings were held either at the |