Hello! I’ve shockingly heard from a number of you that you have been excited?? for the next installment of the garbage saga. Well, happy holidays, here it is! Haven’t been following but think you might be ready to get excited about the garbage? Here are parts one and two.

BUCKLE UP! — aeb

This is now the header for this entire series so when you see it you can say: Ah yes. Time for THE GARBAGE. Clip here.

We return to the garbage (again, the garbage) in the pivotal year (in garbage) of 1901. It’s been six years and one mayor since our last installment.

If you’ve forgotten what was happening with the garbage, or didn’t read the previous installments, a refresher: We began in 1890 with the grand opening of the Detroit Sanitary Works, a trash “reduction” company contracted by the city of Detroit to dispose of residential organic waste. The noxious garbage factory infuriated nearby residents, who organized to halt its operations. But the city still needed to do something about the garbage. Where would it go? Canada? (They tried it.)

But despite being investigated by Canadian detectives and attacked by local farmers, the Detroit Sanitary Works did eventually open a new facility at French Landing, in Van Buren Township, and as the 20th Century dawned, complaints about the garbage shifted from its disposal to how it was — or wasn’t — being collected.

Let’s pick up the Sept. 16, 1900 edition of the Detroit Free Press to catch the vibe, courtesy of a letter to the editor in response to a story about the sharp new Grand Rapids garbage collection system:

“ ... Such a process would never appeal to official Detroit, or to the garbage contractors. They are well aware of the fact that garbage wagons in the streets are looked upon as public institutions. They know that the citizen has become accustomed to having his backyard smell like a slaughterhouse by reason of the odors from the festering garbage cans, and that a change would produce nostalgia. They understand, too, that nothing delights the average cyclist more than to wheel his way down the street on a glorious summer morning, behind a garbage wagon that scatters its sweetness over the whispering air, and prevents the smell of flowers from becoming offensive. They appreciate the fact, too, that many a house wife would feel that life had lost all its compensations if the collector of garbage did not leave his wagon standing in front of the house, from time to time, while he conducted a diplomatic controversy with the servant girl in respect to the bad condition of the alley for speeding purposes.

To the people of Grand Rapids, their system of collecting garbage may seem preferable to the one we have here, but that is because they have not had a chance to become familiar with ours. The Detroit method has many advantages, not the least of which is that it accustoms the native to such a variety of stenches that nothing in the way of smells can possibly annoy him.”

Hazen Pingree, the People’s Mayor and an all-time advocate for municipal ownership of everything, had wanted the city to explore taking the garbage into its own hands. But after a brief and failed effort to serve as mayor of Detroit and governor of Michigan simultaneously, Pingree gave up his mayorship, leaving the seat to William Cotter Maybury, who took over Pingree’s term in 1897.

You know Mayor Maybury as the guy with the other monument in Grand Circus Park, gazing jealously across the boulevard at Pingree, one of the most popular people in Detroit history and a tough act to follow.

Our two mayoral monuments on Grand Circus Park. Vintage postcards both from the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

But on the garbage problem, Maybury made some important moves. The first was:

The 1901 trash collection ordinance.

Something you should know about the Sanitary Works and the city’s trash management efforts more broadly is that hoteliers and restaurateurs hated them. For decades before the city did anything about the garbage, hoteliers made money from farmers who bought their food waste to use as fertilizer, feed and compost. It wasn’t fair, hotel owners complained, to have to give up their garbage for free to some other business that planned to profit from it. (They also complained, like everyone else did, that the Sanitary Works was really bad at picking up the trash.) Many refused to allow the Sanitary Works to collect their trash at all. And that really bothered the Sanitary Works, whose representatives argued that their business model wouldn’t work if they couldn’t have all of the city’s trash.

A view of the Hotel Normandie on East Congress Street, one of the many hotels in the city that refused to give up its garbage to the Sanitary Works. At one point its proprietor, Charles Roe, petitioned the health director for a special exemption from the city’s garbage ordinance to be allowed to dispose of his own trash. He was denied. Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

So in 1901, to placate the Sanitary Works and (ostensibly) to protect public health, the city amended its garbage ordinance, making it a crime for anyone but the city’s contractor to collect anyone’s garbage.1

In the eyes of the hoteliers, this gave the Sanitary Works an illegal monopoly, and they repeatedly challenged it. In 1901, a trash freelancer named James Gardner, who had been arrested multiple times for collecting trash from hotels, brought a case alleging that the ordinance violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.2 Garbage, Gardner’s lawyers argued, was private property, and citizens should not be compelled by the government to give it up without cause or remuneration.

A Detroit judge upheld the ordinance, writing that “even though the garbage may have some commercial value, ... the courts will not, at the expense of public health, recognize that this refuse matter, in its legal aspect, is property.” Gardner appealed his case to the Michigan Supreme Court, arguing all the way up that lawmakers were less interested in protecting public health than upholding the monopoly of the Sanitary Works. But the court confirmed the legality of the ordinance in 1905, and James Gardner’s independent trash collecting days were over.

The next important garbage development in the Maybury years was:

The 1901 Sanitary Works contract amendment.

In his 1900 State of the City address, Maybury made a bold swing: It was time, he said, to build a municipal garbage plant. Days later, he instructed the common council to “appoint a special committee to consider the recommendation.” Classic next step on an intractable municipal problem!

William Cotter Maybury, photographed in his younger days, when he was a U.S. Representative from Michigan. Via the Library of Congress.

Maybury was no Pingree-style progressive populist, but he was as frustrated as anyone else with the constant complaints to the health department about the garbage. Here is a typical attempt by the city to address concerns with the Sanitary Works: “Health Officer Kiefer yesterday had a conference with M.H. Chamberlain, president of the Detroit Sanitary Works, relative to complaints of householders that garbage has not been collected promptly. ... Mr. Chamberlain promised better things for the future.”3

Maybury was also a deficit hawk. Two years earlier, he had refused to approve any contract with the Sanitary Works that would put the city in the red. Some aldermen on the council had also begun to question why the city should be paying the Sanitary Works to make a profit on the city’s trash. It seemed possible that over time, a municipally owned garbage works might save the city a little money, and a lot of community angst.

