 . . . Summer 1999
The U-M was organized in 1817 in Detroit as the Catholepistemiad. It was reorganized in the 1820s and given a Board of Trustees. In 1837 they sought an expanse of land for a campus, and found what they were looking for in Ann Arbor.
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Lyman Decatur Norris (1825-1894) later wrote the University that he was "the first student admitted ... the first to enter, the first one on the ground (by a week at least) the first one to occupy the Dormitory-a study, 2 bedrooms and a wood closet-on the upper floor of North Hall [formerly Main Hall and later Mason Hall], N E. corner." He graduated from Yale where he took his senior year. Comparing the two schools, "... the class I left behind [at U-M] were nearly all of them better Latin, Greek and Mathematical scholars than those I joined at Yale." Pray recounts his pleasure at seeing Norris when the latter returned to Ann Arbor and "assisted" at the first graduation in August 1845. Norris was made an honorary member of Alpha Nu, one of the early student organizations called "literary societies," which were forerunners of fraternities but more academic and political in function. Alpha Nu was founded Oct. 6, 1842 (see note).
After graduation, Norris studied law in Detroit and practiced in St. Louis, where in 1852 he was retained in the Dred Scot case in which Scot, a slave in Missouri, sued for freedom on the ground that later residence in Illinois, a free state, had made him free. He won his suit in lower court, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed its decision. Norris said he was "assigned alone to the forlorn hope of procuring a reversal of the decisions of the Missouri Supreme Court." He appears to have succeeded in that the case then went to the US Supreme Court, where Scot lost in 1857.
Norris was also editor and proprietor of the St. Louis Daily Times. In 1854 he returned to Ypsilanti to manage a "large estate." In 1857 he moved to Grand Rapids where he died. As a member of the Michigan Senate, he helped pass a measure to raise "appropriations and revenue for my Alma Mater," by helping to pass the first "regular tax for its support...a 1/10th of a mill." In the 1880s he served as a U-M Regent.
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Dixboro lies almost equidistant between Pray's farm and the campus. The hamlet of Dixboro was not George's favorite place: "Dixboro is a disgrace, desolation broods over it, illness and dissipation curse it. Even dogs are too listless and lazy." (Diary, 10/30/1848) Dixboro was famous for a ghost that Pray talked about two years earlier (1/2/46).
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Esek Pray was born Nov. 29, 1790, in East Killingly, Connecticut, and died July 5, 1856. Sally Ann Hammond was born July 13, 1792, in Foster, Rhode Island, and died in Rhode Island in the early 1870s. They married July 21, 1811.
Nathan, born April 1, 1814, married Sally Ann McCormick, daughter of Esek's closest neighbor, April 22, 1837. He is probably the brother whom Pray went to visit at his farm at Windsor, Eaton County (9/3/48). Nathan died March 11, 1881.
Eliza Ann, born Nov. 7, 1816, in New York, married Elijah Murray on Feb. 9, 1836, and died in October 1845 at 28. Elijah Murray died Nov. 6, 1849.
Catherine, born January 19, 1820, in New York, married George Sutton Oct. 25, 1838. In the 1850 census George was 40, from New York. In 1843 he was a delegate to the Washtenaw Democratic Convention (as were Esek Pray and George's brother-in-law-to-be Earl Gardiner.) Catherine died April 18, 1871.
Joseph, born March 25, 1823, in New York, farmed next to his father and later moved to nearby Whitmore Lake. A letter from him to George is folded into the back of George's 1864 medical appointments book. He married Elizabeth Finton, July 4, 1849, in a double wedding with George and Deidamia. Joseph died Sept. 13, 1896.
George (1825-1890) married Deidamia H. Pope, July 4, 1849. Deidamia was born Nov. 18, either 1827 or 1828, in Pennsylvania and died March 14, 1875.
Almira, born May 17,1828, in Michigan, married Freeman Galpin, Oct. 9, 1845 at 17. She died April 20,1853.
Mary Jane, born June 2, 1830, in Michigan, married Watson Geer, Dec. 15, 1852.
Sarah Louisa, born March 17, 1833, married Daniel McKim, Dec. 8, 1853.
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Main Hall (later North Hall and Mason Hall) was 42 X 110 feet, made of local bricks and covered with stucco. Every room contained furniture. A member of the class of 1849, Edmund Andrews, wrote in his memoir that there were four recitation rooms on the ground floor, one of which contained the chemical laboratory. The chapel and library were on the second, and on the third were the mineralogy and zoological collections. He recalled that the latrines often got so disgusting that the students burned them down from time to time. Pray's suite was probably on the northeast corner of the second floor.
