Category: In and Around East Lansing
-
The “Home-Building Campaign” of 1929–1931
A variation of this article, in tweet-thread form, was originally published as part of the #LostEastLansing project in November 2022. The house on the corner of Grand River Avenue and West Oakwood Drive in East Lansing has a unique history. Notice how it stands out on the 1951 Sanborn fire insurance map. In a sea…
-
Cedar Banks — the women’s prison that never was
A variation of this article, in tweet-thread form, was originally published in November 2018. Tucked away in the woods southeast of Okemos, on a roughly hundred-acre lot next to the Red Cedar River, stands the transmitter antenna of Michigan State University’s WKAR-TV and WKAR-FM radio. It is not odd for M.S.U. to own a piece…
-
The Streetcar and the Interurban Railway
Early transportation to and from the Michigan Agricultural College was arduous at best. “Students and state board members coming to the college in the early days from Detroit and vicinity traveled by rail to Jackson, thence by plank road to Eaton Rapids, and stage to Lansing.” Once in Lansing, the travelers would have to hire…
-
The Michigan Avenue “Battle of the Boulevard” (1925–1928)
The cities of Lansing and East Lansing today are contiguous with each other, but in the 1920s their city limits were separated by a distance of almost a mile along Michigan Avenue—roughly from Mifflin Avenue on the west to Highland Avenue on the east. The state highway department held the responsibility for this major thoroughfare…
-
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…
-
The Old Plank Road
The road that would one day be known as Grand River Avenue appeared in this area sometime in the late 1830s; unlike other roads that followed surveyed section lines, it cut through the land on a (mostly) straight-line diagonal. In those pre-railroad days it served as the main trucking route between Detroit and Portland, but…
-
Alonzo Proctor Tollhouse (1851)
Asa Proctor (1784–1870) settled in the area in 1847, purchasing 120 acres on the west side of Park Lake Road where the “Grand River Road” cut across the southwest corner of his land. In 1851 the Lansing–Howell Plank Road turned it into a toll road, and Proctor was commissioned to operate one of its seven tollgates. Tollhouse…