In the spring of 1901, the city extended its 10-year contract with the Sanitary Works — but with an amendment, included at Maybury’s insistence: After five years, the city would have the option to end the contract early, with a buy-out.

Was this a huge leap for municipal waste management in Detroit? It was not, but it did open the door to eventual change. And did it prompt the Sanitary Works to get their shit together vis a vis a more prompt, efficient and cleanly waste collection system for Detroiters? To this question I reply … LOL. LMAO.

So how were things going with the Sanitary Works?

How things were going with The Sanitary Works.

This whole time, the Detroit Sanitary Works continued to operate its facility on 24th Street — the one that made everyone angry way back in 1890. It no longer “reduced” garbage at this factory, but used it as a collection station, hauling allllllll of the city’s garbage there via “wagons that are little better than big sieves,” then shipping it out by rail to French Landing. (How were things going at French Landing? I’m glad you asked: Since we last checked in, the Sanitary Works factory was badly damaged in TWO consecutive dust fires. Chamberlain, the company’s president, was seriously injured in the second fire.)

This bear has nothing to do with our story except that he’s stealing from a garbage wagon and I love him. Source.

“The city ordinance provides that the wagons used by the sanitary company shall be of metal and fitted with airtight covers, but at the present time very little attention seems to be paid to this provision,” The Detroit Free Press reported in 1904, after residents on the west side raised another ruckus about the Sanitary Works making their neighborhood miserable.

Meanwhile, the volume of resident complaints to the health department about the Sanitary Works — complaints about nauseating alleyways, revolting garbage wagons, and non-collection of, for example, dead horses from livery stables and offal from slaughterhouses — continued to rise.

In the summer of 1904, serious talk began in City Hall about exercising the option to buy out the Sanitary Works contract and finally build that long-dreamed-of municipal garbage plant. For two years, city officials diligently took all of the necessary bureaucratic and political steps to make this happen, seeking and receiving Gov. Fred Warner’s endorsement4 and passing a local enabling act for a $100,000 bond issuance to build the plant. Meanwhile, term-limited Mayor Maybury left office and handsome former college baseball captain George P. Codd succeeded him.

On June 30, 1905, the city finally, FINALLY, gave one-year notice to the Sanitary Works that its contract would be terminated. And toward the end of that year, Detroit, at long last, began accepting bids for the construction of a new municipal garbage plant. This plant would have to go into operation in 1906, because the contract with the Sanitary Works would end, and the trash would have to go somewhere.

The winning bidder. (I hate this.)

You know who submits a bid to the city’s RFP? The Sanitary Works, offering to sell the city the old reduction factory at French Landing for $100,000. Why build new when you can just have old/twice destroyed by dust fires???

But another intriguing proposal is submitted by a company organized just two days before bidding opened. Led by Misters Robert K. Davis and Alex McElroy, they called themselves the Detroit Reduction Company, and they brought forward a new plan to … reduce the garbage into saleable byproducts such as grease and fertilizer, i.e., exactly what the Sanitary Works already did. Still, the Reduction Company made an offer that the common council found hard to resist: If the city would collect the garbage, the Reduction Company would dispose of it — for free. They also proposed, for a small poundage fee, to accept some of the waste that the Sanitary Works never collected, including ashes, tin, and wood scrap.

The Reduction Company said it would build a brand-new waste management facility somewhere in Ecorse Township.5 (Later in our saga, Robert K. Davis will vow to build this plant “if it’s the last thing I do.”) Until then, they offered a temporary solution: They would take the trash to the old Sanitary Works facility, at French Landing. Which they would lease. From the Sanitary Works.

Despite some raised eyebrows (a Free Press headline asked if the city was being “gold-bricked!”), and confusion over whether any of this was even legal, the Reduction Company bid was accepted by the Common Council and Mayor Codd.

Who even knows. Clip here.

Yes, after 16 years of sturm und drang, Detroiters came around to municipal ownership and then continued around the horseshoe and ended up at the same very privately owned garbage plant where all of their problems started. However! Before you throw yourself out the window, remember that they did bring one aspect of the garbage problem under municipal control: The city, now, would be responsible for collecting the garbage. We hope for better things, etc.6

There was just one remaining roadblock.

City Controller F.A. Blades.7

Blades refused to sign the city’s contract with the Reduction Company. The common council, Blades said, had no authority to agree to this deal with the Reduction Co., had not gone through proper channels for approval of the plan, and had made no accounting whatsoever as to where the funds for collecting the garbage would come from.

“This matter has been gone into without the slightest information or the slightest consideration of the subject ... The result is that the city is committed to an extensive expenditure without any definitely fixed idea of where it is going to end,” Blades said.

The Reduction Company tried to compel Blades to sign the contract by applying for a writ of mandamus, which was denied by a Wayne County judge. They appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court, which overturned the lower court’s ruling, deciding that Blades did indeed have a duty to sign the contract.

“GARBAGE DISPUTE ENDS,” the Detroit News reported8 on April 23, 1906. “The Detroit Reduction Co. has asked the controller to sign its contract with the city, as ordered by the supreme court, after prolonged litigation. The controller will submit to the inevitable.”

AND SUBMIT TO THE INEVITABLE HE DID: The next day, Controller Blades DIED, at the age of 85. RIP TO A REAL ONE!!!

Stay tuned for next time, when we see how it’s going with municipal trash collection, meet more celebrity trash activists including a one-time Detroit Tiger, and find out whether Robert K. Davis of the Detroit Reduction Company indeed built a new plant at River Rouge if it’s the last thing he did.

Hello and Happy Halloween! Quick reminder: Tomorrow (Saturday, 11/1) at 2 p.m., I’m hosting a tour at Elmwood especially for Little Detroit History Letter readers! We’ll talk about time-keeping history in Detroit, e.g. Eastern Time/Daylight Saving Time, time balls, the Detroit Observatory, the City Hall clock, watch-makers, etc. Will be very low-key! Just email me and let me know if you plan to join. — aeb

All-time fave portrait of Douglass Houghton (and Meemee!) on his 1840 geological survey. Painted by Robert Thom for “A History of Michigan in Paintings,” a series commissioned by Michigan Bell Telephone Company in the 1960s, which probably deserves its own Little History Letter.

