Education
Besides buildings, John Allen and the pioneer settlers of the village
were constructing much more important things--the social, educational,
religious, political, and economic foundations for the settlement. It is
remarkable how soon the cultural institutions were established and how
vigorous they proved to be.
Ann Arbor was scarcely a year old in September 1825 when a Miss Monroe
opened a primary school in a log school house. Allen had erected the building
on his property at the northwest corner of Main and Ann streets. It was
just across from what would be court-house square, then serving as Allen's
vegetable patch. It was a crude building with small glass windows and split
log benches.
We know of little more than the existence of this first school. Miss
Monroe, the first teacher, died in 1829. Her successor, Harriet G. Parsons,
moved the school into a frame house on the corner of Washington Street
and Fifth Avenue in 1829. Miss Parsons later married Lorrin Mills, a tailor
who built the first brick house in town.
These pioneer schools were not supported by public funds but by rate
bills and other assessments levied on the parents of the children. Public
schools were not even authorized until 1830, and it was some years before
tax money began to support education. Consequently, many of Ann Arbor's
boys and girls did not attend school. In 1832, the average attendance was
only 35 out of a possible 161 children five to fifteen years old.
For secondary education a whole variety of private schools were established
beginning with the Merrill Brothers' school in 1829--"a select school...for
teaching higher English and Latin and Greek." Some were more prosperous
than others. One of the most successful, and the private school with the
longest history, was the Misses Clark School for young ladies. It was established
in 1839 by three well-educated sisters from New York. They operated the
school until the death of Mary, the senior partner, in 1875.
A unified public school system emerged slowly. Those citizens who lived
across the Huron River in "Lower Town," which existed until 1861 as a separate
village, maintained their own school system up to that time. In Ann Arbor
teachers in the "aristocratic" north district were paid $224 per year,
those in the south $90 until the two districts agreed to build a union
school. When the Union School opened in 1856, it was the finest building
in the city with an assembly room which could hold 700. Moreover, it was
the most expensive school in Michigan on one of the largest sites.
The Union School far outshone in grandeur and landscaping
the campus of The University of Michigan, which by action of the legislature
was permanently located in Ann Arbor in 1837. The coming of the University
undoubtedly was the single most important event in Ann Arbor's development.
Its founding determined much of the subsequent history of the community.
A land company of five leading citizens purchased 200 acres of farm
land east of State Street and gave 40 acres of it as an inducement for
the fledgling school to locate here. Its first buildings, imposing by frontier
standards, were four professors' houses and University Building (later
called Mason Hall), which opened in 1841. Its first class graduated in
1845. A medical department was added to the literary department in 1850;
law followed in 1859. From 1837 onward, the history of the University and
that of Ann Arbor have been inseparable and interdependent. There emerged
a feeling of creative tension that usually was congenial, or at least tolerant,
only occasionally slipping into hostility.
Ann Arbor's first residents were actively establishing other social foundations
besides schools. A group of villagers began a library in 1827, which by 1830
had 100 volumes. In 1831, twenty-eight Ann Arborites joined the Lyceum, the
purpose of which was "the cultivation of science and knowledge by members on
subjects chosen by themselves, the collection of books and apparatus, and specimens
of Natural History."