Like many Ann Arborites, my family settled here following a stint at the University of Michigan. The mortgage on our four-bedroom home on Keech Ave. is less than the rent we paid for a two-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, so after my fellowship, we stayed.
Our house, which was built in 1905, is also a transplant. “It was spared from the wrecking ball and moved down the street to its current lot when the University of Michigan decided to build a new stadium, ironically nicknamed ‘The Big House,'” architect Michael Klement wrote in Fine Homebuilding magazine in 2009. “It seemed that saving the house was a good idea. What might not have been such a good idea was the way the movers set the house on the site: They turned it 90 degrees away from the street.”
The original front patio is on the right, facing east toward the stadium. There’s still an impression in the old paint where the house number plaque hung when the porch fronted a street two blocks away. But “turned sideways, the layout made no sense,” Colin Blakely, the previous owner, told me. “From the front door, you entered the dining room.”
The Blakelys remedied that problem in 2007 when they hired Klement and Doug Selby of Meadowlark Builders to do a remodel and backyard addition, modernizing the downstairs floor plan and adding a family room, an upstairs bedroom and bathroom, and a basement photo studio.
The house’s no-nonsense vernacular style remains intact, including the vestigial front porch. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder about the origins of this unusual old home.
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Enter Marguerite McDonald, ninety-four, who lived in the house beginning in 1929, when she was five years old. Her granddaughter, Kim Sperlbaum, is my next-door neighbor. From the front passenger seat of Sperlbaum’s SUV, McDonald gave us a guided tour of the neighborhood. It was like going for a ride in a time machine.
“These were fields of apple trees,” McDonald says, sweeping her arm toward Potter St., “we played Tarzan in them!” She fondly recalls stables on Hoover where she used to go horseback riding. An ice cream parlor on the corner of Keech and Main–“five cents a cone!” And there was the original, more accessible Michigan Stadium, whose iron gates were open to the public every day until five o’clock so neighborhood kids could play on the big grass field and vagrants (“we called them hobos back then,” McDonald says) slept under the bleachers on mattresses of discarded football tickets.
McDonald was born Marguerite Lachler in 1924, daughter of George and Marie Lachler. George is listed as a machine operator in Ann Arbor’s 1929 city directory, with an address of 510 Keech. “He helped build the stadium, digging the hole,” McDonald says.
Drawing on stories she heard from her German-born parents, McDonald says that at least three homes were removed from the stadium site and scattered to nearby vacant lots. Another remained inside Michigan Stadium’s grounds for decades.
That orphaned house is visible in old aerial photos of Michigan Stadium, complete with a front sidewalk that intersects the fence along Main St. Other sidewalks lead from Main to nowhere, ghosts of homes that were demolished or displaced.
According to Jeff and Michael Fisher, one that now stands at 320 W. Stadium originally sat on thirteen acres belonging to John Miller, their great grandfather. “Supposedly of all the houses that were moved, ours was the only one that the original family retained ownership after the move,” says Michael. “We grew up in it at its current location.”
As reported by Robert Soderstrom in his book The Big House: Fielding H. Yost and the Building of Michigan Stadium:
In a letter dated April 28, 1926, six days after the Regents approved the project, Yost made arrangements to meet in Ann Arbor with Bernard Green, President of Osborn Engineering. Yost … wanted Green to look at a parcel of land known as the ‘Miller tract,’ located just north of Stadium … In October 1925, the athletic department had purchased the property for $18,000.
Soderstrom’s book makes no mention of homes being removed, but Greg Kinney, U-M’s athletics archivist, did some digging: “The Board in Control of Intercollegiate Athletics acquired about 119 city lots in addition to the Miller farm house,” he emails. “Stadium excavation began in the Fall of 1926, so presumably houses would have been moved or demolished about then.”
The vast majority of those lots were vacant, but Kinney discovered three contracts with house mover George Karr. On September 1, 1926, the Board in Control of Athletics agreed to pay him $600 to “remove the two story frame building known as the Malloy house from its present location on Lot 18 of Killin Stuhrburg First Addition to the city of Ann Arbor to and upon Lot 159 of Oak Crest Subdivision of the city of Ann Arbor.” I hadn’t known that my neighborhood had a name, but I found it on a 1925 plat, bordered by Main St. to the east, Edgewood Ave. to the west, W. Keech Ave. to the north, and Snyder Ave. to the south.
The Malloy house was named after William H. and Fannie Malloy. Fannie’s maiden name was Miller, and a quick Internet search reveals she was the daughter of John and Mary Miller (of Miller tract fame). The Malloys’ son Woodrow, who was raised a chip shot away from the Alister MacKenzie-designed U-M golf course, was a 1937 National Collegiate Medalist and helped Michigan win the 1937 national title at the Congressional Country Club course in Washington, D.C. That gives my home additional swag, as the kids say. At least one of those who stayed here was a champion.
Overlaying the old plat diagrams, a Google map, and a Michigan Stadium seating chart, it looks like the Malloy house would have been located roughly halfway up the east bleachers, near the 50-yard line in Section 1. The lot itself stretched north across Sections 44 and 43. Those are some great seats; if you sit in them, you can thank the Malloy family for leaving.
