R. E. Olds and Industrial Lansing

By Michael Rodriguez

Upon the dedication of a new Capitol building in 1879, the city of Lansing was just beginning to emerge from the swampy wilderness of its recent past. As industry began to take root along the banks of the Grand River, Ransom Eli Olds brought his father's motor shop to national prominence with advancements in gasoline and steam engines, and then horseless carriages. By the early 20th century, Oldsmobile became the world's first mass producer of automobiles and Olds had moved on to found a second car company, making Lansing the first Auto City. Through these efforts, Olds rose to become one of the nation's greatest industrialists and entrepreneurs. Using primary documents and historical images, this book traces the industrial history of the Capital City within the context of one of the 20th century's greatest entrepreneurs, R.E. Olds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781439631379

Michael Rodriguez

Michael Rodriguez is a Humanities Librarian at Michigan State University and a resident of REO Town. He is the author of Detroit's Belle Isle: Island Park Gem, also published by Arcadia.

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INTRODUCTION

"Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents,

Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising,

See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream."

—from Song of the Exposition, Walt Whitman

When Walt Whitman wrote about what he considered the greatness of American industry, after the close of the Civil War and just before the Columbian Exposition, he was a poet excited by the potential of a country poised to be the manufacturing capital of the world. In 1871, America was a country struggling through reconstruction and was finding its identity and geographical balance through the building of its cities and the making of its machines. Between 1830 and 1880 the population of the U.S. had increased by 400 percent, and a full 22 percent of that total were then living in urban areas. The agrarian way of life in was disappearing into America’s past. Lansing was made within this atmosphere. The city emerged from a dense forest previously thought uninhabitable and became a new industrial center and hub of state government surrounded by farming communities—and this geographic and economic transformation happened within a span of 50-odd years.

The development of Lansing is an interesting study of the tension between the farm and the factory. Without the factory life and the close-knit proximity of workers, it would have had to rely solely on the arrival of the new government for the development of its infrastructure, its tax base, and its cosmopolitan center. And, ironically enough, what the factories of the city produced in greatest quantity between 1870 and 1900 were agricultural tools for the settling of the West. The early inhabitants of this community were pioneers in just about every sense—they accepted the risk of coming to a place that had few amenities and was difficult to access, and literally cleared the way for the making of what the city was to become. And they willingly (many of them) accepted the challenge because they shared the same kind of optimism that Whitman discovered in examining the simultaneous opening of new territory and the building up of cities. It is fitting that this pioneering moment introduced the man who would so broaden the city’s early industrial efforts that he would completely remake cultural and economic Lansing at the turn of the 20th century.

This book is an exploration of Lansing industry at the time immediately preceding the coming of the automobile and the reasons for its coming, the local career of the person most responsible for the modernization of the community, R.E. Olds, the industry that immediately grew out of the automobile trade, and R.E. Olds’ life outside of automobiles and within the community. In order to focus best on these aspects of Lansing’s industrial history and therefore see best the reasons for the early growth of the city (and Olds’ place within it), the timeline here is inclusive of the period just after the dedication of the current Capitol building, in 1879, to the end of the automotive career of R.E. Olds, in 1936.

It should be noted that this is not a history of either Oldsmobile or of R.E. Olds’ second automotive venture, REO. There has been much good scholarly and general interest literature on Oldsmobile’s history. See, especially, Helen Early and Jim Walkinshaw’s Setting the Pace. Also, since this study ends with Olds’ departure from REO in 1936, no attempt has been made here to chronicle the entire corporate and social history of that company, which ended approximately 40 years after his departure.

Finally, it should be noted that while compiling the research and images for this project, it was discovered that any history of the industry of Lansing is by its nature a social history of its river, the Grand. Even before the city had a name, the earliest settlers and those who platted, mapped, and then established homesteads in Lansing all understood the crucial importance of this waterway. The city’s industrial history simply would not exist without it. As is the case with Detroit, a damning gaze is often cast on this industrial history and on the early settlers and city planners as those who would not (and could not) foresee the damage inflicted in the first 100 years of manufacturing on the river’s banks. But abuses to the Grand River have begun to be corrected. Industry has moved toward other venues within the expanded boundaries of the city, and with the building of the River Walk and parklands on its banks, Lansing began to embrace and celebrate the Grand in the last part of the 20th century.

One

INDUSTRIAL LANSING BEFORE THE AUTOMOBILE

BIDDLE CITY. Just before the State of Michigan was admitted into the Union in 1836, William and Jerry Ford plotted land in mid-Michigan and were promoting it to Easterners from Lansing, New York. They called their town Biddle City, located in what is now section 21, at the confluence of the Grand and Cedar Rivers. Few people that bought lots ever made it to see their swampy, heavily timbered properties, and some that did took one look and either went back East or settled in more hospitable territory. There were early settlers, though (Cooley, Townsend, and Seymore), that battled the elements and eventually made a go of it in lands purchased around Biddle City and elsewhere in nearby sections, and all settled around the Grand. This earliest plat of what is now Lansing also highlights the area that would become home to the city’s most important industry, the manufacturing of automobiles.

TOWN OF MICHIGAN MAP. The state’s constitution of 1835 declared Detroit as its temporary Capital, but required that the Capital be permanently located by the legislature by the year 1847. After the War of 1812, especially, it was thought by some that Detroit was too vulnerable because of its proximity to a foreign border. Many geographically central locations were entertained, including Ann Arbor and Jackson, because of their position on the main rails that led from Detroit to Chicago, but places such as Houghton and other northern locations were entertained as well, because of their importance in raw materials and trade. The wilderness that was Lansing at the time was thought a joke by many legislators, but it won the vote after a very confused and acrimonious debate led by Representative Enos Goodrich, of Genesee County. At the time the area of the city was known as Michigan. (FPML/CADL.)

NEW CAPITOL. There were two Capitol buildings before this one, the Palladium-domed structure that we currently know as the state’s seat of government. There was the structure in Detroit that was afterward used as a high school, and the temporary structure that was to eventually burn down in Lansing after the dedication of this building in 1879. The wide streets of Michigan Avenue in this photo (c. 1880) are yet unpaved, though what is now Grand River Avenue brought everyone previously invested in state politics to the new frontier capital on roads made of wooden planks, completed in 1853. (FPML/CADL.)

WASHINGTON AVENUE. This is a c. 1875 photo of early Washington Avenue. Horse-drawn wagons line the dirt road of the business center of the city at the time. Washington was the first road in Lansing to be paved, in 1878, with cedar planks down the middle and bordered by cobblestones. City planners soon found out that this was a bad method of paving, since the cedar would buckle and wear poorly with the extreme changes in Michigan weather. The same was found to be true with the Lansing-Howell Plank Road (now Grand River Avenue)—the main thoroughfare from Detroit to the new Capital—and the planks were replaced with gravel. It wasn’t until 1893 that the first brick was laid on Lansing streets. (FPML/CADL.)

GRAND RIVER. From