The Harrison Family

The Harrison family home was built circa 1861 facing the unpaved lane that became Michigan Avenue. By the time it was razed in late 1963, it was addressed as 1111 Michigan Avenue and the Brody residence hall complex was immediately to its east. Photo Credit: City of East Lansing, reprinted in Miller, p. 24.

Almond Harrison Jr (1802–1892) and Eliza Newton Harrison (1805–1892) moved from Berkshire County, Massachusetts, to the Territory of Michigan around 1826, more than a decade before statehood. They settled in Lenawee County, on an irregular lot of about 120 acres on the east bank of the River Raisin, east of Blissfield. Over the next nine years they accrued more parcels, all in the area between Blissfield and Deerfield, for a total of nearly 270 acres by 1835. Almond was an inventor as well as a farmer; his “new and improved shovel-pointed cultivator” received U.S. Patent № 4,170 in 1845.

While at Blissfield, Almond and Eliza had seven children: Louisa, later known as Lois (born 1832); Daniel, 1834; Clement, 1836; Joel, 1839; Gertrude, 1841; George Wyman, 1845; and Dwight, 1847.

In 1860 they moved to Lansing Township. Their new 600-acre farm was south of the Middletown Road East (later renamed Michigan Avenue), immediately west of the Agricultural College, and bisected by the sectional centerline road that now bears the family name. It extended south by a mile, to where the Grand Trunk railroad tracks are today. Although the site was on the far outskirts of the township, and still very much in the hinterlands, this must have seemed like a future-thinking investment at the time—and yet risky, as the pre-Reorganization College was not yet firmly on its feet.[Beers, p. 15. LSJ, 28 Jan 1924, p. 7]

Almond erected a barn to shelter the family until a house could be constructed. The house was built of bricks that were produced right on the farm, with stone trim cut from slabs originally used for sidewalks in Detroit. It was completed in 1861, 1865, or 1866, depending on whom one believes. Most of Almond and Eliza’s children joined them in the move to Lansing, with two exceptions. Lois, the eldest, was married by age 17 to George M. Hubbard, a Blissfield merchant some twenty years her senior. They remained at Blissfield. Joel, meanwhile, moved to Detroit. He served as a Private in the Michigan 1st Cavalry Regiment from September 1861 to September 1862.[LSJ, 28 Jan 1924, p. 7; 16 Aug 1935 p. 26. Towar, p. 34. Miller, p. 24. Minutes, 29 Apr 1861, pp. 78–79; 13 Nov 1862, p. 100]

A year after arrival (i.e. 1861), Almond built the first bridge over the Red Cedar River at Farm Lane for the College. Within a year it had safety issues, but we may assume he corrected them. The bridge lasted until it was carried away in the spring thaw of 1875.[Minutes, 29 Apr 1861, pp. 78–79; 13 Nov 1862, p. 100]

In 1862 Gertrude, the younger daughter, married Abram Truman. By 1870 they had established a 160-acre farm at the northwest corner of Harrison and Mount Hope Roads, its northern boundary abutting the south end of the Harrison farm. (In the 1950s this became the Spartan Village apartment complex.)

In 1866 George and Lois Hubbard purchased the John Joy farm in Meridian Township. This 87¾-acre lot fronted on the plank road, opposite the College property. Today, this former farmland is marked from just west of Bailey Street to just east of Kedzie Street, extending north to Burcham Drive. It forms the heart of the Bailey neighborhood, having been platted into the Fairview and Strathmore subdivisions.[Towar, p. 33, who refers to the buyer as “L. W. Hubbard” and obfuscates her gender throughout the paragraph. Beers, p. 51]

Within the next several years, parcels of the Harrison territory were transferred to the elder sons of Almond and Eliza. Daniel Harrison ran the 280-acre Peninsula Farm on the east side of Harrison Road, south of the oxbow bend in the Red Cedar River, where today stand the athletic complex (Old College Field, Spartan Stadium, Breslin Center, Munn Arena, etc.) and the South Neighborhood of residence halls. In an era when most residents kept a “home cow” for fresh milk, Daniel was a pioneer in collective dairy farming.* Clement L. “Kep” Harrison’s 160-acre farm was across Harrison Road from the Peninsula Farm, on the site known today as the Red Cedar neighborhood (Flowerpot and Ivanhoe subdivisions). A cheese factory operated on Harrison Road near where Marigold Avenue is today.[Towar, pp. 34–35. Beers, p. 15]

Meanwhile, Joel had moved home to study “phonography,” a form of stenography. Wyman (M.A.C. ’66, M.S. ’67), having worked for a year as assistant foreman of the College Farm, also lived with his parents, working as a life insurance agent. Dwight (M.A.C. ’68) was a drug store clerk in downtown Lansing, and boarded there. Joel soon finished his studies and moved out: he was a phonographer at Lansing (and living downtown) in 1873; at Adrian in 1880; Grand Rapids in 1887.