On October 13, 1845, surveyor Douglass Houghton was returning from a supply run that he probably shouldn’t have made. As he sailed on Lake Superior toward Eagle River, his boat was caught in a sudden squall. As the waves rose and the boat took on water, Houghton refused to put on a life preserver, apparently to reassure his four crewmates that they weren’t in serious danger. But the boat capsized, and the men were flung into the rough. As they clung to the boat’s upturned bow, Houghton urged them to focus on their own survival: “I can get ashore easily,” he is reported to have said.1 But another wave knocked Houghton off the bow, and his men never saw him again. Two of the other sailors drowned. (Houghton’s loyal sidekick, a spaniel named Meemee, survived.2) Three feet of snow fell on the shores of Lake Superior that night.

The following spring, on a beach a few miles west of the wreck, someone found the hand of a corpse hailing out of the sand. Dr. Houghton’s mangled remains were identified by his boots, and his body was sent to Detroit to be buried after a funeral service at the Presbyterian Church on May 15.

Buried where? My understanding is that no one knows exactly where Douglass Houghton was buried that spring; Elmwood Cemetery was not yet open for business. But Elmwood’s records show he was moved to a lot there in 1850, along with two other members of his family. A broken obelisk — fittingly symbolic of a life cut short — was placed on the lot, with an inscription that reads: Drowned in Lake Superior in the cause of Science.

The Houghton lot monument at Elmwood, Section L, Lot 5.

For the next century or so, Dr. Houghton rested in peace. And then, for no good reason, the Houghton lot at Elmwood made the news.

Abandoned

Sometime in the mid-century, Houghton’s family lot at Elmwood was reported to be “abandoned.”

It’s weird, because Elmwood was not in any way abandoned, and never has been — the cemetery has been in continuous operation since 1846. But many family lots have been classified as “abandoned” and reclaimed by Elmwood over the 180-year business history of the cemetery.3 Reclaiming a lot gives Elmwood the right to sell any unused graves on the lot, but existing burials are never disturbed, and the cemetery continues to provide basic care, like mowing the grass and trimming the trees.4

So: In this context, was Houghton’s lot abandoned? According to the lot file, the cemetery did at some point reclaim it, though we don’t have a record of when. The last burial on the Houghton lot was in 1933, of Dr. Houghton’s niece Annie. Sixteen years later, the cemetery trustees introduced an “assessment” model, whereby lot owners were required to make regular payments into a care fund at a rate based on the size of the lot. The assessment model also gave the trustees the right to reclaim any lots on which an assessment went unpaid for some period of time.5

I adore this tedious but archivally rich period in the cemetery’s history; our lot files are packed with letters between cemetery trustees and descendants of long-dead Detroiters getting bills out of nowhere from some cemetery they’ve never heard of for hundreds of dollars in assessed perpetual care fees.

Bonus: This correspondence was often written on amazing stationery.

But anyway: We can make an informed guess that Elmwood would have reclaimed the Houghton lot in the decade or so after the assessments went into effect, after the trustees heard no word nor received any funds from Houghton’s descendants.

How anyone would have learned that Elmwood had deemed the Houghton lot “abandoned,” a dramatic-sounding but ultimately boring order of cemetery business, is beyond me.6 But when the news reached Houghton — the city on the Keweenaw Peninsula named for the man whose geological surveys had kicked off the region’s copper rush — it caused a stir. City officials developed7 a plan to disinter Dr. Houghton from Elmwood and rebury him in the town square, where Houghton’s namesake would be appropriately memorialized. Conveniently for the city of Houghton, this would also coincide with the city’s bicentennial celebrations in 1976.

“The Houghton officials … admit they’re a bit stymied on what legal action to take to move the dead doctor,” the Free Press reported when it got the tip about Houghton’s half-baked exhumation plans in January of 1975.

On the heels of that story came a column from Louis Cook sharing the cemetery’s perspective: that rumors of the tumble-down state of Houghton’s gravesite were fully fantastic, and besides that, they were irrelevant.

“The keepers of Detroit’s Elmwood Cemetery were miffed at the accusations of the city of Houghton … that the grave of Dr. Douglass Houghton has been neglected and that his body should be moved to the city that was named after him,” Cook wrote for the Free Press. “And well they might be, because the grave of the one-time mayor of Detroit is in good shape in an old section of Elmwood, on the near east side.”

More to the point, the “abandoned” lot — never a problem that needed to be solved in the first place — had already been adopted.

Under new ownership

The Michigan Basin Geological Society was founded in 1936 by a group of petroleum geologists who had come to Michigan during the oil and gas boom that kicked off ten years earlier, when oil was discovered in the Saginaw Field.8

In the summer of 1970, the MBGS, which had also heard the news about the “abandonment” of Houghton’s lot at Elmwood, informed the cemetery that its board had voted to pay the outstanding care funds on the lot and take over the deed. The society told Elmwood that it did not plan to use any of the vacant graves on the lot; they were interested simply in its stewardship. Houghton, of course, may have been the most important geologist in Michigan’s history — our first state geologist, first professor of geology at the University of Michigan, and one of the founders of what would become the American Association for the Advancement of Science.9 It’s a fitting tribute, and it’s also touching to me that this group of scientists working 120 years after Houghton’s death chose to preserve his legacy in this quite reverent and intimate way.

Final payment was issued to the cemetery by the MBGS in the spring of 1971, and the deed is still in the society’s name today — as it was in 1975, when Houghton officials began to make noise about moving Douglass Houghton to the city of Houghton.

This sidetrack in the history of the Houghton lot did lead to one visible change. When the Wayne County Medical Society came out to Elmwood to see Houghton’s “abandoned” lot for themselves, they found things in good shape, except that there was no headstone on Houghton’s grave. The medical society raised the funds to place one — Houghton having been, besides a pioneering geologist and explorer, a well-respected medical doctor — and it was dedicated in 1975.

Top: Joyce Garrett (!), then head of the city’s Bicentennial Committee, with some doctors at the dedication of Douglass Houghton’s headstone in 1975. Below, same headstone still looking good and not abandoned in the summer of 2024.

