Ann Arbor Observed: Selections from Then and Now

The Remarkable History of the Kempf House

The Remarkable History of the Kempf House Following brass bands around Basel turned Reuben Kempf ’s career from the ministry to music. The Kempf House, at 312 South Division, a nationally recognized gem of Greek Revival architecture, is now a city-owned center for local history. It is named for Pauline and Reuben Kempf, the husbandand -wife music teachers who lived in it from 1890 until 1953. The Kempfs were guiding lights in the local music community who often loaned the Steinway in their front parlor—Ann Arbor’s first grand piano—to the university. It was played in the May Festival (a University Musical Society concert series) 1894–1995 by such luminaries as Victor Herbert and Ignacy Paderewski. The Kempf House was actually built in 1853 by Mary and Henry DeWitt Bennett. The Bennetts came from Stephentown, New York (southeast of Albany), where they had doubtless seen numerous examples of Greek Revival architecture. Henry Bennett, described by contemporaries as a genial and warmhearted man, served as postmaster and, later, as steward and secretary of the U-M. After Bennett retired, they moved to California. The house was sold in 1886 to a neighbor, who rented it out for a few years. Then in 1890, Pauline and Reuben Kempf, married seven years and the parents of a daughter, Elsa (a son Paul was born six years later), moved into the house. They lived there for the next sixty-three years. Both Pauline and Reuben were raised in Ann Arbor’s large German community, and both showed early musical promise. Pauline was the daughter of Karl Widenmann, the German consul for Michigan and owner of a hardware store on the northeast corner of Main and Washington . The family lived in a big house on Fourth Avenue until Pauline was fourteen, when her father was diagnosed as having a brain tumor. He sold his business and moved his family to Whitmore Lake, where he died eight years later. The family could not afford to send Pauline to music school to study singing, but two professors at the university, im232 pressed with her talent, arranged for her to give a recital in the Athens Theater (later the Whitney) at Main and Ann. The proceeds were enough for one year at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Reuben Kempf, born in 1859, a year before Pauline, grew up on a farm in the area now occupied by Briarwood mall. According to his daughterin -law, Edith Staebler Kempf, “he learned to play the organ at the Bethlehem Church school, and by the time he was a teenager played the pipe organ quite well. But this didn’t impress his parents. They said, ‘You will study for the ministry.’ In those days they didn’t ask you.” Reuben was sent to Basel, Switzerland, in 1877, to the same theological seminary that had graduated Friedrich Schmid, the first German pastor in Michigan and a hero to the local German community. But Reuben had been there only a few months when his parents received a letter from the principal, recommending that they not force him to be a minister but let him follow his own wish to be a musician. Evidently he had been following brass bands around Basel. Edith Kempf says it broke his parents’ hearts, but they allowed him to transfer to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Stuttgart, where he studied organ and piano and was a classmate of Victor Herbert. When Reuben returned to Ann Arbor, he opened a studio on the corner of Main and Liberty, on the third floor. He supplemented his income by playing the organ at St. Thomas Church. In 1883 he married Pauline Widenmann, their common music interests forming an obvious bond. Architecture 233 Pauline and Reuben Kempf enjoy sitting on their porch with daughter Elsa (left) and a woman thought to be a neighbor. (Courtesy of Bentley Historical Library.) When they moved to Division Street from their first home on the corner of Main and William, they set up a studio in the front parlor where they could both give lessons. The Kempfs’ house was conveniently located: children could walk to their lessons from all over town. The front door was left unlocked so that students could walk in without knocking. If a lesson was still in progress, they would wait their turn on the red sofa. Geraldine Seeback, who was a student of both Kempfs, remembers...