On Campus Building

The Story of Northern's Founding


The pale winter daylight had died from the sky over Marquette Bay in Lake Superior by six o’clock on January 30, 1899. The snow-covered docks and the rough ice reflected the beam from the lighthouse, and tall pilings of the four huge ore docks stood black against the surrounding hills. Only a block from the quiet bay, horse carriages moved briskly and streetcars clanged up the brightly lighted Front Street, taking Marquette’s leading citizens from their substantial homes on the north side of town to the Hotel Marquette whose brightly lighted windows overlooked the bay from the south. 

They were gathering for dinner with over 100 members of the Michigan Legislature who had accepted Representative Gordon’s invitation to come see for themselves why Marquette was the best possible site for Michigan’s third normal school. (Many of the legislators were coming to inspect the other state institutions in the Upper Peninsula: the Michigan College of Mines at Houghton, the State Hospital at Newberry, and the Branch Prison at Marquette.) 

The legislators’ train was delayed by the intense cold which made the tracks slippery, and it was well after 11:00 before dinner was over and Peter White, a leading banker and popular toastmaster, rose and gave the account of his efforts to get a normal school for Marquette in 1875, when he was a member of the State Senate. He said that President Putnam and the entire faculty of the Ypsilanti Normal School gave up all school business for the day and came to Lansing in a body to persuade the Legislature that there was not enough money in the state treasury to support more than one normal school.

They were probably right. Michigan’s educators had insisted that the first constitution of 1835 include state support of public education. The revenue from the sale of public lands designated as school sections was to be deposited in a trust fund. Interest from the fund was to be distributed each year to all school districts in the state on the basis of the number of children in the district. No one anticipated that Michigan’s population would grow so fast that the Primary Interest Fund would soon prove inadequate…. In 1899, revenues from the copper and iron mines in the Upper Peninsula were bringing into the state treasury far more than was being spent on services to Upper Peninsula residents.

The mining companies had built primary schools in a number of towns. There were 50,000 children in schools throughout the Peninsula. Of the 1,200 young teachers, only 300 had any training beyond high school. But all had passed township examinations, and in 1896 they organized the Upper Peninsula Education Association to discuss topics of professional interest. One of the talks at the January 1899 meeting in Ishpeming was by Fred Clark, Marquette school board member and son-in-law of Amos Harlow, one of the city’s founders. His topic was “The Best Means of Securing a State Normal for the Upper Peninsula.” Michigan’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jason E. Hammond, was well aware of the problems of the Upper Peninsula. But the bills for a normal school which he drafted and presented to the Legislature in 1895 and 1897 were both defeated.

In 1899, Governor Hazen Pingree’s pressures for legislation which would benefit the common man, combined with the determination of the legislators from the Upper Peninsula, apparently persuaded the other members of the House and Senate that Superintendent Hammond’s latest bill should be passed. The Mining Journal pointed out that a normal school was “a recognized necessity for the public school system” and that the area also needed “a college for the common people.”

Either the quality of the dinner served at the Marquette Club or the eloquence of the citizens evidently convinced the legislators. Representative Kern of Calumet assured the Mining Journal reporter the next morning, “There will be no difficulty about the matter at all if the Upper Peninsula members of the legislature could only get together on a site.”

The legislators made their inspection of the College of Mines at Houghton and returned to Lansing. On February 9, Representative Gordon and Senator Chamberlain sent telegrams to the Mining Journal announcing that the normal school bill had passed the House and congratulating Marquette on its selection as the site for the proposed school. An editorial in the Mining Journal on February 11 pointed out that the decision had been “fairly awarded” and that “the whole Upper Peninsula, not just Marquette, has cause to rejoice.”

However, the next month five members of the House of Education Committee were traveling throughout the Peninsula for the express purpose of selecting the site for the normal school. Though the Marquette citizens were doubtless disappointed, they once again made elaborate preparations for entertaining the five committee members. The citizens who met the train brought big fur coats for the visitors to wear while they were driven around town in sleighs, through a heavy, wet snow storm, to see the sites available for a normal school. For the dinner at the Clifton Hotel, “The room was lighted by tapers in silver candlesticks ... the handsome centerpiece was an azalea in full bloom, and ferns arranged artistically down the centers of the tables contrasted prettily against the white of the spotlessnappery,” reported the Mining Journal. The account continued, “The banquet in the evening was graced by the presence of ladies, a feature quite unusual with legislative spreads. Their presence lent a charm and piquancy to the occasion that it was very plain was pleasing to the legislators.”

Among the honored ladies was Ellen Harlow Clark, who had been three when she arrived with her parents to establish the settlement at the mouth of the Carp River on Marquette Bay. Also present was Anna Chandler, superintendent of the city schools. (Peter White, as school trustee, had supported her effort to establish kindergartens in all areas of the city.) She reminded the legislators that prospective students of the Normal could use the Peter White Public Library which already had 12,000 volumes. She remarked that the Ypsilanti Normal College, which had been in existence fifty years, had only 3,000 more. School commissioner F. D. Davis pointed out to the committee that only 100 of the 300 Upper Peninsula teachers with some training beyond high school were Upper Peninsula residents.