Is it possible that this is the only cemetery lot in the world owned by a geological society? It seems pretty safe to say so, though the world is big and weird.

Links, for once

📻 Not Detroit history, but I learned this week that my old college radio station has decided not to renew its FM broadcast license and will transition to an online radio format. As a former WBCR DJ and program manager, I’m heartbroken, but at least happy for the chance this bummer news gave me to learn about the history of the station, which I never knew was actually pretty trailblazing: it was “the first to broadcast accurate time signals to all receiving stations within 100 miles of campus” in 1914. More from the Beloit College Roundtable.

🎉 Preservation Detroit celebrates its 50th anniversary this year! I was on the board for the 40th and I’m so pumped to be part of this half-century celebration. (I’m also resisting the urge to blurt out “I’m old!” all the time but wow being involved in both milestones has made me feel some pangs of passing time!) We’re partying next week at the Dakota Inn; I believe general admission tickets are sold out, but even if you can’t make it, I hope you’ll consider learning more about the org during this milestone year (and if you CAN make it, let’s clink a glass, ok?).

Some other seasonal reads

Hello! I am taking a break from writing about the garbage because it’s hard to write about pretty much anything in August. I was going to re-run an old post about how Michigan ended up on Eastern Time, but I love this story so much, I found a way to write it all over again, with some new research and gems from the archives.

Back with more trash intrigue soon now that school has started,

-aeb

Postcard of Detroit City Hall by night from the Detroit Public Library, Burton Historical Collection. Card is postmarked Nov. 17, 1913. Printed on back: “City Hall, Detroit, Mich. City Hall cost $600,000. The clock is one of the largest in the United States and there is but one larger in the world. The dials are 8 1/2 feet in diameter.”

Ten minutes before midnight, on a spring Saturday night in Detroit in 1915, an odd lot of men (and one 12-year-old girl) began to climb the five flights of stairs that led to the top of the City Hall clock tower. They were on their way to move the clock forward one hour, from 12 a.m. to 1 a.m.1 — moving Detroit out of Central Time, where it had been since 1905, and into Eastern Time, where it remains today.

Among them: Public works director George Harrison Fenkell (namesake of the street!), Alderman Edward Barnett and his daughter Lillian, the portrait photographer C.M. Hayes, coal man Walter Brooks, and a throat doctor named George Renaud. (Also, lest we forget them, the unnamed Detroit Free Press and News reporters who documented this moment in time.) So was David McCormick, an old firefighter who had traveled to the scene of the Chicago Fire in 1871, and who had been, since that same year, the official keeper of the city hall clock.2

But that night, Dr. Renaud would be the one to turn the gears; this whole thing had been his idea. He was the founder of the More Daylight Club, the father of Eastern Time in Michigan (as an obituary would later remember him), and a designer, in a way, of the entire concept of Daylight Saving Time, with the More Daylight campaign his prototype.

I’ve written about this before,3 and I am apparently not going to stop now. I think about Dr. Renaud and the More Daylight Club every summer — especially in August, when the sun begins to set “earlier” (still well after 8 p.m.), bringing on those super-charged, summer’s-fleeting feelings.

On a mid-August evening in Detroit on Central Time — before DST — the sun went down at around 6:30 p.m. The core conviction of the More Daylight campaign was that it would be nice to have a later sunset. There was so much you could do on a summer evening with just an hour more light: Some golf, a bike ride, a pleasure drive, a post-dinner stroll, an evening row. (It was not a coincidence that several members of the More Daylight Club also belonged to the Detroit Boat Club.4)

More daylight would make it all possible. “The saying ‘In Detroit, life is worth living’ would have an added significance” under Eastern Time, Dr. Renaud once wrote.

Caricature of Dr. George L. Renaud from “Our Michigan Friends as We See ‘Em,” Newspaper Cartoonists of America, 1905. Drawing by Drury Haight. I don’t really get it? But I like it.

Renaud founded the More Daylight Club in 1907 with a total roster of two members, himself and the photographer C.M. Hayes. (I can’t decide whether it’s poetic or ironic that a photographer — a literal writer of light — was a driving force of the daylight campaign.) From offices in the Fine Arts Building, where Hayes also had his portrait studio, the pair began to draft a ballot proposal that would ask voters if they wanted to evict themselves from Central Time and move into Eastern Time, an hour ahead5.

It took several years and two failed proposals before the More Daylight movement caught on. But to understand the city’s initial reluctance to adopt Eastern Time and its eventual embrace of EST, you have to grasp Detroit’s antipathy to the idea of standardized time itself.

When Detroit was on “double time”

When time was first standardized in Michigan in 1885 — a departure from “Sun Time,” which was different in every locality — the state adopted Central Time, a zone that spanned 111 minutes.6 In Detroit, on the time zone’s western boundary, Central Time was 28 minutes earlier than the city’s Sun Time.

Detroiters weren’t having it. For years after the railroads and state government adopted it, the city stubbornly kept Sun Time. Effectively, Detroiters lived in two time zones at once, with no clear answer to the question “What time is it?”

As a resolution from the Board of Commerce explained it:

“The U.S. state courts use standard time; the city courts use sun time. The county offices use standard time; the city offices sun time. The clock on the federal building is set to standard time; that on the city hall to sun time. The station and hotel clocks have standard time; the banks and businesses houses sun time. The situation is not only confusing, but unsatisfactory and inconvenient in the extreme.”

Hotel clerks had many funny stories about explaining Detroit’s time-keeping quirks to exasperated guests; theater managers complained about out-of-town actors showing up blithely late to rehearsals. “Double time” infuriated business leaders, who wanted Detroit to be seen as a civilized metropolis like Chicago and not some backwater where the clocks all told different times.

A street clock on Woodward Ave. outside the Rolshoven jewelry store. Undated photo, but I bet that clock is on sun time. Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

But a lot of people didn’t want to give up that half-hour of evening daylight. Workers, especially, opposed the move to standard time, which would keep them at the factory 30 minutes later into the evening than under Sun Time. Central time, populists believed, was “the time of monopolies, corporations and trusts,” as one Alderman said in 1900. The city council briefly adopted standard time that year, but fears of a constituent uprising led aldermen to reverse the resolution and turn the clocks back to Sun Time less than a month later.

