Jackson Michigan – My Hometown (#2)

…continuing with a look at my former hometown.  This time I’ll delve a bit more into the history of the city and its buildings.  Most of the postcards I used for this post were dated in 1914 or earlier.

While there are a number of my father’s relatives living in Jackson and the nearby area, there is possibly only 1 member of my mother’s family still living in Jackson County.

As shown in this postcard from 1912, downtown Jackson was quite the place back in the day… Given the fact that no automobiles are shown in the picture, I’m guessing that the card predates its postmark by at least a few years.

Jackson was one of many cities and towns in Michigan that got into the early automotive boom in the USA.  In 1912, at least 3 companies were building automobiles in Jackson and another, Buick, was still building trucks in town.

As shown on this postcard from 1910, the Grand River used to flow through downtown Jackson.  In reality it still does but due to the questionable wisdom of local politicians, it now flows completely under the downtown area… In this day and age, rivers in downtown areas are controlled if needed but they are generally considered to be a community asset.

I’m not sure when the Grand River was buried under downtown but this painting of the Grand River was painted by my stepfather, Hugh Thomson, sometime between 1948 and 1953.  It shows the river just as it flowed under the back of the buildings that face onto Michigan Avenue, Jackson’s main street.

The Grand River is located in the south and southwestern part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.  It is the longest river in the state, flowing west northwest for about 252 miles to its mouth at Grand Haven Michigan.  It is one of the 3 major tributaries feeding into Lake Michigan…

In the early days Jackson prided itself on being so fully electrified.  That’s evident from the scene shown on this postcard.  Note those trolley tracks down the center of Main Street…now Michigan Avenue.  This postcard isn’t dated or postmarked but the fact that the view is from the Dalton Hotel is a good clue.  In 1904, the Dalton brothers bought the then dilapidated Union Hotel (built ca. 1864) and greatly expanded it. 

By 1960, the hotel was deteriorating and it had closed.  At that point it was known as the Miller Hotel…but it still housed the Dalton Bar.  By 1964, the building was slowly crumbling so the city bought it and demolished it.

Notes:

·       In 1914, George Todoroff founded the first “Coney Island restaurant” in Jackson and created his famous Coney Island hot dog topping.  His restaurant was directly in front of the railroad depot and it was open 24 hours a day.  At least 4 Coney Island style restaurants still operate near the depot with Jackson Coney Island claiming to be the original…dating back to 1914.

·       Jackson was the home of the inventor of the duplex corset by Bortree.  The city became a center of corset manufacturing.  By the early 1900s, there were as many as 16 manufacturers of women’s corsets operating in town.  With the advent of elastics and changing fashions, the majority of the corset manufacturers closed their doors by 1920 with 3 surviving the decade by changing their product lines. 

This next postcard shows an early view (1914 or earlier) of the Otsego Hotel.  I do remember this particular hotel.  As I learned at an early age, this is where Hugh Thomson, my stepfather-to-be, lived when he first came to Jackson.

The 5-story Otsego Hotel was named after the builder’s Otsego Lake, New York birthplace.  It opened in 1904 with a gala banquet and music by a grand piano. In the early 1900s the hotel was regarded as the best place to stay in Michigan outside of Detroit.  It was described as ‘palatial’ in the newspapers.  The Otsego had 150 rooms, 100 of which were connected to bathrooms!  All rooms had long-distance telephones as well as hot and cold water!  Rooms ran from $2.50 to $4.00 per night.

The hotel was expanded and refurbished in 1929, following a Native American theme.  Bold paint schemes, brightly colored porcelain and buffalo heads were part of the décor.  Waitresses wore beaded headdresses.  Blankets and bedspreads featured a chief’s image.  The lobby and second floor public areas featured canaries, parakeets and other songbirds in cages as part of the décor.

By the early 1960s, the Otsego Hotel had again lost its glory.  For a time the New Tribes Mission owned the building.  But in 1981, it was converted to federally subsidized housing and it’s now a senior citizen’s home.  In June of 2015, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.  

This postcard showing the Jackson County Infirmary is postmarked November 24, 1913.  Love the little girls in the horse drawn cart!  However, all was not as blissful as it would seem from the photo.  When we think about an ‘infirmary’, we think about hospitals or long term care facilities.  The latter was closest to the facts related to this building.

In 1839, the first ‘infirmary’ was built on this site.  In reality, it was a ‘poor house’.  The original structure burned down in 1886 and this building was completed a year later.  Both buildings were basically ‘dumping grounds’ for the homeless poor, blind, deaf or insane.

  

No one knows how many people lived in Jackson County’s “Infirmaries” from 1839 until 1963 or how many were buried in the adjoining cemetery because the records were lost in a fire.  It is documented that in 1881, 33 people lived at this site.  The men worked around the 183 acre farm, garden, barn and woodpile while the women performed household duties.

By 1950, the County’s poor-home residents were so old and in such poor health that they were no longer capable of field work…and by the summer of 1951, the farm portion of the property was sold off.  But it was February of 1963 before almost 90 residents of the “poor home/infirmary” were moved to the new Jackson County Medical Care Facility.  In 1964, contractors who had a contract to tear down the old building accidentally burned it down. 

