Robert Burcham and the Burcham family

Robert B. and Hannah (Booty) Burcham emigrated from Norfolk, England with all but the eldest of their nine children and in 1837 settled on a forty-acre plot in Jackson County. They fared well over the next few decades, acquiring more than 400 acres of land in Jackson and Lenawee counties and raising another three children.

Their second child and eldest son, also named Robert,^† in 1849 “acquired title to the east fraction of the northeast quarter of Section 13, Lansing Township, including [what would later become] the plats of Oakwood, College Delta, and the forty acres of the college campus lying between these plats and the [Red] Cedar River.” Two years later Robert Burcham built a log cabin in the vicinity of where the Music Building stands today. His wife Emily and their children (Warren, born 1843; Robert A., 1844; Purley, 1849; Henry, c.1851) joined him in 1852, and they began to clear the land for farming. Part of that clearing is now Walter Adams Field.¹

This farmland, around eighty to ninety acres in size, had access via the plank road that passed through it but otherwise was an unimproved wilderness, far from the nascent city of Lansing or any other sizable settlement. Yet only six years after Burcham acquired the property, its prospects would change dramatically.

As an aside, there is some confusion in this author’s mind with regard to the Agricultural College’s founding. Towar tells us Burcham was still living on the future campus when the state bought it in 1855, and another man named Smith was working another portion farther to the east. Yet by all accounts the land was owned and offered for sale by Colonel A. R. Burr of Lansing. Burr (1818–1885) arrived at Lansing in 1854 and over the years held a range of public offices including city alderman, county sheriff, and postmaster. He also dabbled in a number of business endeavors, but had left farming behind in his home state of Ohio so he was not working the college land himself. Was he a land speculator? Did he own the land, with Burcham and Smith as tenants? The record is unclear.

What is clear is that when the state bought the property for the College in 1855, Burcham “built another log house just east of the site of the [current] People’s Church, and lived there until 1866, when he sold out to Dr. Manly Miles. He then moved to a farm east of the city limits.” Like Burcham’s first purchase, that farm also abutted the Red Cedar River and had the plank road passing through it, approximately where Stoddard Avenue meets Grand River Avenue today. Its farmhouse was on the south side of the road, later addressed as 1208 East Grand River Avenue.²

Robert Burcham died in 1870, leaving his entire estate to his wife Emily for her to manage and apportion to their children as she saw fit. An 1874 map shows their eldest son Warren had 65½ acres on the northeast corner of what are now Abbot Road and Burcham Drive. Their second son Robert A. Burcham had an estimated 103 acres further along Abbot Road, north of Saginaw Street. Emily Burcham remained at her home on the plank road along with their third son Purley, who worked the farm. Purley continued to live there into the 1930s.³

Mary Marble Burcham and Burcham’s Woods

Nowadays Robert Burcham is only a brief mention in the early history of M.S.U., and a city street bears the family name, but the story goes further than that. The Burchams were closely intertwined with East Lansing’s other pioneer families. Robert and Emily’s daughter Hannah (1852–1905) married Asa M. Proctor (1848–1908), son of the tollhouse namesakes Alonzo and Sarah Proctor, in November 1872. One month later, their son Warren Burcham (b. 1843) married Mary Angela Sophia Marble (1855–1940), daughter of John P. Marble.

Mary Marble Burcham became a venerated figure in East Lansing lore. Her husband Warren died sometime prior to 1904, and after bouncing around several Lansing addresses with her widowed daughter Laura Burcham Emmett and grandson Chauncey Emmett, the family returned to Mary’s home near the northeast corner of Abbot Road and North Street.^†† By then the tract, shown as 65½ acres in the map above, had been parceled down to 53 acres.⁴

Nearly all of that tract and much of the surrounding land was a “legendary,” densely forested area that came to be known—thanks to “Grandma” Mary Burcham—as Burcham’s Woods. A long ridge (an esker in geologic terms) meandered on an east-west line through the woods, and before pioneer days the high ground between swampy areas provided local Chippewa with a convenient portage from Chandler’s Marsh to the Red Cedar River. They found it an excellent place for hunting deer, and flint arrowheads were once a frequent find there. It had long been “a refuge for species of wildlife not found elsewhere in the county,” and M.A.C. professors such as Bailey, Beal, and Bessey knew it as “a great birding spot” for great horned owls, red-shouldered hawks, scarlet tanagers, indigo buntings, and many other species. Grandma Burcham tended to the woods with diligent stewardship and was very protective of the land where she was known to look unkindly upon trespassers. She picked wild huckleberries to sell by the pint, and at least once “waded through knee-deep snow to feed starving quail and partridge.”⁵

Mary Burcham’s daughter Laura and grandson Chauncey lived with her at the family homestead, ultimately addressed as 303 Burcham Drive after North Street’s name was changed circa 1928. Chauncey Emmett (1909–2001) worked at the Weather Bureau 1928–1942. During World War II he joined the Army Air Corps, qualified as a sharpshooter, and was assigned to the security patrol at Motor Wheel where he continued to work after the war until retirement at age 65. According to his obituary, “He was nicknamed ‘Chance’ from his many years of participating in motorcycle endurance runs.”⁶

Mary Marble Burcham died tragically in 1940 from burns she received in the explosion of a gasoline-fueled kitchen stove—an all-too-common household accident in that era. In 1949 the East Lansing school board acquired Burcham’s Woods for a new high school building, and it was expected that the entire forest would be destroyed. Birt Darling, Lansing historian and State Journal staffer, wrote an effusive article filled with anecdotes about the old ground and said, “If the Burcham Woods could talk, they could make history more fascinating than any historical novel you ever read.”⁷

That tale is now a mere whisper. Only the northernmost fringe of Burcham’s Woods is still intact today, north of the public library and high school. It includes the esker and its original portage trail and runs parallel to Whitehills Drive between Abbot Road and Old Hickory Lane.

1. Towar, p. 32. LSJ, 18 Dec 1949, p. 7. Beal, p. 14. ↩︎
2. Towar, p. 32. ↩︎
3. Beers, p. 51. Towar, p. 32. ↩︎
4. LCD (1904), p. 90; (1919), p. 255; etc. ↩︎
5. LSJ, 18 Dec 1949, p. 7. ↩︎
6. LCD (1928) pp. 777, 783. LSJ, 30 Oct 2001, p. 11. ↩︎
7. LSJ, 18 Dec 1949, p. 7; 1 Jan 1956, p. 11. ↩︎

1. † There were at least three men named Robert in the Burcham family. On this site, “Robert Burcham” only refers to the pioneer settler of East Lansing, not his father Robert B. Burcham nor his son Robert A. Burcham. Beal calls our pioneer “B. Robert Burcham” while Towar calls him “D. Robert Burcham,” each without explanation of the first initial. Modern sources, including the historical marker that stands in front of East Lansing City Hall, all echo Towar. Yet Robert’s own gravestone—and even more to the point, his signature on his last will and testament—read simply, “Robert Burcham.” With the vagueness and discrepancies involved, this author has chosen to follow his lead.↩︎
2. †† North Street, so named because it was the northernmost boundary of the original East Lansing city limits, became commonly known as “Pine Lake Road” after the interurban railway provided access to that resort area—even though the street itself did not reach all the way to the lake. Around 1928 it was renamed to Burcham Drive.↩︎