Eventually, the board of commerce guys prevailed, with some support from a coalition of people who were just sick of talking about this for God’s sake just pick a time. When the question went to a popular vote in 1905, after an aggressive push from business leaders, including Edward H. Doyle, J.L. Hudson, the Russel Brothers of Russel Wheel & Foundry, and William Farrand of the Farrand Organ Co., Central Time won the day.

And so, at midnight on April 30, 1905, up the city hall clock tower trudged an envoy of City Controller F.A. Blades. The clock was turned back 28 minutes, an illuminated time ball dropped on the roof of the Wright Kay Building, and Detroit joined Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati and St. Louis in Central Time at last. No more disoriented travelers! No more missed meeting capers! No more bewildered actors late to the theater! One time zone to rule them all!

Would it stick? “Looking into the future, I can see the day when we shall be compelled by the voice of the people to return to city time,” said Alderman Max Koch before the clock tower climb had even begun.

He was almost right. But George Renaud and the More Daylight Club had a better idea.

Here comes the sun

After the first vote to move Detroit to Eastern Time failed in 1908, J.L. Hudson wrote a rather sneering letter to Dr. Renaud applauding the outcome:

“It is a confounded shame to hit a man when he is down, but I am so pleased that Central Standard Time, for which Dr. Doyle and I are more largely responsible than anybody else, has been victorious. I congratulate you on the fact that we will have just as much daylight as ever, it may not come just at the hour you like it but we will have it just the same, so let us both be happy. With very kind regards and with apologies for laughing at you I am,

Yours very truly

J.L. Hudson”

The same lobby that had supported Detroit’s move to Central Time in 1905 had quashed the Eastern Time proposal in 1908 — not because of any drawbacks of Eastern Time in particular, but due to fears of falling back into time chaos.

Dr. Renaud would have the last laugh, of course. He kept this letter from J.L. Hudson next to a clip from a 1915 newspaper ad sharing the J.L. Hudson Co.’s new hours — same as the old hours, but on Eastern Time. Progress!, the ad trumpeted.

J.L. Hudson Co. ad reads: “Beginning Monday, May 17th, All Departments of This Story Will Be Operated on Eastern Standard Time.” From Dr. Renaud’s framed collage of photocopied clippings and correspondence about Detroit’s move to EST, courtesy the Renaud family.

It was a long road from 1908 to the top of the clock tower in 1915. The More Daylight Club tirelessly circulated petitions at factories, solicited essays from school kids, and brought champions on board from the business community, conservation societies, and public health. (Dr. Renaud used his medical cred to argue that a move to Eastern Time could reduce the spread of tuberculosis, pneumonia and the flu.) The manager of the Detroit Tigers, Hugh Jennings, was an ally: “The adoption of eastern standard time in Detroit could not help but boom the great national game,” he told the Detroit Evening Times. Thousands of supporters of the More Daylight wore blue-and-white pins to show off their commitment to the mission.7

Another Eastern Time proposal in 1911 lost by fewer than 800 votes. The Free Press, historically not a progressive publication, urged a no vote on EST but admitted that Renaud and his club had conducted their campaign “with a skill worthy of a better cause.”

In the end, the More Daylight Club’s political success came not by popular vote but through a Common Council ordinance — supported by the public by a measure of 200 to one, the Free Press reported — championed by Alderman Barnett and passed by the council unanimously (although Ald. James Vernor complained, on behalf of the hotel lobby8, before casting his vote with the majority).9

In the first few months of EST in Detroit, Alex Dow of Detroit Edison said that the utility stood to lose some $200,000 to $300,000 annually, well beyond initial projections (although he told the Detroit news that he still supported Eastern Time). Parks superintendent Ira Jayne said that the public parks and playgrounds had welcomed so many new evening visitors that he was working on a plan to keep the pools open until sunset. After Detroit effectively seceded from Central Time, other major Michigan cities were fast to follow, and most of the state10 moved to EST in 1931.

Photo of Walter Brooks, Dr. George Renaud, and John F. Smith of the More Daylight Club photographed at the White House, Washington, D.C., in February 1917, after an interview with President Woodrow Wilson. Scan of a framed photo courtesy the Renaud family.

Meanwhile, as the federal government explored a national Daylight Savings plan — a wartime energy savings measure inspired by a similar European plan — George Renaud, Walter Brooks and John F. Smith went to Washington D.C. to testify about the great success of Detroit’s move to Eastern Time. After all, it was really a daylight savings pilot project at heart.

At one point during the More Daylight campaign, someone asked Dr. Renaud: If it would be so good to have one extra hour of daylight at night, why stop there? Why not two? It read as a sarcastic question to me, but Renaud answered it earnestly, and with prescience:

“First I think we ought to get Eastern Time. Then we can set the clocks ahead farther in summer if we wish.”

Renaud was remembered for this work for the rest of his life and interviewed by reporters for his thoughts whenever major time changes where on the table (like when the entire nation was placed on a year-round daylight saving time, called “War Time,” during World War II). Once described as the “savior of sunlight” and Michigan’s “father time,” his story is obscure today. Whether you rue or rejoice in our long summer days, I hope you think of Dr. Renaud when you do.

Many thanks to the family of Dr. Renaud for their enthusiasm about his place in the history of our clocks, and for sharing some tremendous family stories and artifacts.

If you liked this post (or this previous post on similar themes), will you join me at Elmwood for a little tour of Detroit timekeeping history JUST for Little Detroit History Letter friends and correspondents? I'm saving some time on Nov. 1 — same weekend we’ll “fall back” to Standard Time — in hopes that we can have a fun field trip and celebrate the last day of Daylight Time this year. Just reply to this email if you’d like to come and I’ll confirm with you directly if enough of you are interested!

Hello! We’re back with more garbage history. More non-garbage history to come again, one day. (But we haven’t even gotten to the REALLY good stuff yet.) First, a quick PSA: I’m excited to join Preservation Detroit’s ALL-STAR 50th anniversary lecture series with a little talk about Elmwood Cemetery, rural cemeteries generally, the kinds of things cemeteries can teach us, my favorite monuments and mysteries, etc. It’s on July 24 at Calvary Baptist Church and we’ll follow it up with a little stroll through the cemetery at twilight. Tickets here, say hi if you stop by!

