By Linda Robinson Walker
© 1999 Linda Robinson Walker

All images courtesy U-M Bentley Historical Library except as noted.

[Part 1 of 6]

The Farm on State Street
When 16-year-old George Washington Pray jumped down from his father's farm wagon in Ann Arbor on September 25, 1841, he wasn't the first student to arrive at the newly opened University of Michigan. Lyman Norris from Ypsilanti had beat him to the campus by a week. But Pray has a greater distinction–he kept a diary in which he unashamedly and unflinchingly wrote down everything. Through the next four years, until earning his bachelor's degree in 1845, Pray–the awkward farm boy–and the raw backcountry university would grow up together.

George was able to go to school because his father, Esek, was wealthy enough to dispense with his son's help on the farm at what is now 8755 Plymouth Road. Esek Pray came to Michigan 1825 and bought land for a farm and tavern. After George's birth on August 27, 1825, in Angelica, New York, Sally Pray joined her husband with their three older children. Four more children were born in Michigan. In 1836, Esek was a delegate in Ann Arbor to the Michigan Territory's second constitutional convention, called to ratify the swap of the Upper Peninsula for Toledo, Ohio, a requirement for Michigan's admission to the Union. Esek was active in educational and agricultural organizations and the Democratic Party, and served at least nine years as a justice of the peace.

On that September day, young George made his way up the stairs of Main Hall–lugging a portmanteau containing more books than clothes–to an unadorned suite still smelling of wood and whitewash. (A facsimile of his quarters, including his own trunk and coverlet, is on standing exhibit in the Student Activities Building on Maynard St.) Five other students arrived that day and three more would trickle in–and one would trickle out–by the end of the first academic year, leaving nine freshmen. Perhaps as many as 20 young men were part of Pray's class at one time or another, including transfers into upper classes, but only six of the original nine freshmen were among U-M's 11-member first graduating class in 1845.

These nine young men, with two professors and a part-time librarian–who made up the entire student body, faculty and staff–embarked on an experiment in democratic, state-supported education. They did so in a young country, in a state only four years old, on a campus that was short on elegance and long on utility. Ann Arbor's True Democrat Weekly complained in 1846 that in summer, "The hot suns and the bare ground" plagued the campus and that "the bleak winds and storms of winter now sweep over this place as over a sandy desert, with not a tree or shrub scarcely to break their force." Instead of being a "place of study and meditation," the paper editorialized, "the beautiful enclosed grounds occupied by this institution is [sic] now used as a farm." It was a profitable farm, however. Patrick Kelly, the University's care-taker, once harvested 800 bushels of wheat from its 31-acre field.

Four houses for faculty and their families had been built by 1840 (only the President's House remains), but their solemnity was lost in a jumble of sheds, shacks, wellheads, latrines and improvised stables for horses, cattle, chickens and hogs kept by the faculty and Kelly. Pray and other students gathered on evenings for "a cheerful and pleasant chat" at the stile on the high picket fence–built as much to keep out the hogs and mad dogs that roamed Ann Arbor as to keep University livestock in.

For Pray, the entire University was contained in the fifth building, Main. Here he slept, attended recitations and lectures, studied, went to chapel, took part in literary society meetings, examined the University's scientific collections–including one of the largest stores of mineral specimens in the world–and read books from the school's 4,000-volume library.

Pray's chum, or roommate, was George Parmelee. No one so vexed Pray as this lazy, puffed-up and boisterous townie. Pray's diffidence and his scholarly bent–he called himself "an ambitious and ardent minded student"–made it a trial to share quarters for four years with a study-hating "shirk." He complained in his diary that Parmelee "bored him almost to death" by constantly inveigling him for help with his Greek lessons. "He asks, 'How do you read this sentence?'–or 'What is this word from?'"

As unlike as they were, Pray and Parmelee formed that bond that roommates often do. Of all the people he knew at Michigan, it was Parmelee whom he most often wrote after graduation separated them. Part of that was the camaraderie of shared tasks. U-M had no gas, electricity, running water or sewage system then. Night trips between campus and the town meant weaving a path through stumps and ditches in complete darkness. In their room, light came from candles or from the fire in the iron stove. In all weather they used the latrine behind the building. Unless they heated it in a kettle on the stove, the water for washing, shaving and scrubbing the floor was always cold. They drew the water from the faculty's well, carried their buckets across the muddy, unpaved campus and lugged them up to their rooms. Nothing was cleaned or done in their rooms unless Pray or Parmelee did it. They "sawed and got a lot of wood in the room," Pray wrote. "We had a great time in the afternoon scrubbing the floor and putting up the stove pipe and blacking it, etc." The price of sloth was bedbugs.