We continue our Route of the Month Series today looking at one of the AATA’s busiest routes, the #4.
In this post, writer Laura Bien imagines what a ride on the Route #4 Washtenaw Bus might have been like in June of 1840. . .
Route of the Month: Route 4
From Poorhouse to President’s House
Route 4 travels the county’s most heavily urbanized stretch of road, where often the only bits of green are patches of fast food restaurant landscaping and trees in parking lots’ mini grass islands. But imagine hopping on the #4 in Ypsilanti in, say, June of 1840.
Remember to look for the bus whose front and side signs don’t read “Washtenaw,” as they do now, but “Middle Ypsilanti Road,” as Washtenaw Avenue was once called. (The #3 would similarly be called “North Ypsilanti Road,” the onetime name of Geddes Road, and the #5 would be called “South Ypsilanti Road,” the onetime name of Packard). Avoid the back of the bus, where the modern-day mildly bouncy ride would instead throw you out of your seat. Pick a dry day, since the Middle Ypsilanti Road is, in 1840, a narrow dirt path. Last, it wouldn’t hurt to sit next to a red-handled emergency exit window–just in case, Heaven forbid, the bus tips over in one of the road’s deep wagon-wheel ruts.
Off we go.
On the bumpy, jaw-rattling ride to Ann Arbor, the view is reversed from the present-day scene. Instead of buildings and parking lots with relatively little greenery, the rider sees green trees, tidy fruit orchards, black and brown cows, and neatly-fenced farms, with only a few buildings in sight. Look south when passing Carpenter Road and you see the handful of buildings that eventually formed the now-vanished village of Carpenter’s Corner, at Carpenter and South Ypsilanti Road.
One of the most impressive buildings comes into view just southeast of the city limits. Here the rider sees the new two-story poorhouse. It occupies a 128-acre farm. In one field the rider glimpses several people tending rows of vegetables; these are the pauper residents, who helped tend the farm and who, by all accounts, were treated humanely.
Even forty years later, the facility was Michigan’s only county poorhouse with a special bathing-house, when many Michigan county poorhouses had no bathing facilities at all. The site is today’s County Farm Park at Washtenaw and Platt.
The most exciting scene comes further down Washtenaw, where the rider can disembark to view the infant University of Michigan, occupying the square bounded by North, South, and East University Avenues and State Street. Only four buildings appear: professors’ houses, of which the modern-day President’s House survives. There’s also a prepared foundation for the scheduled construction of Mason Hall, which served as both dormitory and classrooms for U-M’s first class, in 1841, of 6 students. Otherwise, the campus looks barren, with muddy paths between the buildings. An L-shaped line of oaks, along the eastern and southern sides of campus, provides the only shade. The campus’s bleak appearance prompted one group of advisors in 1847 to suggest that “the highway of thought, and intellectual development and progress, much of which is parched and rugged, should, as far as may be, be refreshed with fountains and strewn with flowers.” They’d likely smile to see today’s pretty campus, and the time-traveling rider also smiles to see the humble beginnings of a great university on its third birthday, three years after its inaugural regents’ meeting on June 5, 1837.
A smile that fades at the thought of the hair-raising 1840 bus ride back to Ypsi.