A garbage scow in New York City in 1908. This garbage scow may have been innocently tugging trash to a landfill on some island somewhere, but you can hold this picture in your mind when you read about Detroit garbage scows in a minute. Via Digital Culture of Metro New York.

And so we return to our saga about the garbage. (Again, the garbage … again.) Last time: It’s 1892. Neighbors of the Detroit Sanitary Works, a “garbage reduction facility” on the riverfront at 24th Street, have notched a tentative victory after the city ordered the company to build a new garbage factory outside of the city.1 A new “garbage problem” was thus presented: What would the Sanitary Works do with all of the trash it collected while their new garbage factory was under construction?

Well, to start, the Sanitary Works tried to pay farmers in the suburbs to dump trash on their land. How did that go?

FARMERS UP IN ARMS
They Object to the Odor of City Garbage
WOES OF THE SANITARY WORKS
Complaints pouring in, but no available harbor within easy range.

The Detroit Sanitary Works is in trouble. Since the Wayne circuit court shut off the consumption of garbage at the company’s plant they have been dumping the corporation filth on farms about the city, paying farmers for the privilege of putting the stuff on their lands, but lately there has been a general kick among the people of the townships. Some farmers not only refuse to permit the garbage to be dumped on their acres, but refuse to let the wagons pass their houses. The company has agreed to pay a Greenfield farmer $40 for the privilege of dumping garbage on his farm, but when several wagons had wallowed their way through the mud to the place where the farmer lived, a neighbor came out with a club and threatened to smash the first driver that attempted to pass his place. The drivers could do nothing but turn around and come back to the city. Some of the wagons were stuck in the heavy mud and had to be abandoned in the roads.

Supt. Hargen, of the garbage company, says he has been driving through the country for the past two days, trying to get places to dump garbage, and has found only one farm, out on the Center line. About 30 or 40 wagonloads of garbage were started for that place this morning, and the company expect that some of these will either get stuck or have to return on account of opposition along the roads.

In the meantime, complaints of the non-removal of garbage continue to pour in to all departments of the city government from all parts of the city. The health officer alone received 75 complaints in two hours this morning.

“What can we do when we are thus cut off all around?” said Mr. Fleischmann, representing the company. “If the council will give us the contract to put in the Merz system, we shall at once put a double force of men to work on a plant, night and day, and gather the matter with 40 or 50 steel wagons. As the matter stands now, it is almost impossible for us to gather the garbage. The wagons that ought to be doing the gathering are out in the country till we find a place to dump.”2

A no-go on farm dumping then, which led farmers to riot and tied up all the garbage trucks in the muddy country all day. A month later, the Sanitary Works said the company had secured some land “down the river” (“just where they did not state”3) where they would bury the 40 to 50 pounds of garbage they collected daily until the new factory was ready.

Then, on July 18, a detective from Windsor burst into the boring corridors of Detroit City Hall, absolutely saving the ass of the reporter posted up there. (“Dullness prevailed in city offices yesterday, most of the officials being too much engrossed in politics to pay attention to anything else. But the garbage question was revived, and very unexpectedly at that.”) The detective, Thomas McKee, charged that the Detroit Sanitary Works wasn’t shipping its trash to a landfill at all, but dumping it in the river — just above the intake pipe for the water works at Amherstburg.

McKee’s shocking accusation was met with a round of shrugs and buck-passing. City health officer Samuel Duffield said he had “no control over the matter” and that McKee would have to talk to someone from the Sanitary Works. A representative from the Sanitary Works told the Free Press reporter that he “hadn’t heard anything of the matter,” denied that garbage was being dumped near Amherstburg, then admitted!!! when pressed that they had, however, been dumping some trash in Lake Erie.

You may remember from our first installment that the city had once explored the idea of dumping its trash in the Detroit River, in a sanctioned and municipally managed way, as one possible solution to the garbage problem. Other Great Lakes cities had tried it. (Milwaukee’s garbage history, outlined in satisfying detail here, closely tracks Detroit’s, including an episode of lake dumping while a new garbage management facility was under construction.) But federal officials usually put a stop to these schemes.

To get a temperature on whether the feds would intervene in the Sanitary Works scandal, the Free Press called up General Orlando M. Poe, whose huge name in Great Lakes engineering history it’s very funny to see in a story about garbage gossip. But Poe said it was only his problem if dumped garbage obstructed the waterways, and that any sanitary complaints from Amherstburg would have to be dealt with “through diplomatic channels.” LOL.

Soo Locks wizard and garbage gossip expert source Gen. Orlando M. Poe.

A major break in the case came just a couple days later, on July 20, when the crew of the steamer La Belle was arrested by Canadian authorities after they tried to dump some 28 boxes of garbage into the river at Amherstburg. The vessel was seized, the crew thrown in jail, and all involved were charged with violations of Canadian customs rules, health codes, and water works laws.

And what did the Sanitary Works have to say for themselves? NOT MUCH! According to a company spokesman, “the captain of the vessel contracted with them to dispose of the garbage collected, and they paid no attention to how he got rid of it. ... What he did with the stuff was his funeral, not the company’s.”

The company further emphasized the rock and hard place they found themselves in whereby everyone wanted their garbage collected, but no one was happy with where the garbage ended up. “If it dumps the garbage inland, it is liable to be stopped by injunctions. If it dumps the garbage into the river or lake it is liable to get into more complications.” What about “pitting” (burying) the garbage, the only disposal method no one really seemed to complain about? “Pitting the stuff is expensive.” Oh, well then. Keep dumping it in the river! In the water people drink!

But it was not, in the end, the Sanitary Company’s funeral, and no one held them accountable for their international garbage crime, nor did the crew of the La Belle face any serious consequences. After the ship’s owner paid Canadian authorities $400 to get his vessel back, the crew was released from jail and Canadian authorities dropped the charges because they had all been so cooperative. Everyone was ready to put the garbage problem behind them.

