College Delta (1897)

The “Delta,” the triangular area of land extending west from the junction of Michigan and Grand River Avenues to just west of Delta Street, was included as part of the original Agricultural College land when it was purchased in 1855. At that time, Michigan Avenue’s eastern end was at Harrison Road. When Michigan was extended to Grand River Avenue in the mid-1860s, the Delta (also known as the “Flatiron”) was isolated from the rest of campus. It was assigned to the Botany department in 1888 for use as an experimental garden, but with better proximity to the center of campus than Collegeville, the Delta soon became a prime candidate for faculty housing.¹

By 1897 the State Board of Agriculture was uninterested in further expansion of Faculty Row, and that year platted the site into “College Delta.”^† Designed by civil engineer Fremont E. Skeels (M.A.C. ’78, Assistant Secretary to the Board 1897–98) it offered ten large lots at prices ranging from $110 to $150, with proceeds from the sale “going towards the purchase of land for an athletic field on the south side of the river,” now known as Old College Field. Water and sewer service were provided by the College, and housing quickly sprang up. Potential buyers were required to have “connection with college affairs,” and were made to enter a contract “to erect a residence costing not less than $800.” (At the time, a professor’s annual salary at M.A.C. was typically $1,800; assistant professors and instructors earned considerably less.) Burton O. Longyear (Instructor in Botany 1894–1904, later State Forester of Colorado) was the first to build and moved into his house on January 1, 1898; by September five more houses were complete and two were in work.²

Since College Delta was intended for faculty housing, for several years the Board kept close tabs on its development and purchasers. There is an illustrative and surprisingly candid moment in the Minutes of the Board. Mrs. Olive Backus, who had operated the kitchen of Abbot Hall prior to purchasing the lot at the apex of the Delta, built a boarding house on the site and had an arrangement with the College to provide room and board for up to a dozen students of the Women’s Course which, just two years after its inception, had already exceeded the capacity of Abbot Hall. The “comfortable and attractive model students’ home” was ready by autumn 1898 and housed ten boarders that term, making Mrs. Backus “the first pioneer of East Lansing in that enterprise,” according to Towar.³

But a year later, in the August 1899 board meeting Secretary A. C. Bird announced that Mrs. Backus was planning to build a store on her property as well. Bird admitted that she had an “unquestionable” legal right to do so, but since the Board’s intent was that “nothing of this kind should ever be done” he suggested an unsubtle resolution: because the water and sewer services were being provided by the College with “no written agreement entered into… it might be possible to prevent the execution of this building by suggesting to Mrs. Backus that… water supply at least would be cut off from her premises.” The Board gave President Snyder and Secretary Bird power to act, and although nothing further was ever mentioned (in the official record at least), no store was built. Within a year, Olive Backus had returned to her hometown of Dansville.⁴

Twelve houses were eventually built on the ten lots of College Delta,^†† and over the years they sheltered many of East Lansing’s (and M.A.C.’s) famous names, among them:⁵

• Ernest Everett Bogue, first Professor of Forestry, 1902–1907.
• Chace Newman, Associate Professor of Drawing and Design, 1892–1939. For about a year the Newmans rented a room here to Myrtle Craig (M.A.C. ’07), the first African-American woman to graduate from the College.
• Jonathan L. Snyder (1859–1918), President of M.A.C., 1896–1915.
• Ray Stannard Baker (1870–1946, M.A.C. ’89, hon. LL.D. 1917), prominent “muckraking” journalist; Pulitzer Prize winner, 1940.
• Luther H. Baker (1872–1944, M.A.C. ’93), Mayor of East Lansing, 1925–1928.
• Charles E. Marshall, Professor of Bacteriology, 1900–1912.
• Andrew Krentel, Instructor and Foreman of the M.A.C. Wood Shop, 1902–c.1925.

