The “Half-way Stone” or “Split Rock”
Long before the days of asphalt and automobiles, the three-mile journey between downtown Lansing and the Michigan Agricultural College was arduous and wearisome at best. What today is Michigan Avenue was a dirt track with occasional corduroy—logs laid perpendicular to the direction of travel—to prevent wagon wheels from sinking into the mire. When it was dry, the ride was bumpy and dusty; in wet weather it all turned to mud.
In these conditions, something as simple as a granite boulder can take on significance, particularly when it happens to stand almost exactly midway between the Capitol and the campus gate. Thus was the “Half-way Stone” christened, and it served as a convenient rest stop for many a tired student traveller. It was considered such a sufficiently important landmark that the Board of Agriculture dispatched Professor Beal in 1888 to ensure that it would be kept in place, “buying it if necessary to that end.” (The landowner assured them that “he would not sell the stone nor permit its removal.”) For a while in the early 1890s it also marked the eastern terminus of the Michigan Avenue streetcar line.[Minutes, 7 Feb 1888, p. 538; 28 Feb 1888, p. 540]
Some time around the earliest days of the College, a wild cherry pit was deposited by chance in a small cleft in the rock. Despite the inhospitable growing conditions, the cherry pit sprouted, rooted, and thrived. By the turn of the twentieth century, the inexorable force of the living tree had riven the rock asunder, and the broken granite acquired its second nickname: the “Split Rock.”[Towar, pp. 1–3]
Split Rock and cherry tree, circa 1913. Photo Credit: Beal, p. 310.
In 1924, in anticipation of the Michigan Avenue road widening, the Half-way Stone was broken up and removed from its original resting place, approximately where the eastbound lanes of Michigan Avenue meet Mifflin Avenue today in Lansing’s Eastside neighborhood. Appropriately, two large pieces were taken to the opposite ends of the journey: one was placed on the Capitol lawn, the other was placed near the southwest corner of the newly completed Union Memorial Building, where a cherry tree was planted nearby.[Stanford, p. 46]
“The Half-way Stone” and cherry tree, with the Union beyond. August 2006. Photo Credit: Kevin S. Forsyth.
Affixed to the on-campus fragment is a plaque containing a stanza of poetry by Frank Hodgman (M.A.C. ’62, author of the basic guide Manual of Land Surveying, and the first president of the Alumni Association) from his 1898 collection The Wandering Singer and His Songs. The ballad, a lengthy reminiscence on his days at M.A.C., was titled “Forty Years Ago.”[Kuhn, pp. 121, 130. Beal, p. 311]
When half the toilsome way was passed, we rested by the stone
Within whose cleft a cherry pit had taken root and grown;
The cleft was not so very wide; just half an inch or so;
The little tree scarce touched its side some forty years ago.
Other portions of the Split Rock were taken by the removal contractor, Fay Dunning, and “used in the construction of the archway and chimney of his residence at the corner of Grand River Avenue and Durand Street.” Sadly, this house “was demolished in 1969 to make way for a short-lived ‘Tijuana Taco,’” and the remaining fragments of the Half-way Stone were lost.[Towar, p. 3. Kestenbaum, p. 5]
Update, August 2022: As it happens, a small fragment of the rock, mounted to a varnished board along with a small brass plaque dated 1925, resides in the local history collection of the East Lansing Public Library. As of this writing it is not on display.