“The company’s new works will be completed in about thirty days,” the Free Press reported, “and then there will be no more trouble.”

WOULD THERE BE MORE TROUBLE??? Find out next time! Our garbage history saga leaps ahead to the 20th Century in PART THREE: The municipal takeover!!!

A morbid side story about the garbage inspectors

One condition of the city’s renewal of its contract with the Detroit Sanitary Works was that the city would employ two independent garbage inspectors to ride around on horseback4 investigating resident complaints about the garbage collection. The health office also appointed a clerk to answer a special telephone installed specifically for garbage calls (dial 2560 if your trash hasn’t been picked up for two weeks!).

In the spring of 1893, the inspectors responded to a call from the Sanitary Works that they had found two skeletons in a load of trash that had been delivered to their new facility at French Landing. The remains were returned to the city, where Garbage Inspector Hitchcock took charge of the investigation.

Working with the coroner and a local undertaker, Hitchcock determined that the trash had come from a boarding house on Jefferson Ave., where a medical student by the name of James Anderson was a tenant. Anderson’s landlady, a Mrs. Kastner, said that Anderson had taken the skeletons home from the Detroit Medical College to study as anatomical specimens, but that she was sick of the smell and threw them away. (!!!)

“There was no doubt that the bodies had been used for dissecting purposes,” the Free Press reported, adding that “Coroner Beatcher does not think, however, that human bodies should be thrown around in such a negligent manner.”5 The coroner was reported to be looking into the possibility of a proper burial for the skeletons. Adding some mild intrigue, the director of the Medical College, Dr. Henry O. Walker, said that not only did James Anderson not have permission to take any anatomical specimens home with him, but he wasn’t convinced that the specimens had come from the college at all! (I’ll leave that mystery for another investigator to pursue.)

All in a day’s work for a garbage inspector!

Hello and thank you for reading the Little Detroit History Letter! I don’t know whether I am thrilled or terrified to share this letter with you today. First of all, it’s about trash. Secondly, it is only the beginning of a saga that spans literally a century. I will be telling it over a few installments, as I am very obsessed and it is a very long story. But I promise by the end of it you’ll never take your garbage for granted again. More soon!

-aeb

In the fall of 1860, Sylvester Larned purchased a storied old house, on an old French farm, on the old River Road that once encircled Fort Detroit. Sylvester’s father Charles had fought — and failed — to defend the fort from surrender in the War of 1812. After the war, Charles settled in Detroit and practiced law. Charles died in 1834, in a devastating cholera epidemic that killed about a seventh of the city’s population. Sylvester was 14 years old.

The same cholera outbreak also killed the man who once owned the old French farm and built the old house, George Bryan Porter, governor of the Michigan territory. The land Porter left behind became known as the Porter Farm, but by the time Sylvester bought the house — sold at auction by order of a Circuit Court judge to settle a debt — the land had been subdivided. What Sylvester bought was Porter’s house and a portion of the old Porter Farm between Fort Street and the River Road, west of 24th Street.

Photo: The old Gov. Porter House at 24th and River Road, where Sylvester Larned lived for 25 years. From the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

On another part of the Porter Farm was another historic building, an old French cottage called the Labadie House, which I have been studying, slowly, since Dan Austin told me about it over a year ago. This was supposed to be a story about the Labadie House, but — sorry Dan! — there’s been a change of plans.1

Now it is a story about the garbage.

The headline that led me down the rabbit hole. Extremely meme-able, please use freely. From the Detroit Free Press, June 1, 1892.

Things had changed a lot along the River Road even by the time Sylvester Larned bought the Porter House in 1860. Detroit’s riverfront had become the hub of an increasingly industrial economy, its docks shipping out lumber, flour, stone, furs, leather, and even the ships that carried them.

Those businesses grew over the 25 years that Larned lived on the river, and more came along: lime kilns, a soap factory, a coal dock, a pork house, and the city gas works. For 25 years, Larned lived with all of the noise and smell and traffic those operations created. Until, in 1889, one more business opened up in the neighborhood.

It was called the Detroit Sanitary Works. It was a garbage plant. And for Sylvester Larned, it was the last straw.

A brief history of Detroit’s trash

For 150 years or so, Detroit residents had handled their trash on their own. Householders fed their food scraps to their pigs. Restaurants and hotels sold their garbage to farmers for feed and fertilizer. Manufacturers conserved materials and repurposed or sold their scraps. And, sure, people just threw their trash in parks and vacant lots, dumped it in the river, or burned it in their backyards.2

But as Detroit became less agrarian, more industrial, and a lot more densely populated, trash became more of a problem. The city’s health department tried to control it through various ordinances that spelled out what residents were not to do with their garbage: throw it in the river, toss it in the alley, dump it anywhere within city limits. But no one told residents what to do with it. Eventually, many people just became trash bandits: “Large quantities of putrescible matter are clandestinely deposited on vacant lots in the outskirts of the city, rotting, stinking and infecting the air in many neighborhoods,” the Detroit Board of Health wrote in an 1884 letter to the Common Council.

A bucolic view of Bloody Run at Elmwood Cemetery. On either side of the cemetery’s gates, Bloody Run valley was a “ditch” that was filled with so much garbage that the city’s health department hired its own detectives to try to deter illegal dumping in its waters.

The health department wanted the Council to take action, but no one was really sure exactly what action to take, and so the “garbage problem” was debated for years. Dr. O.W. Wight, who led the health department in the 1880s, was an advocate of a sanctioned municipal system for dumping waste into the river, in which residents would bring their trash to city-owned scows that would then offload the trash into the water. (Wight was adamant that there was no evidence that this would have any harmful effects: “The fact is the fishes in the river will not be killed by garbage but will eat it all up,” he told a reporter when questioned about the environmental impact of his trash plan. “This is not theory. It has been proved by long experience.”) Other city leaders pushed for burying the garbage, incinerating it, or “reducing” it to saleable byproducts through a process known as the Merz method.

In 1889, the city of Detroit entered into a contract with one of these Merz-style “reduction” facilities — the Detroit Sanitary Works, a company led by former mayor Marvin H. Chamberlain. Under the terms of the contract, the Sanitary Works would collect all of the city’s animal and vegetable waste for $35,000 annually.3 The garbage would then be “treated chemically and reduced to fat and fertilizers.”