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The ten students who enrolled at U-M in 1841-42 in addition to George Pray were Collins, Cumming, Goodrich, James B. Kellogg, Lawrence, Norris, Parmelee, Platt S. Titus and William Brigham Wesson.
James B. Kellog was an original member of the Phi Phi Alpha Literary Society (see note) when it was formed Jan. 28, 1842. In July 1842 he was elected secretary-treasurer. His name does not appear after the end of the first academic year (August 1842).
Platt S. Titus (1819-1888) from Jackson, Michigan, was a founding member of Phi Phi Alpha, and was elected pro tem secretary July 1842. He seems to have remained at U-M until Jan. 1843 (his sophomore year), when another student replaced him as marshall in Phi Alpha. Information given to U-M by the War Office recounts that he was a lieutenant in the US Infantry, March 1847 to Aug. 1848; and a lieutenant and captain in the Michigan Infantry, Feb. 1862 to April 1865 (the end of the Civil War). In 1888, the year he died, he applied for a government pension, saying he was 69, making him–together with Fletcher Marsh–one of the class graybeards when he enrolled at about age 22.
William Brigham Wesson (18??-1890) of Detroit is the student who "trickled out" of U-M during the first academic year, 1841-42. When he left in January 1842 due to ill health, he was the only student with sophomore standing. After gaining admission to the bar he practiced in Detroit, where he became a trustee, director or president of the Detroit Medical College, the Wayne County Savings Bank, the Trust, Security and Safe Deposit Co., Hargreaves Mfg. Co., the First National Bank, and the D. L. & L. M. Railroad. Wesson is listed as a member of U-M's first graduation class in 1845 nunc pro tunc ("now for then") because in 1873 ("without my solicitation," he wrote the University) Michigan awarded him the degree he hadn't got at the time. Wesson was a member of the Michigan Senate 1872-4.
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Members of Pray's class who enrolled after freshman year but left before graduating in 1845 with the others, include Alexander McDougal Campau, Charles T. Southworth and Thomas White.
Alexander Campau, (c.1825-1908) of Detroit was identified in the Michigan University Book as "Real Estate Dealer and Capitalist." He probably enrolled in September 1843 after studying at Georgetown University. His name appears in the Dec. 15, 1843, minutes of the Alpha Nu literary society. A member of an old French pioneer family whose history in Detroit went back to Cadillac's settlement in 1710 (according to the necrology file), and sold Belle Isle to the city in 1878, Campau had his hands full managing the "large real estate holdings that came to him through inheritance."
Charles T. Southworth (1827-1884) was born in New York. His family seems to have moved to Monroe, Michigan, and he attended Oberlin College before transferring to U-M in his sophomore year, 1842-3. He studied medicine in Monroe, at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons and in Paris before getting his degree in Madrid. He practiced in Havana and in Mexico, and became a surgeon in the Mexican army. In 1859 he returned to Monroe and during the Civil War, the necrology files report, he was placed in charge of the US hospital at Nashville. He returned to Monroe where he died.
The sole reference to Thomas White is from an entry in Pray's diary on October 16, 1844: "I was visited by Thomas White who was formerly of our class." He was a cousin of Sarah Doty Thompson and Pray added that "when I was struck with the tender passion for her, I called on him as an excuse to see her."
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Serving as librarian was The Rev. Henry Colclazer, minister of the Methodist church in Ann Arbor, who was also on the governing board of Miss Clark's school (see Sarah Doty note). Although the rules governing student behavior took seven years to put in place after the University opened, rules for the use of the library were quite detailed from the onset. (See Regents proceedings, November 1841).
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Patrick Kelly was allowed to live in one of the empty faculty homes. Pray wrote (4/9/46) that in chemistry class they frightened "good old Pat" by rubbing phosphorous on him. "Pat's worthy head was surrounded by a halo of glory"… . A more honorable and pure heart never beat." He wrote in September 1847 that a new janitor had taken:
… the place of good and friendly Pat. Pat... I can now only record a few anecdotes of Pat and his bell ... A bell was got and Pat was well pleased with it ... Sometimes the students did not obey the summons so soon as they might and then indeed was Pat in trouble to think that he should be so disregarded and he would go from room to room visiting perhaps half of them and sticking his head in, would chid at the same time he enquired, 'And did ye[z] not hear the bell?!'"
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