Ann Arbor Observed: Selections from Then and Now

Delhi Village

Delhi Village Once a thriving industrial town, it never recovered from the tornado of 1917. On summer weekends, many Ann Arborites escape to Delhi Metropark , five miles west of town on the Huron River. Picnicking on the riverbank or jumping from rock to rock in the river, few realize that the rapids that make the park so impressive contain the foundation stones of five nineteenth-century mills or that the small settlement nestled southwest of the park was once a thriving village. When Michigan was settled, water was the main source of energy, and so most early towns were founded on rivers. Delhi, where the Huron River drops steeply as it rounds a bend, was a particularly good place for mills. At its peak in the 1860s and 1870s, Delhi was a small industrial village, with two gristmills, a woolen mill, a sawmill, and a plaster mill; its own post office (called Delhi Mills); and a railroad station with four scheduled train stops per day. The first to see the possibilities of the location was Jacob Doremus, a shoemaker who emigrated from New York State in 1831. He bought a tract of land along the river, built a small sawmill, and started clearing the land and selling rough-cut lumber to local farmers. In 1836, he platted a town, which he called Michigan Village, and began selling lots. He built a primitive dam with timber, stone, and earth. Local resident Isaac Place built a millrace on the north side of the river to channel the water. Taking advantage of the increased water power, Doremus replaced his original sawmill with a better one at the end of the Place race and then built two additional mills, also on the north side of the river—the Ithaca Flour Mill and a four-story brick woolen mill that he named the Doremus Carding and Clothing Works. Doremus was one of the founders in 1833 of the Webster Church (still extant, it is the oldest continuously used church in Michigan) and an organizer of the local school. In 1846, he tried to change the name of the town to Doremusville, a move that Delhi historian Nick Marsh theorizes may have been to honor his wife, Esther, who died that year. 207 But the other residents objected and decided to rename it Delhi after the dells and hills in the area. Doremus died the next year, and the mantle of town leader was passed to his younger partner, Norman Goodale. Goodale built a new flour mill on the south side of the river, which he called simply the Delhi Mill. (A millrace, called the Church race, had already been built on that side of the river for a short-lived scythe factory.) The new mill, four stories high, with an unusual indoor water wheel, could be seen for miles around. With Goodale’s death in 1869, ownership passed to his nineteenyear -old son, Frank, and his partner, John Henley. Frank was the senior partner since he owned more of the stock, but Henley, who knew more about the business, continued to run the mills. By then, however, the rise of steam power was freeing industry from its dependence on flowing water. Small mills like Delhi’s were already facing competition from large urban factories that bought and sold on a national scale. The woolen mill was the first to go: it closed in 1874, done in by competition from larger clothing mills in the East that were being supplied by larger sheep herds in the West. After Henley died in 1881, the other mills’ profits also began to go down drastically, due to a combination of hard economic times and Frank Goodale’s inexperience. In 1889, Goodale and his mother lost ownership of the remaining mills. 208 Ann Arbor Observed Delhi, looking north, in 1874 when it was still a thriving mill town, with homes and mills lining both sides of the Huron River. It was all downhill from there: the first mill closed the same year. (Courtesy of Bentley Historical Library.) In 1900 the Delhi mills merged with the Michigan Milling Company , which razed and sold for scrap the Ithaca Flour Mill, the sawmill, and the plaster mill. In 1903, the company closed the last operating mill, the Delhi Mill, and it was dismantled in 1906. Delhi had lived on water power, and it withered as water power became unnecessary...