Mary E. Champe (1860–1953)

Mary E. Wright was born on July 29, 1860, in Lapeer County, the daughter of Silas and Martha Wright. In 1882, she married William Champe, whose family owned substantial farmland in Onondaga Township, and the couple soon settled on the 140-acre Wright farm in Meridian Township, near what today is the corner of Hagadorn and Haslett Roads. Three generations lived together there, with the arrival of William and Mary’s four children: Silas (born 1883), Levi (1884), Ann (1886), and Frank (1895).¹

Silas Wright died in February 1886 under circumstances that might have seemed ordinary had they not proven fatal. He fell on the steps outside Dr. Hagadorn‘s pharmacy in Lansing, striking his head on the pavement. His physician attributed the fall to “vertigo brought on by urinary poison” and judged the head injury survivable—but the infection killed him two days later. He was 65 years old. Martha Wright, left to manage the family’s considerable property, proved fully capable of doing so. A subsequent dispute with the Lansing tax assessor revealed that Silas had kept all his assessed property in his wife’s name—this, along with their move to Meridian Township, seems to have allowed the Wrights to avoid city taxes.²

In September 1899, Martha purchased nearly all of Brooks’ Addition to College Delta from Charles and Hannah Brooks, who were leaving the area. The price was $3,100 for twenty lots. She immediately asked the College to connect the addition with its water and electric light systems; the Board referred the request to committee and apparently took no action. Within two years, Martha had died and her estate—including the Brooks’ Addition lots—had passed to her daughter Mary.³

Mary and William Champe found themselves owners of an underdeveloped subdivision that, like Collegeville to its west, lacked community water or sewer service. As a result, although it had been touted as “a desirable location for a suburban home,” it was proving to be much less desirable than College Delta or Oakwood, which both had services provided by the College. The Champes sold the north portion of Lot 1 to the new fractional school district in September 1901 for $250, providing the site for the original Central School. Around 1904, William erected a building on the southeast corner of Lot 1, on Michigan Avenue, and opened a store there. The MAC Record described it as a thriving enterprise including a bakery, meat market, restaurant, and shoe shop; Towar, writing later, remembered it more modestly as a “small frame store” selling “confectionery, soft drinks and tobacco” which “survived but a short time.” They sold the property to a real estate company in 1910.⁴

Meanwhile the marriage had become dangerous. In October 1903, Mary filed for divorce, claiming that William “has been extremely cruel and has often threatened to kill her and the family by blowing up the house.” The divorce was granted in January 1904—but by June they had remarried, in Owosso. Whatever reconciliation they attempted did not hold. In early 1915, Mary filed again, this time also filing a quitclaim deed against the Onondaga farm. The Lansing State Journal reported that William had deeded the farm to her, she had deeded it back, and she now claimed she had done so under duress. The second divorce was granted on March 1, 1916, on grounds of extreme cruelty. She appears to have won the quitclaim as well—she later used the Onondaga farmland as mortgage collateral.⁵

The years immediately following were not without further hardship. In December 1917, her youngest son Frank was struck and killed by a westbound Grand Trunk passenger train near Trowbridge, while crossing the tracks northbound on Harrison Road.^† He was 22. Frank had apparently been running the Meridian farm as a working commercial enterprise; within days of his death, Mary advertised a liquidation of the farm equipment and livestock, describing teams, plows, harrows, cows, hogs, and some 250 bushels of oats, much of it “good as new.” Whatever plans she had for the farm seem to have died with him.⁶

Finally freed from the marriage, Mary ramped up her efforts to develop what remained of her Brooks’ Addition holdings. She still held a significant portion of the original plat—perhaps five acres of the roughly nine that the addition comprised—along with the Meridian farm and the Onondaga property. In September 1921, her eldest son Silas Earl Champe (M.A.C. ’06) announced plans for a large apartment house on the lot immediately south of Central School, describing ninety-three apartments and “reservations already being made.” Towar says a foundation was partly completed on that lot, and a row of auto garages was built for its tenants, but this scheme was never realized. What was built instead was a more modest two-story frame structure of approximately forty-five rooms, completed in 1924 at 215–217 Louis Street and known as the Campus Apartments or Campus Hotel.⁷