McDonald recalls that another transplanted house was located on Belmar. Kinney also found a contract with Karr to move the “old Nagel house”; it presently resides on the southwest corner of Belmar Pl. and Berkley Ave. Owners Bob and Lisa Ronk confirm Marguerite’s memory that their house was also rotated. “It was more prestigious to turn the house away from the street,” Bob surmises. “That way everybody could tell you owned more than one plot of land.” Years ago the Ronks added a two-car garage to the adjacent lot, and the former front porch became a mudroom connecting the old Nagel house to the new Ronk garage.
The third contract, dated September 22, 1926, gave Karr $300 and only six days to remove “the two story frame building known as the new Nagel house” from the now extinct “E. Berkley Ave.” to Oak Crest Lot 1 on the west side of Main. It now sits in the shadow of Michigan Stadium, which might not exist where it does if the Nagels and others hadn’t agreed to move.
Now it’s endangered again: 1300 Wick LLC, an affiliate of Wickfield Properties, has city approval to build a four-story building called “Game Day Condos” on its site. Managing partner Brad Hayosh emails that they “are currently working on final permitting and will likely be scheduling construction (including planned demolition) in the next couple of months.”
Hayosh hadn’t been aware of the home’s history, and says he’s “certainly not opposed to gifting the structure to someone or a group that would move it.” But he adds that “timing might be a challenge.”
The changed neighborhood would be a greater one. Its empty lots long since filled, Oak Crest is now seeing “tear-downs,” as developers clear sites for condos targeting wealthy Wolverine fans. The “new Nagel house” seems likely to be the latest casualty.
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In a 1927 aerial photo, all four moved homes are visible in an Oak Crest subdivision not nearly as crowded as it is today. The Lachlers contributed to the neighborhood’s increasing density: in 1947, they built and moved into a red brick house on the adjacent lot (that’s Kim Sperlbaum’s home now). Before they moved, Marguerite says, friends would tease her that she lived in an “old” house.
Judging by her stories, her friends were probably jealous. When Marguerite was a teenager, “about four of us girls were all playing over at the stadium and Tom Harmon [Michigan’s future Heisman Trophy winner] and [Forest] Evashevski [the team captain], gave us a ride in a convertible,” she says. “Harry Kipke was the coach then; my mother worked for him, you know. Anyway, we had a lot of fun–I can tell you a lot of stories,” she says, eyes twinkling.
That joyride with Michigan’s star football players left quite an impression for McDonald to recall it so vividly nearly eight decades later. I’m more interested in her memories about Oak Crest houses than what went on at the football stadium, but the two are inextricably linked: These displaced (and now disappearing) homes are physical reminders of the sacrifices the Ann Arbor community made so that Michigan Stadium could be built in what was–quite literally–our own backyard.
We enjoyed reading the story of “The Big House Diaspora.” In the 1990’s, Rick Weid and Doug Barnett did extensive genealogy research on the Miller family. John Miller, Sr. arrived in Washtenaw County in the 1850’s and married Mary Anna (some records show her name as Anna Mary) (Schneurle)(changed to Schnearle) in 1859.
In 1893, John Miller purchased a 13 acre farm on Boulevard Drive or as the locals called this dirt street, the Cutoff, for $801.00. I remember calling it “The Cutoff” myself as a young boy.
My grandmother, Mary (Miller) Barnett was the first born to John and Mary Anna (Schneurle) (Schnearle) Miller in 1860. She was the first of seven children: six girls and one son, John Miller, Jr. They were Mary, Elizabeth, Caroline, Eva, John, Barbara and Fannie. It was Mary’s brother, John Miller, Jr., who actually sold the farm to AD Yost.
Senior John Miller died in 1908 and his son, John, Jr inherited the farm. This was an old custom whereby the son inherited property from the father. It was John Miller Jr, who sold the farm to AD Yost in 1924 for $35,000.00. He then moved his homestead across Main Street where it still stands at 320 W. Stadium Blvd. John Miller Jr died in 1936. He was my Dad’s uncle.
John, Jr.’s son Robert’s home was in the stadium near old gate 5 and was used as a caretaker’s home for many years after the sale of the farm.
After the farm was sold to AD Yost, John Jr’s son and daughter, Robert Miller and Florina Weid, then built homes at 312 and 316 W. Stadium Blvd. The property to the west of the original homestead also included 6 additional lots for parking cars for football games. Behind the Weid home, their property ran all the way through to Snyder Ave. Florina (Miller) Weid’s son, Russ, lived at 307 Snyder Ave for all his married life.
All of this second farm of John Miller, Jr, has been sold with the exception of Robert Miller’s home at 316 W. Stadium. It is still owned by a Miller descendent, his grandson, Robert Tobias.
Fannie Miller married William Malloy in 1900 and moved to 401 Snyder Ave. John Malloy, son of Fannie, lived for over 60 years at the corner of Main Street and Snyder Ave.
This is just some additional information on this pioneer family of Ann Arbor. I also just read that the Barnett homestead at 904 Greene Street will soon be demolished to make way for a huge four block development. My Dad was born there in 1907, the youngest of ten children by Edward Barnett. He was married to Caroline Miller, who died in 1888. Edward Barnett then married Mary Miller in 1890. Doug also lived in this home in 1938 for a few years.