The Board of Agriculture could not keep its leverage over the Delta forever, particularly once the City started providing its water and sewer services. Mrs. Backus’ former boarding house became (in 1903) the home and office of Dr. Oscar Bruegel, a local physician, who in 1924 built a gas station at the apex of the Delta. Over time the faculty homes began to be used as fraternity and rooming houses. A wave of redevelopment in the 1950s and 1960s supplanted most of the buildings, and by 1976 only three original homes remained on the plat, which Kestenbaum noted were “architecturally interesting as examples of turn-of-the-century houses rare in East Lansing, [yet] are the youngest and least significant of the twelve built there.”⁶

Today the sole survivor, the Landon–May house, is an East Lansing Landmark Structure. College Delta, once a cozy little neighborhood at the heart of the community, is now a collection of large apartment blocks, fraternity houses, professional offices, and commercial buildings.

Landon–May House, 243 W. Grand River Ave. (1902)

Brooks’ Addition to College Delta (1899)

Charles S. Brooks was foreman of the M.A.C. Experiment Station poultry department from April 1895 to June 1899. It was a busy four years for Brooks, beyond his duties representing the College at poultry shows across the state. A widower, in 1896 he married his second wife Hannah McKenzie. He (or they; it is unclear when) acquired the land between Collegeville and the Delta and built a home at the southeast corner of the property, later numbered as 320 Michigan Avenue (approximately where the Campus View Apartments stand today). Then, with the lots of College Delta selling quickly, in April 1899 they platted this addition on most of the property—the easternmost portion was reserved for the Brooks, part of which soon became the site of Central School. Louis Street is named for Charles’ son Louis C. Brooks (M.A.C. ’92), and has since been converted into a cul-de-sac. Empire Avenue was renamed Elm Place by 1915. Prospect Street was changed to Oakhill Avenue following the creation of College Heights, and later became Hillcrest Drive.⁷

The plat fulfilled an unmet demand that was partly caused by the recently extended streetcar line—within five months all but one of the Brooks Addition lots had been sold. His employment term with the College having expired, Charles and Hannah moved to Saginaw to be near her family, and rented the house on Michigan Avenue to Martin D. Atkins, Assistant Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering.⁸

C. M. Krentel House, 322 Elm Place (1906)
Central School, 325 W. Grand River Ave. (1917) SR/NR

Next: Oakwood

1. Kuhn, p. 114. Minutes, 9 Jul 1897, pp. 190–191. ↩︎
2. MAC Record, 4(1), 13 Sep 1898, p. 1. Lautner, pp. 59, 80–81, 102. Minutes, 9 Jul 1897, pp. 190–191. Towar, pp. 42–43. 39th AR, p. 13. 43rd AR, p. 7. ↩︎
3. LCD (1896), p. 286. 37th AR (1898), p. 29. MAC Record, 4(2), 20 Sep 1898, p. 1. Towar, pp. 43–44. ↩︎
4. Minutes, 29 Aug 1899, pp. 339–340. U. S. Census (1900). ↩︎
5. Kestenbaum, pp. 115–116. ↩︎
6. Miller, p. 50. LCD (1925), p. 232. Kestenbaum, p. 9. ↩︎
7. 38th AR (1899), p. 8. Sanborn (1926), p. 276. MAC Record, 1(11), 24 Mar 1896, p. 3. ↩︎
8. MAC Record, 4(34), 9 May 1899, p. 3; 5(3), 26 Sep 1899, p. 1. LSJ, 26 Apr 1912, p. 7. ↩︎

1. † The Board adopted the “College Delta” plat on July 9, 1897, commencing sales soon after, and by the first day of the new year Burton Longyear was already in residence. Towar sets the date of the plat as August 11, 1898, when it was officially recorded with the county registrar. By that time at least seven houses were completed or under construction.↩︎
2. †† College Delta was originally platted with eleven, not ten lots: Lot 11 was the little triangular patch at the center of the wye intersection of College and Delta streets, as seen in Newman’s map. Never purchased from the school since it was too small to be suitable for building, it was treated as a city park and ultimately had “a picnic table and a stove for outdoor cooking.” M.S.U. transferred Lot 11 to the City in 1964, which eliminated it to straighten the intersection and to narrow College Street to a twenty-foot-wide alley. [Minutes, 10 Jan 1964, pp. 4979–4980]↩︎