Note:

·       The Jackson County Infirmary did have 4 more short term residents in May of 1963…escaped convicts hiding out from the law.  But that leads to another story…Jackson’s ‘second industry’!

I love this postcard dated October 7, 1912.  That firehouse is a classic that’s enhanced by the horse drawn fire fighting apparatus that is apparently ready to go!  I couldn’t find any other information on this building…

So it’s time for a little Jackson history.  Located in the south central area of the state, Jackson was founded in 1829 and was named after President Andrew Jackson.  By the early 1900s the city had a strong manufacturing based economy.  Before Detroit began building cars on assembly lines, factories in Jackson were making parts and building cars.  By 1910, auto manufacturing was Jackson’s primary industry.

More than 20 different car brands were once built in Jackson.  I’ve only come across a couple of them in museums.  Brands included: Reeves, Jaxon, Jackson, CarterCar, Orlo, Whiting, Butcher and Gage, Buick, Janney, Globe, Steel Swallow, C.V.I., Imperial, Ames-Dean, Cutting, Standard Electric, Duck, Briscoe, Argo, Hollier, Hackett, Marion-Handly, Gem, Earl, Wolverine and Kaiser-Darrin. 

Then Detroit and history passed Jackson by and auto manufacturing moved elsewhere…although the automotive support/parts industry fueled Jackson’s economy for many more years.  The Jackson Automobile Company survived the longest, from 1903 until 1923.

This postcard showing the Michigan Central Depot in Jackson is postmarked December 31, 1906.  Note the men crossing the tracks and the 2 passenger trains at the depot.  In 1906, railroads were the only way to quickly travel from one place to another. 

The Michigan Central Railroad arrived in Jackson in 1841.  The city was the railroad’s western terminus for many years.  An influx of settlers and entrepreneurs came to town.  With the railroad, many jobs opened up.  Later, Jackson was a midway stop between Chicago and Detroit.  In 1857, the Michigan Southern Railway also arrived in town.  The city became a transportation hub and its importance was enhanced in the late 1800s when Michigan Central re-located their locomotive and repair shops to Jackson…including a roundhouse…and a thousand jobs too!

The city of Jackson has been on a slow decline since I was a teenager.  The city’s population was 55,187 in 1930, in 1950 when I was 8, it had 51,088 and today’s population is estimated at about 32,000.  Jackson County has continued to grow.  In 1930, there were 92,304 residents and in the 2010 census, there were 160,248.  The area has suffered from the “rust belt” syndrome…

The old Michigan Central Depot still stands just east of downtown Jackson.  In 1873, the Michigan Central Railroad built this depot as a replacement for an existing depot.  It was used as a Union Station, serving all of the other lines through the city except the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, a major competitor.  Railways that used this depot included the Jackson, Lansing and Saginaw Railroad, the Grand River Railway and the Michigan Air Line Railroad.

It is said that this historic station is the oldest, continuously operating, railroad-designed-and-built passenger train station in the United States.  By early 1870, 30 trains a day stopped in Jackson.  In that year, the former depot served 72,482 passengers.  Today Jackson’s old depot is served by Amtrak’s Wolverine with 3 trains daily in each direction.  In 2017, 23,373 passengers utilized this station. 

Laurie and I have taken the train from Chicago to Jackson, but that was back in the 1990s.  Today, the trains are ‘high speed’ and can reach speeds of 110 mph on some stretches of track!  

Then there is Jackson’s ‘prison history’.  This postcard is dated September 23, 1909 and that isn’t some fancy resort you’re looking at.  It is the old Michigan State Prison at Jackson.  Note the castle-like guard tower at the right of the picture.  

Jackson was home to the first prison in Michigan, which opened in 1839.  This prison, or at least part of it, was built in 1842.  It was built surprisingly close to the center of town on about 20 acres.  It was almost always overcrowded.  New buildings were added continuously and at its peak capacity, it housed about 2,200 inmates in 4 cell blocks and a dormitory.

 

Finally, in 1924 a new prison was built 3 miles north of the city.  It was built on 3,469 acres and has an enclosed area of 57.6 acres…with a capacity of 5,280 inmates. 

FYI…after it closed the original 1842 prison was used as a Michigan National Guard Armory for quite a long time.  Currently, remaining segments of the old structure houses apartments, art galleries and a bicycle cooperative.

About this time of the year…a century or so ago, residents in and around Jackson started thinking about an ‘oasis’ just south of town.  Hague Park was an amusement park at Vandercook Lake that welcomed thousands on warm days.  On summer weekends from 1910 – 1920, upwards of 20,000 people would come out to the park.

 

Around the turn of the twentieth century, 3 businessmen bought 110 acres on the lake and they started building.  There was a vaudeville theater, a dance hall, bowling alley, shooting gallery, rental boats, a carousel, roller rink, balloon ascensions, ballgames, concessions and even a steamboat that offered rides around the lake.   In addition to the giant toboggan (water slide) shown on the postcard, there was a figure-8 roller coaster called the “Jack Rabbit”.  The amusement park closed in 1938 and today the remnant, a 21 acre plot of land, is named the Townsend Beaman County Park.

There are a number of Myers living in the Vandercook Lake area in Jackson County…and I’m guessing that some of them are distant relatives.

That’s all for now.  Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them.

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave