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I'm Jim Tobin. I write the U of M Heritage column for Michigan Today and I'm standing here on the Diag of the University of Michigan
We all take it for granted that the Diag is where is it is.
It doesn't seem like it could be anywhere else.
But in fact, it could very easily have been somewhere else.
It could have been here--a few blocks north of the Diag, near University Hospital.
If just one member of the Board of Regents had changed his vote at a meeting in 1837,
then all of us would've gone to school on a campus that was around here.
The upper stories of Angell Hall might have looked out on a view like this,
out over the Huron River toward the hills where North Campus is now.
It was this particular natural setting that attracted settlers to Ann Arbor in the first place.
They were from New England and upstate New York, and the low hills right through here reminded them of home.
They started the town in the 1820s.
Ten years later, when Michigan was about to become a state, some smart real estate developers went to work.
They called themselves the Ann Arbor Land Company.
They bought a bunch of property in and around the village,and they laid out streets with lots for houses.
They knew Ann Arbor was in the running to become the state capital.
They also knew that if that came to pass, the value of their properties was going to skyrocket.
So they offered 40 acres for free to the new state government as the site of a capital building.
But Lansing was picked instead.
So the Ann Arbor Land Company offered the same acreage as the setting for the new University of Michigan.
And that tipped the Legislature's decision to put the University in Ann Arbor.
Once that decision was made, the town was going to grow--and the Ann Arbor Land Company knew it.
So they placed this ad for a thousand town lots in the newspapers:
Meanwhile, in June 1837, the U-M Board of Regents held their first meeting in Ann Arbor.
One of their main tasks was to decide on a physical location for the campus.
Now according to early histories, the committee looked at two sites.
One of them was here, at the north end of State Street -- the site overlooking the river.
This was property owned by a farmer named Nowland, who offered to sell it to the state.
The other site was here at the Diag--the 40 acres the Ann Arbor Land Company was offering for free.
It was this square plot of land bounded by State Street on the West, South University, North University, East University.
It had belonged to Elisha Rumsey, who founded Ann Arbor with his partner, John Allen. It was flat, and it was mostly cleared of trees.
The committee came back and said they wanted to buy the Nowland site--the one overlooking the Huron valley--and make that the campus.
Now, the Regents didn't keep detailed minutes of this meeting, so we don't know exactly what they argued about.
We know money was tight, and the Rumsey site was being offered for free.
And some of the Regents probably talked about problems with the terrain near the North State site.
If you've ever waited in line at Angelo's, you were standing in the little valley where Glen Street is now.
In the 1830s, this little valley was deeper and steeper--it's been filled in and smoothed out since then.
One of the early historians of the University wrote:
"In 1837 it was a forbidding-looking place, its sinkholes concealed under swamp weeds and stunted tamarack, and full of snakes.
The first students at the University had a horror of the place, and dubbed it a 'cat-hole.'
The Regents thought this little gulch would block expansion of a future campus.
So they overruled their own committee by a single vote, and accepted the gift of the nice, flat Rumsey farm. And so that's where the campus was built.
For a long time a lot of people in Ann Arbor thought they'd made the wrong decision.
Even as late as the 1920s, Wilfred Shaw, who was the head of the Alumni Association for many years and a great loyalist of the University, was still thinking about it.
He wrote: "We can only imagine now how much more beautiful and impressive the buildings of the University might have been, lining the brows of the hills overlooking the Huron Valley, rather than spreading over the flat, rough clearing of the Rumsey farm."