Harrison House — the “White Elephant” (1895–1916)

The “White Elephant” holds a peculiar place in East Lansing history—a building that was never much loved, barely successful, occasionally infamous, and only remembered fondly after it was gone.

Joel “Ping” Harrison inherited a portion of the Harrison family farm—bordered by Harrison Road, Michigan Avenue, and the Red Cedar River—when his parents died in 1892. In 1895, he built Harrison House (also known as Harrison Hall) facing Michigan Avenue, a massive two-and-a-half story rooming house constructed of locally produced bricks, either glazed or painted white. Given the building’s size and color, its nickname was probably inevitable. Designed to accommodate approximately twenty-five residents, it was, according to Towar, the first rooming house in the vicinity of the College.¹

Although Towar states that the house “prospered for a while,” there is very little indication that it really did. Within its first year, the site was associated with controversy when Harrison was arrested in July 1896 for malicious destruction of property. He had damaged the streetcar tracks in front of the hall, claiming retaliation for the railway company tearing out his fence and making the grade “much higher than necessary.” The case was later dropped when the company declined to press charges, but this early conflict may have set the tone for the building’s troubled future.²

In an unrelated indicent, later that month a resident of the house, graduate student George B. Hancrone of Iowa, died at age 36 of appendicitis.³

From its inception, the house was intended to serve students. In the fall of 1897, M.A.C. rented the entire hall as a dormitory annex and installed electric wiring powered by the campus plant. The lease was renewed annually through at least the 1899–1900 school year. During this period, the nickname “White Elephant” began to emerge, and between 1901 and 1905, it had become the building’s de facto name.

In April 1900, scarlet fever struck the College, and Harrison Hall was cleared out to serve as a quarantine facility. Nine students and one instructor spent about two weeks in isolation there. Fortunately, all recovered.⁴

The building served the community in other ways. Its dining room hosted meetings that led to the formation of the fractional school district in 1900, and the first annual meeting of the school board was held there in 1901, where the site for Central School was chosen. For the 1904–1905 school year, it housed classrooms for grades 5 through 8, as the town’s growth had already outstripped the capacity of the original 1901 schoolhouse. The school’s second story was completed in 1905 to alleviate this overcrowding.⁵

Harrison House also housed a variety of businesses. In 1902, Homer Burton, a former delivery wagon driver, leased the property and opened a general store with partner Edwin M. Higgs. Just a year later, they moved the Higgs & Burton grocery to the Chase Block in College Grove and the White Elephant became home to a gentlemen’s furnishing store and steam laundry, both operated by Higgs’ brother John. Yet both of those enterprises seem to have closed within months.⁶

Joel Harrison put the property up for sale in 1901, though it is unclear when or to whom it was sold. By 1905, ownership had passed to Leonard B. Wells, an absentee landlord. Although the State Journal called him a “citizen of Lansing,” it is not clear why—records indicate that he lived in Pontiac, and later moved to Pasadena, California.⁷

In the fall of 1905, the College established a boarding club at the White Elephant to serve meals to up to fifty students, but the facility was abruptly shut down in October following a typhoid fever outbreak. Professor Marshall traced the outbreak to contaminated wells in Collegeville, one of which supplied water to the White Elephant. At least two students died.⁸

From that point forward, the White Elephant’s reputation was irreparably damaged. A later State Journal article noted that after the typhoid incident “only the most hardy and fearless family would move into the place,” and many of its later tenants “did not move the best of reputations into the place with them.” It otherwise went unmentioned in the newspapers and the M.A.C. Record, with the odd exception of a 1908 proposal by an unnamed “local physician” to convert it into a hospital. The State Journal reported the idea but conspicuously omitted the doctor’s name along with any mention of the building’s history with illness, and the proposal never materialized.⁹

By 1915, plans were floated to replace the White Elephant with “a row of fine flats and a store,” but the project fell through. In October 1916, the College bought the property for $4,000 and promptly demolished the building. It was announced that a new bridge over the Red Cedar would be contructed on its site, to provide a convenient entrance to the athletic field south of the river (now Old College Field). However, the bridge was described as “somewhat ethereal,” and remained so—in the end, additional land purchases by the College and a newer bridge over the river at Harrison Road made it unnecessary.¹⁰

As its old bricks were carted away—reportedly reused for campus buildings then under construction—the White Elephant underwent a posthumous image transformation. Once seen as an ill-fated transient house with a history of sickness and death, it became a nostalgic part of M.A.C. lore. A 1916 Record article reminisced:

Students, past and present, will greatly miss the old brick block. Many interesting scenes transpired there, and when the streetcar conductor called “White Elephant” every student of former days felt that he was getting back home.

M.A.C. Record, 22(3), 10 Oct 1916, p. 4.

For years afterward, the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Harrison Road was still colloquially known as “the old White Elephant corner.” By the mid-1920s, Michigan Avenue had been widened, and in the 1970s, South Harrison Road was realigned to meet its North Harrison counterpart and eliminate a dangerous dogleg. Today, the White Elephant’s original location is very near to the tip of the pedestrian island at the southwest corner of the intersection.¹¹

Meanwhile, in 1908, L. B. Wells had platted Joel Harrison’s former property into “River Bend,” consisting of fourteen lots stretching from Harrison Road to the Red Cedar River. Several of these lots were replatted into “River Court” in 1925. Over the years, a couple dozen houses were built on the two plats, but in September 1945, the Board of Agriculture selected River Bend and River Court as the site for the Kellogg Center for Continuing Education. By June 1947, the land had been acquired by the College, the existing houses were moved or demolished, and the one existing street, River Court, was declared abandoned. The Kellogg Center was completed in 1951.¹²

1. Towar, p. 35. ↩︎
2. Towar, p. 35. LSJ, 10 Jul 1896, p. 8; 21 Sep 1896, p. 1. ↩︎
3. LJ, 31 Jul 1896, p. 8. ↩︎
4. LSJ, 27 Apr 1900, p. 8; 8 May 1900, p. 7. ↩︎
5. LSJ, 26 Jun 1900, p. 1; 3 Sep 1901, p. 4; 1 Oct 1901, p. 1. ↩︎
6. MAC Record, 7(38), 17 Jun 1902, p. 3; 8(32), 5 May 1903, p. 3; 8(37), 9 Jun 1903, p. 3; 9(1), 21 Sep 1903, p. 2; 9(17), 19 Jan 1904, p. 2. ↩︎
7. LSJ, 16 Sep 1901, p. 5; 2 Mar 1908, p. 1. LCD (1905), p. 445. Pasadena City Directory (1907), p. 498. ↩︎
8. LJ, 18 Oct 1905, p. 1. MAC Record, 11(1), 19 Sep 1905, p. 3; 11(7), 31 Oct 1905, p. 2; 11(8), 7 Nov 1905, p. 2. ↩︎
9. LSJ, 4 Oct 1916, p. 1; 2 Mar 1908, p. 1. ↩︎
10. LSJ, 4 Oct 1916, p. 1. MAC Record, 22(8), 14 Nov 1916, p. 6; 28(3), 9 Oct 1922, p. 4. ↩︎
11. MAC Record, 22(8), 14 Nov 1916, p. 6; 26(12), 10 Dec 1920, p. 1; 30(2), 29 Sep 1924, p. 20. LSJ, 1 Sep 1974, p. 17. ↩︎
12. Minutes, 20 Sep 1945, p. 2174. LSJ, 20 Jun 1947, p. 16. ↩︎