Remains of Boy Governor Moved, Recalling His Part in Founding Bay City
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(R) Painting of Stevens T. Mason, 6 feet wide and 15 feet high, hangs in the State Capitol. (L) Famed athlete Jim Thorpe in his football playing days.
This seems to be the week for stories about long dead heroes with Bay City connections.
First was the yarn about famed athlete Jim Thorpe, whose son Jack wants him back from the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Jim was buried there more than half a century ago in a devil's bargain made by Thorpe's third wife who was paid $5,000 for the body.
Now it is about Michigan's first governor whose remains were excavated Tuesday in a tiny park in downtown Detroit.
We don't even know if Stevens T. Mason ever visited Lower Saginaw, Michigan, but he was an investor in the Saginaw Bay Company along with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, noted Indian agent for Michigan, James Fraser and a group of Detroit investors.
Thorpe's connection comes through the Sauk Indians, now the Sac and Fox Tribe of Oklahoma. The main Sauk village was located on high ground on the west bank of the river here 350 years ago until the massacre of the tribe about 1640.
Interviewed in 1980 in Oklahoma, Jack Thorpe recalled that his tribe's oral history contains recollection of the massacre and the time of the Bay City residency.
Hardly anybody except Bay City historical buffs know anything about the connection of Stevens T. Mason.
But the historical record shows that he would have been governor for perhaps two years, aged about 26, in 1837 when he joined the group that put up considerable cash to buy part of the Riley Reservation that comprises a good chunk of downtown Bay City today.
The investors risked the incredible sum of $30,000 and paid it to Stephen V.R. Riley, a trader, for 240 acres from today's Woodside Avenue to Tenth Street and from the River to Van Buren Street. The land was part of a reservation obtained for his half-breed Chippewa son John Riley in the Saginaw Treaty of 1819.
In addition to the amazingly large investment (about $694,000 in today's dollars) in what was basically wilderness, the investors plunged further by building a series of buildings on speculation along the river about where Wenonah Park stands today.
The other founders of the stock company were Frederick H. Stevens, Andrew T. McReynolds, Horace Hallock, Electus Backus, John Hulbert, Henry K. Sanger and Phineas Davis.
Mason's remains had rested in a New York crypt, then were moved to a Detroit site beside a cornerstone of the original state Capitol. The casket-shaped crypt was uncovered six feet down.
"We thought we'd find him directly under the statue, but he was a few feet to the side," said Cedric Hesley, superintendent for Tooles Contracting.
The casket will be opened Thursday by workers from the Harris Funeral Home.
"It's unique to have the actual remains of the state's first governor buried in a park beneath his statue," said Jack Dempsey, vice president of the Michigan Historical Commission.
The discovery of Mason's mortal remains have elicited a variety of reactions; in 1905 the disinterment was accompanied by a band playing and Civil War and Spanish American War veterans marching; in the second unearthing later there was little ceremony.
Now his statue rising above his grave will occupy a place of honor in the park.
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