Composite detail map of Lansing Township (T4N R2W) and Meridian Township (T4N R1W), Ingham County, 1874. The intersection of Michigan Avenue and Harrison Road is at the center of Section 13. Mount Hope Road forms the south border of Sections 24 and 19. Map shows the farms of Almond Harrison, Daniel G. Harrison, Clement L. Harrison, Abram K. Truman, and George M. Hubbard. Total size of the five parcels was 779.55 acres—more than the acreage of the Agricultural College at that time. Image Credit: Beers, 1874.

The 1870s and 1880s appear to have been good decades for the Harrison family, even though Lois was widowed by 1880 and had moved in with her parents. (Presumably she sold the Hubbard farm, but when and to whom is unclear.) Yet by the late 1880s, barely a decade after its peak, it seems that the Harrison empire was on the wane. In 1888 Almond still had the northernmost portion of the original farm, 91.8 acres worth about $5,000. But Clement worked at a feed mill, Daniel was a stone mason, and Daniel’s wife Mary was a clerk for the Secretary of State; they all lived in the city. Abram and Gertrude Truman’s farm was down to 80 acres, half the size it was in 1874. Lois still lived at home, helping Eliza run the household. Joel, Wyman, and Dwight had all moved on.[LCD (1888), pp. 111, 298, 366]

Then in February 1892, just four days apart, Almond and Eliza both died of influenza.

Almond and Eliza’s estate was bequeathed to Lois, Joel, and Dwight, to be divided equally.* The three siblings worked out an agreement amongst themselves. Lois and Dwight split the land west of Harrison Road into two odd-sized portions, in a 65/35 share respectively. The dividing line was, by this author’s estimation, a north-south line slightly west of where West Brody Road meets Michigan Avenue today. Lois received the western portion, which put her home—the original brick Harrison farmhouse—at the northeast corner of that lot. Dwight received the eastern portion, facing onto both Harrison Road and Michigan Avenue. In 1900 he platted part of this into Cedar Bank.

Joel received the ten acres of land east of Harrison Road and west and north of the Red Cedar River. Nicknamed “Ping” because he sported an identical beard to that of Michigan Governor Hazen S. Pingree, he retired as court stenographer of Lenawee County in 1896 and rejoined what remained of his family in these environs. That same year he built the first rooming house in the vicinity of the College, a massive two-and-a-half-story white brick affair at the southeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Harrison Road. Although its formal name was “Harrison Hall,” it quickly became known as the “White Elephant.” Ping Harrison also built a small store east of the White Elephant in 1898 and “became the pioneer merchant of Collegeville,” selling “confectionery, soft drinks, tobacco, cigars and cigarettes.” Both buildings ultimately fell into disrepair, were acquired by the College and demolished in 1916. Because of road widenings and the realignment of Harrison Road, the site of the White Elephant is today beneath the intersection of Harrison and eastbound Michigan Avenue.[Towar, p. 35. Miller, p. 24. MAC Record, 22(3), 10 Oct 1916, p. 4]

In time the last pieces of Harrison properties passed from family hands. Lois sold her portion in 1906, the year that her second husband, Jok Montgomery, died. By 1911 Kep’s farm was owned by Stephen Henry Hicks and his family, who developed the Flowerpot neighborhood. By 1913 Daniel’s Peninsula Farm was owned by C. D. Woodbury, who leased the land to the College that year (and sold it three years later). Ping’s land was platted into subdivisions named River Bend (1908) and River Court (1925), and over time more than a dozen houses were built there. Michigan State College acquired the entire area in 1945–46, some of it by judicial condemnation, for the site of the Kellogg Center for Continuing Education. The brick farmhouse, which “in its early days was a noted rural mansion,” was moved more than 100 feet to the south in 1928 when Michigan Avenue was made a boulevard. It was demolished in late 1963.[ELi, 30 Aug 2015. Minutes, 17 Jan 1946, p. 2222. Towar, p. 34. LSJ, 3 May 1928, p. 1; 2 Jan 1964, p. 8]

It’s worth mentioning that the Harrison family held education in high regard. Along with sons Wyman and Dwight, five grandchildren of Almond and Eliza attended M.A.C., graduating in various years. Among them was Kep and Jennie’s daughter Mary Louise Harrison (M.A.C. ’88), who was one of just twenty-one women* to earn an agriculture degree prior to introduction of the Women’s Course. Lois Harrison Hubbard Montgomery, eldest child of Almond and Eliza, died at age 91 in 1924 and left “a considerable sum to found a scholarship for girls of the Lansing High school who have begun high school work but find they are not able to finish.”[Towar, p. 36. Yakeley, p. 51. LSJ, 28 Jan 1924, p. 7]