Yankees in Michigan

The Flowering of Yankee Michigan

55 TheFloweringofYankeeMichigan This country, but a few years since, a desolate wilderness, shall like New England be spread over with churches and schoolhouses, the steady witnesses to our happiness and prosperity. —Detroit Courier, September 27, 1832 B y the late 1840s and 1850s, the Detroit Courier’s predictions were beginning to become a reality, at least in the Yankee-settled counties of southern Michigan. The worst effects of the economic depression of 1837 had faded, and many of Michigan’s pioneers were feeling prosperous and secure. Log cabins were quickly being replaced with Yankee versions of Greek Revival wood-frame or brick structures, especially the ubiquitous “uprightand -wing” houses so popular with Yankees from Upstate New York.161 And despite the fact that a raft of state-sponsored internal improvements, including canals and railroads, had fallen victim to the economic downturn, roads had improved and communications with the East were faster. Farm products were easier to send to more distant markets, and a greater variety of eastern manufactured goods began to appear in the local general store. The mails moved faster, with news arriving within days of an event, not weeks. 56 B rian C. W ilson The pioneer’s sense of isolation was passing away. Michigan was moving beyond the frontier stage. The Growth of Yankee Towns Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the passing of the frontier era than the rise of the Yankee town in Michigan. Many Yankees craved town life, and with good reason. Their Puritan ancestors had come largely from villages and towns in England and had sought to recreate this urban life in New England. Towns, for Puritans, came to represent the ideal social order, offering tightknit community, opportunities for education, and, above all, a disciplined religious life.162 For economic reasons having to do with the availability of land, their descendents often sacrificed this Puritan ideal for material gain, but many Yankees never lost their taste for town life. Indeed, in the Midwest, Yankee farmers were far more likely than their non-Yankee neighbors to sell or lease their farms and move to town, especially if they felt it would be more profitable.163 For those who did not abandon farming, the Yankee desire to be close to town created a situation in which prosperous Yankee farmers tended to monopolize the land closest to town, inflating land values around urban areas and relegating less prosperous non-Yankees to a distant periphery. As historian Daniel Campbell found in the case of Marshall, Michigan, this, in turn, tended to create a relatively homogeneous Yankee farm belt around a town, thus intensifying Yankee influence over a town’s development.164 This is not to say, of course, that the towns themselves were culturally homogeneous ; this was never the case. However, given the Yankee predilection for town life, and given the strength of Yankee migration during this period, most towns in Michigan took on a distinctly Yankee flavor. Not surprisingly, Yankees in Michigan modeled their towns’ development after towns they had known in Upstate New York and New England. These eastern towns had undergone significant changes during the first decades of the nineteenth century, and Michigan towns reflected these changes. For one thing, as the commercial economy expanded, production and retail moved out of the home and into specialized districts. Thus, instead of the traditional town that grew organically without planning, towns in the northeast and Upstate New York came to be platted on a grid with commercial areas separated from residential neighborhoods. As Michigan’s commercial crossroads, with YANKEES IN MICHIGAN 57 their single street and mix of businesses and dwellings, grew into full-fledged towns, they too became differentiated: domestic districts were soon segregated from retail and manufacturing districts, and all contained within a grid of parallel streets and rectangular lots.165 The reason for this differentiation goes back to the perennial tension in Yankee culture between the demands of the market and the demands of community. Wishing to participate freely in the market, yet realizing its potential corrosiveness to communal values, Yankees sought to insulate the institutions of social order—family, church, school, and to a lesser degree, government—by physically separating them from the market. As economic life intensified in the antebellum period, so too did the drive for concerted urban planning. The desire to protect communal life from the rapacity of economic life not only impacted the structure of Yankee towns, but that of Yankee families as well. In those families who could afford...