Dr. Jeremy Kilar, second from right, displays his latest book on local history. Local History Now Gets Some Respect, Says Professor/Author Jerry Kilar
|
||||||||||
| Printer Friendly Story View |
Dr. Jeremy Kilar's book "Michigan Lumbertowns" has made the list of Fifty Essential Michigan Books selected by the Michigan Department of History, Arts and Libraries.
Dr. Kilar spoke to an appreciative crowd at the "Second Saturday" series at the Bay County Historical Museum recently and revealed some inside information about his discipline -- local history -- and about Bay City's rowdy past.
"Local history has had a slow evolutionary awareness," he said, noting that there is a lot of writing from a popular perspective. When he began writing local history 30 years ago in this area only Dr. John Jezierski at Saginaw Valley State University and he were addressing that aspect of history, he recalled.
After an initial probe into local history in collaboration with Bradley Smith on a book called "Tobico Marsh," Dr. Kilar dug deeply into the industrial and social histories of Bay City, Saginaw and Muskegon.
He reported that the economic decline of the late 19th century was very similar to today's decline. "In my book Bay City does not come out very well," Kilar noted. One of his theses in the book was that Saginaw and Muskegon lumber barons re-invested in their communities while Bay City's wealthy mill owners were mainly absentee landlords who took their money and moved on. A good example was the Eddy family that took its equipment and moved to Canada. While two-thirds of the lumber barons in Saginaw and Muskegon lived in those towns, in Bay City the situation was reversed.
"Bay City is really fun to write about because of the ethnic groups," said the author, who is a professor of history at Delta College.
Writing about the lumber barons is difficult because of 200 wealthy individuals, only six or seven kept their papers, he noted.
Some, like Henry Sage, however, left documentation of their perverse attitudes. "Sage vigorously fought any community improvements because they would have cost him money in additional taxes," he said. Sage also brought in Polish immigrants as strikebreakers when he fired about 1,000 of his employees for seeking a raise in pay and shorter hours. Sage even fired some of his managers who were suspected of secretly sympathizing with the workers.
Sage did keep his promise to build a library for West Bay City but he deducted 25 cents from each paycheck of his employees to fund the project, according to Dr. Kilar.
Bay City proper, or East Bay City, although it had about 15 millionaires living nearby, had to seek funding for its library from the Carnegie Foundation in Pittsburgh.
When the upper classes abdicated political leadership, the ward heelers moved into Bay City, he said. This trend has persisted to the present day.
When votes came for consolidation of the cities, the wealthy wards voted "no" while the immigrants favored the move, he said. "That was proof the wealthy didn't care about improving the city."
Dr. Kilar said he could find no historical confirmation of a rumor that the Ford Motor Co. was kept out of Bay City because William Clements didn't want any competition for workers.
When the 1880 Census was taken, Saginaw reported 38 houses of prostitution while Bay City said it had only four. "Everybody knew Bay City was really a lot worse," he commented. "Prostitution was big business in Bay City and Saginaw," he said, estimating that there were 250 "ladies of the night" between the two towns.
"My next book may be entitled "Sin and Salvation in Bay City," he said, concluding the talk.###
| Printer Friendly Story View |
|
|
Dave Rogers |
|
|
|
Printer-Friendly Story View
0200 Nd: 04-22-2024 d 4 cpr 0
12/31/2020 P3v3-0200-Ad.cfm
SPONSORED LINKS
12/31/2020 drop ads P3v3-0200-Ad.cfm