It was Detroit’s first try at the municipal collection and disposal of trash. The Sanitary Works’ state-of-the-art new garbage factory opened for business on January 20, 1890, at the foot of 24th Street on the Detroit River.

A clip of the 1897 Sanborn Fire Insurance Co. map of 24th and River Road, with key locations in the story labeled — the Porter House where Col. Larned lived, the Labadie House that was supposed to be the oldest in Detroit, and the Sanitary Works.

That day, a Free Press reporter toured the works and reported with awe that it didn’t smell bad at all. Chamberlain showed the reporter a three-story factory system for sorting trash, steaming it (?) dehydrating it (??), and pressing out its oils (???), thereby transforming vats of dead fish and rotten cabbages into a tidy pile of unscented brown dust.4

Of course, the reporter did not return weeks later to see the trash start to pile up and rot. He did not stand around sniffing the riverfront as the backlogged garbage was burned. Also, the trash probably didn’t smell too bad in January! By June, hundreds of queasy neighbors of the Sanitary Works were complaining that not only did the garbage works smell horrible, but they were starting to get physically sick.

A West Side story (about the trash)

On June 13, 1890, residents and business owners around the garbage works got together to see what they could do. As they arrived at the home of Henry Heames at 22nd and Fort Street, 70-year-old Sylvester Larned stood on the steps to greet them, inviting them to take a big whiff of the “odiferous air” wafting up from the river on their way into the hall.

Illustration of Col. Larned from an 1893 Detroit Free Press story.

At the meeting, the neighbors aired their grievances with the garbage factory. One said he’d heard that a woman had contracted typhoid fever from the air around the plant. A florist in the neighborhood, Mr. Taplin, said ladies wouldn’t patronize his shop anymore because it smelled too bad. A man named Seth Carpenter said he’d visited the Sanitary Works recently and counted 49 dead dogs and four dead horses on the ground.5 When one neighbor pointed out that Mr. Chamberlain denied that his factory smelled, another replied: “He must be deaf in his nose.”

That night, 100 people signed a petition to the Board of Health, stating that they were “sorely afflicted and our lives imperiled by the fetid, noisome odors, and our property destroyed from the uncleanliness of those establishments which are so obnoxious, filling the atmosphere of the whole surrounding neighborhood with deadly gases.” They asked the city to shut down the Sanitary Works and vowed to take legal action if their civil efforts were not successful.

Headline from the Detroit Free Press about the meeting at Heames’s hall, June 14, 1890.

They weren’t bluffing. In the fall of 1890, the neighbors sought an injunction against the Sanitary Works. A Wayne County Circuit Court judge determined that the garbage works were indeed a nuisance and ordered them temporarily shut down. Lawyers for the Sanitary Works had argued to the judge that the factory didn’t smell bad and that they were working on mechanical improvements to reduce bad odors going forward. In a response to the judge’s nuisance ruling, the company’s lawyers responded that maybe the neighborhood just wasn’t a place where people should live anymore. (!)

It was a relief for the West Siders, but the relief was brief. By the time the weather warmed up again in 1891, the Sanitary Works was back in operation, belching its belligerent gases into the air. (One desperate resident floated the idea of an “aerial sewer system” that would channel the bad smells out of the neighborhood and into some great beyond where they wouldn’t bother anyone. Intriguing!)

That July, Sylvester Larned and his wife Nellie both filed civil suits against the Sanitary Works, suing for $50,000 each for damages caused by the “foul, uncomfortable, disagreeable, sickening, unhealthy, poisonous, prostrating and penetrating stenches, odors, vapors and gases” emitted by the Sanitary Works. Larned alleged in the suit that he was no longer able to work due to his poor health and had lost some $15,000 in income.

A jury ruled against Col. Larned in 1892, unable to determine whether his illness was caused by the sanitary works or some old war injury or just old age.6 But by then, city leaders were committed to finding a long-term solution to the problem of the Sanitary Works, and the garbage in general.

(Look how much this was part of the local discourse: a front-page ad from a local piano dealer, using the garbage works drama as a hook.)

Readers were INSATIABLE for GARBAGE WORKS TAKES! You can take a closer look at the advertisement here.

It wasn’t just the smell. Detroiters complained constantly about the Sanitary Works. They complained that their trash wasn’t collected consistently. They complained that collectors left a mess in their alleys. They complained that the garbage was hauled around town in leaky open wagons that were noisy, gross and, of course, smelled atrocious.

This image of a trash-strewn Detroit alley is from 1911 and when I first saw it, I thought, “wrong era!” but actually … it’s kind of not. Just imagine more rotten cabbage and dead cats in 1890. Via the Detroit Public Library.

When the council renewed the Sanitary Works contract in the summer of 1892, they did so with some conditions. The Sanitary Works was to subsidize the pay of two city-employed “garbage inspectors” who would address complaints about trash collection and assure that residents were sorting their trash correctly and into proper receptacles. For every complaint against the company not resolved within 24 hours, a $10 fine would be issued. (That summer the Sanitary Works racked up $2,400 in fines, which they refused to pay.) The Sanitary Works would also have to build a new garbage works, well beyond the city limits. Ultimately, the company found a site along the Huron River in Van Buren Township, conveniently located on a rail line so the trash could be shipped there on special trash-carrying train cars from Detroit. (The new works were built at French Landing, today a scenic fishing spot apparently, where we should maybe have a little Little Detroit History picnic this summer?!)

Unfortunately for Sylvester Larned, he did not have much time left on this green earth to enjoy the once-again-fresh air in his neighborhood7. In 1892, the Larneds left the Porter House and, after his doctor prescribed a “sea voyage,” Sylvester removed for a time to London to stay with his daughter. Late in 1893, Larned died there, at the age of 73. His obituary in the Detroit Free Press mentioned the garbage saga: “Three years ago his health failed, due, he always said, to the villainous odors emanating from the sanitary works, which plant was erected opposite his old home.”8

As for the Sanitary Works, the company now had to figure out what to do with the 50 tons of garbage it collected a day while their new works was under construction.

Next time: What they did with it.