Silas was the proprietor when the hotel opened in April 1924, having married that March and moved into the building with his wife. He quickly recognized that the dining room required professional management and advertised widely for “a high-class and real live wire” operator. By 1925, he had stepped back and Mary—then in her mid-sixties—had resumed the proprietorship herself, living in the building she owned and ran. Some third-party operator handled the dining room, but in September 1927 Mary published a notice in the Lansing State Journal disclaiming responsibility for any debts “contracted under the name of Hotel Campus Cafe”—suggesting the arrangement had ended badly. Towar, writing in 1933, called the Campus Hotel “a quiet pleasant hostelry” with excellent dining service, which suggests either a subsequent period of stability, or simply that he liked eating there.⁸

The hotel’s finances were always precarious. A $30,000 bond issue in 1923 had financed its construction, secured against both the Louis Street property and, it appears, the Onondaga farm. In 1928 the mortgage was foreclosed upon, and Mary lost both the farm and the portion of Lot 1 that had been the intended site of the failed apartment project. The hotel passed out of her hands before 1936, when Michigan State College purchased it from an intermediary for $23,025 and renamed it North Hall Dormitory, housing ninety-two women there until 1950. (It continued as a private rooming house called Spartan Hall for another four decades, finally coming down between 1995 and 2001.)⁹

Meanwhile, by 1930 a development group led by Walter Neller had subdivided the southern fifty acres of what was then called “the Champe farm” on Hagadorn Road, as Greencrest and Greencrest № 1; the remaining ninety acres passed to other owners as well. Whether Mary Champe sold voluntarily or was pushed out is unclear from the record, but the timing—right alongside the other foreclosure and just as the Great Depression was setting in—suggests financial pressure as much as a planned exit.¹⁰

Mary E. Champe spent her final years in a modest frame bungalow in Lansing’s Eastside. She died on July 15, 1953, two weeks shy of her 93rd birthday, of injuries sustained in a fall at her home four days earlier. She was buried at Mt. Hope Cemetery. Although her obituary was accurate if understated in describing her as “active in real estate circles here until a short time ago,” Mary E. Champe is worth remembering today: she managed property in her own name through a difficult marriage, two divorces, the loss of a son, financial reversal, and nine decades of life—and the East Lansing neighborhood she helped shape still shows traces of her influence today.¹¹

1. LSJ, 15 Jul 1953, p. 32. ↩︎
2. LSR, 5 Feb 1886, p. 4; 8 Feb 1886, p. 4; 16 Feb 1886, p. 1. ↩︎
3. LJ, 9 Sep 1899, p. 1; 29 Aug 1901, p. 2. MAC Record, 5(4), 3 Oct 1899, p. 3. ↩︎
4. MAC Record, 4(34), 9 May 1899, p. 3; 10(6), 25 Oct 1904, p. 3; 10(24), 7 Mar 1905, p. 7; 12(27), 26 Mar 1907, p. 3. Towar, pp. 46, 53, 107. LSR, 12 Sep 1910, p. 9. ↩︎
5. LSR, 21 Oct 1903, p. 1; 27 Jan 1904, p. 2. Marriage certificate, 2 Jun 1904, Owosso. LSJ, 15 Jan 1915, p. 16; 19 Feb 1915, p. 14. ↩︎
6. LSJ, 5 Dec 1917, p. 1; 19 Dec 1917, p. 15. ↩︎
7. LSJ, 13 Dec 1923, p. 22; 22 Sep 1921, p. 1; 19 May 1922, p. 25. ↩︎
8. LSJ, 4 Mar 1924, p. 9; 8 Sep 1927, p. 18. Dayton (Oh.) Herald, 5 Sep 1924, p. 26. Towar, p. 111. ↩︎
9. LSJ, 13 Dec 1923, p. 22; 3 May 1928, p. 21; 31 Jul 1936, p. 1. Minutes, 2 Jul 1936, p. 1258; 16 Mar 1950, p. 2326. ↩︎
10. “Green-Crest” plat map, filed 29 Aug 1929; “Green-Crest No. 1” plat map, filed 15 May 1930. Hixson (1939). ↩︎
11. LSJ, 15 Jul 1953, p. 32. ↩︎

1. † The State Journal‘s front-page article, amid a shocking amount of gruesome detail about the accident, refers to it as “the ‘White Elephant’ road,” even though the White Elephant had been torn down more than a year before.↩︎