Episcopal Bishop G. Mott Williams summarized all the arguments and executed a ringing plea for the Normal in a nineteen stanza original poem, “Lines on the Proposed Normal School.” The three most succinct stanzas follow: “Ours is a land of wonders, We have the deepest mine, The greatest ship canal on earth, The finest growth of pine, The grandest lake, The sweetest fish, The mealiest potatoes, The richest beds of magnatite, The liveliest moskaytoes.

Give us a school, a Normal school! Our children cry for learning. There’s work enough for hand and tool and wages for the earning. But when it comes to train the mind, We have to be like Dante, And find a guide to go below, And stew in— Ypsilanti! And where in all this Northern land is just the best location, To place the school for training men, For this divine vocation? But just this town that nestles down Her wide extremes between? For you may read, we’re all agreed, That fair Marquette is queen!” 

The banquet concluded by a toast to the Normal school drunk by all “standing in good cold Lake Superior water.” Though the committee members refused to comment, Marquette citizens were confident that they had finally won. The bill, PA No. 51, passed both houses of the Legislature and was signed by Governor Pingree on April 28, 1899.

The State Board of Education was authorized to buy land in Marquette, erect buildings, hire a faculty, and establish a curriculum for the purpose of “instructing persons in the several branches pertaining to public education, and in the science and art of teaching the same.” At a special election in June, the citizens of Marquette voted 318 to 9 to authorize the city to sell bonds to raise the $5,000 the State Legislature had asked them to contribute toward the new Normal. However, the city fathers had denied the State Board’s request that they also donate free light and water.

Peter White had offered six lots on the south side of the city for the new school, but when he failed to get clear titles to all the lots, the State Board chose instead John M. Longyear’s twenty-acre hilltop in the north part of the city. On July 16, three members of the Board, Dwight Waldo, and Longyear took carriages out to the “Northern Knoll” to stake out the location of the buildings. The next day the Board announced its intention to start classes in rented quarters. The Legislature of the State of Michigan passed the law establishing Northern State Normal School and appropriating $10,000 for its first year…

On September 6, Principal Waldo and D.F. Charleton, the architect for the new school, attended a Common Council meeting to request the use of the space on the second floor of city hall for classrooms… Principal Waldo assured them that he would be personally responsible “for the good order and decorum of the pupils.” Classes began in the City Hall on September 19, 1899; thirty-two students enrolled, and by the end of the second week, sixty-one had registered. Among the twenty-three from Marquette were Mary M. Wallace, who later left a substantial trust to Northern for student aid; Frances “Fannie” Russell, daughter of the warden at Marquette Branch Prison, who would later be on Northern’s faculty; Lydia M. Olson, who became Northern’s librarian for over thirty years; and Charlotte Preston, daughter of a Jamaican barber. She died before she was able to graduate, but her presence for a year meant that Northern’s first class included one black girl and one boy, Harold L. St. Johns.

[Northern’s first building,] the South Wing, was completed in time for summer school, 1900, and the firm of Longyear and Ayers built a three-story wooden dormitory on private land adjoining the Normal School property which was ready to house students and faculty in July 1900.

Northern’s first baccalaureate ceremony was a union service (it was in the Methodist Church, and the Baptists and Presbyterians took part) “by which all could show their interest in and loyalty to the new institution of which Marquette feels so proud,” (Daily Mining Journal). In the morning of July 3, 1900, Northern’s first sandstone building was formally dedicated. During the ceremonies, the Honorable Percy F. Powers, President of the State Board of Education, directed the faculty to “instruct students in the science of teaching others, neglecting neither real education, nor the culture of the students.” State Superintendent Hammond called the young institution, “the gem of Normal schools in the Northwest.” Anna Chandler, Marquette Superintendent of Schools, was pleased to note that the training school scheduled to open in the fall would include a kindergarten.Mr. and Mrs. J.M. Longyear-received thanks for their gifts to the young Normal.

But it was Peter White who most delighted the audience. He predicted that in time the institution would have a thousand students, a four-year course, 500 graduates, a library of 20,000 volumes, a gymnasium, laboratories, an astronomical observatory, and a statewide, if not a national, reputation. The Mining Journal account of his speech continued: “He also predicted that when the time came the weather observatory would be moved out to the Normal and that a much better quality of weather would be furnished for state occasions like the present.”

By 1920, all these predictions had come true except those concerning the observatory and the weather! That afternoon (July 3, 1900) State Limited Certificates were presented to three young ladies who had entered with advanced standing, Ellan Harshman, Sarah MacLeod and Ida Mitchell. All three received third year certificates in 1901.

 

From Northern Michigan University: The First 75 Years

By Miriam Hilton