Faculty Row house numbers

(a note from the author)

On this site, the Faculty Row houses are named according to numbers, № 1 through № 10, as given in Beal. This is the de facto standard since it has been repeated by many later historians including Kestenbaum, the East Lansing Historic Commission, and this author.

However, when it came to enumerating and describing the Faculty Row houses Beal was inaccurate, incomplete, and out of date.

Inaccurate because of this statement on page 271: “A brick dwelling in Faculty Row, № 8, was erected in 1884 for Professor Samuel Johnson, later occupied by Professor C. D. Smith and since 1909 occupied by Professor L. R. Taft.” Both dates are incorrect. The Johnson house, later known as the Taft house which Beal calls № 8, was built in 1879. Taft moved into it, from № 9, in spring 1908. These errors have led to considerable confusion about the histories of the last three houses built on the row.¹

Incomplete because Beal omits two houses from his text entirely: № 9, which conveniently allowed him to say nothing about the current Professor of Horticulture; and № 14, even though a photo of it appears on page 76 as the “dwelling for the entomologist.” That caption neglects to give proper titular respect to Rufus Pettit, Professor of Entomology—perhaps intentionally, for there is no mention of him in Beal’s book at all except for his obligatory appearance in the biographical section. Pettit’s house appears as № 14 in the map above, north of the barn of № 2.

Out of date because Beal’s house numbers are frozen in time at the year 1885 when № 10, the easternmost professor’s residence, was built. He ignores Station Terrace, the residence for Experiment Station researchers and instructors, built 1892 and inserted between № 6 and what at the time was № 8—and designed by Edwyn Bowd, which perhaps makes its omission less than coincidental.^†

Yet by 1899 (the earliest example found by this author), more than a decade before Beal retired and fifteen years before his History of the M.A.C. was published, campus maps numbered Faculty Row as seen in the excerpt above: with Station Terrace as № 8, the houses east of that as № 9, № 10, and № 11, and the entomology professor’s residence (tucked away in the woods where Wills House stands today) as № 14. This numbering is recapitulated by such varied sources as the M.A.C. Faculty and Student Directory (1903 et seq, many issues available online), Chace Newman’s 1915 city map, issues of the Lansing City Directory from 1916 onward, and the 1920 U.S. Census.

The 1899 map named the houses for the professions of their occupants, such as “Residence Professor of Chemistry.” Meanwhile the Minutes of the Board almost always refer to the houses by the names of their occupants, such as in this item: “It was resolved that a barn at Prof Johnson’s house be built at a cost not to exceed $300.00.” Occasionally a profession is given instead, usually when no one had been appointed to the position: “The plans for the addition to the house of the Prof. of Hort. were presented and referred to the committee on Buildings and Grounds.” It is up to us to connect these data points.²

Needless to say, tracing the history of Faculty Row can be an endeavor rife with confusion. For example the Landmark Structure standing today at 217 Beech Street is known as “Faculty Row № 9,” which arguably is historically correct because that was its number when it was built. However it was addressed as № 10 at the time that it was moved from Faculty Row in 1919. This numerical shift confused the writer of an M.A.C. Record article about the move that calls it the Eustace House (for Harry J. Eustace, the last Professor of Horticulture to reside there, 1908–1919) but erroneously gives its build date as 1885—presumably because the writer thought of it as № 10 but was unaware that the house numbering had shifted. The uncredited writer also states that it had “continually been the home of the professor of horticulture,” which is not quite the case: Professor Taft changed position in 1902 to Superintendent of the Farmers’ Institutes and remained in the house until 1908 when Professor Eustace arrived; the horticulture professor in the intervening years, Ulysses P. Hedrick (M.A.C. ’93, M.S. ’95), resided in the Oakwood subdivision.³

Adding to the confusion, in the later years of the row when several houses were assigned as practice houses for the Home Economics division, they were often given different numbers entirely.

In the end it is clear that the application of house numbers on Faculty Row—if numbers were applied at all—was somewhat fluid during the nine decades that the row existed. Yet today we tend to ignore that fluidity and lock into Beal’s anachronistic pronouncements. With all this in mind, the best this site has to offer is to use Beal as the starting point for the house numbers—and then strive to clear up that source’s errors and vagueness about which house was which, and who resided where.

1. Minutes, 18 Mar 1908, p. 477. ↩︎
2. Minutes, 14 Sep 1880, p. 365; 7 Aug 1893, pp. 34–35. ↩︎
3. MAC Record, 25(4), 17 Oct 1919, p. 3. Faculty Directory (1903), p. 13. ↩︎

1. † In William J. Beal’s History of the Michigan Agricultural College, architects Appleyard, Mallory, Myers, Watkins, Arnold, and even building contractors are all given credit for their work. Yet in all its 500-plus pages, Edwyn Bowd is never once mentioned by name. Given that at the time of writing Bowd was on staff as the official College Architect, and had just completed the centerpiece of the campus, its largest, grandest, and most important edifice—Agriculture Hall—it is difficult to imagine that this is anything other than a deliberate omission by Beal. This author is of the opinion that Beal held Bowd to blame for all the shortcomings of his replacement Botany Lab—even though the Board was responsible for its budget and all decisions on the matter—and slighted Bowd in his book out of spite.↩︎