There’s a sculpture in the middle of the pond at Elmwood Cemetery of geese in flight.
The sculpture was commissioned by Estelle Littlepage Macauley, widow of Alvan Macauley, in his memory. When he died in 1952, he was best known as the long-time president of Packard Motor Car Co., a job he held for two decades.
But farther back in his biography is the tale of a semi-forgotten Detroit mega-business and how it got here. It’s the story of an adding machine company. And unlike many of Detroit’s once-great non-automotive industries — stoves, tobacco, seeds, e.g. — the adding machine business wasn’t homegrown. Nothing in Detroit’s geographic or agricultural or sociological context promoted its development. It was transplanted here — possibly in a spirit of vengeance!
Macauley was born in 1872 in West Virginia and grew up in Washington, D.C. His father was a veteran who had lost an arm during the Civil War. Macauley spent his summers milking cows on farms; then he went to law school. An apprenticeship with a patent attorney led him to an in-house job at the Dayton-based National Cash Register Company. That’s where Macauley decided, as the headline read in a 1921 profile of Macauley in Motor magazine, that “he preferred business to law,” and entered the management ranks at the cash register company.
Alvan Macauley. From the Detroit Public Library’s National Automotive History Collection, Lazarnick Collection.
In 1901, Macauley was recruited to join the American Arithmometer Company in St. Louis, Mo., founded in 1885 by the inventor of the adding machine, William S. Burroughs (oh like the Beat writer you might ask? In fact yes! It’s his dad!). Three years later, the company was growing out of its space. As Macauley related to Motor, as part of a planned expansion, the company sought approval from the St. Louis city council to build a bridge over an alleyway. The council denied it — perhaps, the reporter seems to suggest, because councilors expected to be bribed for their votes.1
The American Arithmometer Co. responded radically: It pulled up stakes in St. Louis, swiftly and completely. There is a story that the company did this more or less overnight and by surprise, but the planned relocation was reported in the Detroit papers in July 1904, three months ahead of the move.
Still, that move was logistically impressive. On Oct. 2, American Arithmometer advertised its 20,000-square-foot St. Louis factory for rent. In four days, it loaded up 41 boxcars full of factory equipment and all of the baggage and personal effects of the company’s 400+ employees onto a chartered train, the Clover Leaf Express. Waiting for them in Detroit was a state-of-the-art 70,000-square-foot factory building at Second and Amsterdam streets, designed by upstart industrial architect Albert Kahn and built on a former D.M. Ferry Seed Co. cornfield. Also waiting for them in Detroit were Mayor William C. Maybury and Joseph L. Hudson, president of the Board of Commerce, who met their train at the station on Oct. 8, along with a large crowd of onlookers, and I love that major corporate relocations were once a spectator attraction.
The first American Arithmometer adding machines shipped out of Detroit seven days later. The company was soon rechristened the Burroughs Adding Machine Co.2
Shortly after their arrival, the new citizens of Detroit (wearing pins that read “New citizen of Detroit”!) were thrown a party on a pleasure boat (the actual steamboat “Pleasure”!) where the mayor wore a jaunty nautical costume and reporters asked them how they liked Detroit so far. One employee said: “It is the spirit of the town I like, and its comparative freedom from graft. Down in St. Louis, graft is the order of the day.” Water Winter Freedom From Graft Wonderland!
A 1906 photograph of employees of the former American Arithmometer Company, renamed the Burroughs Adding Machine Company upon its relocation to Detroit, outside the company’s Detroit factory. University of Minnesota Libraries, Charles Babbage Institute.
But back to our man Macauley. Was it his idea to move the American Arithmometer Company to Detroit? This is unclear, but here is a clue: the company’s president, Joseph Boyer, had been since 1900 a resident of Detroit, having — well, — pulled up stakes of another St. Louis-based company, the Boyer Machine Co., loaded its equipment and hundreds of employees onto a chartered express train, and relocated the entire company to a more capacious factory at the intersection of Second and Amsterdam streets. It stands to reason that, although Macauley may have played an important executive role in American Arithmometer’s relocation to Detroit, the idea was probably Boyer’s.3
Nevertheless, it brought Macauley to Detroit, into its business circles, and toward his corporate destiny. Packard recruited him in 1910, and that’s where he stayed for the rest of his career.
Ruddy and robust, Macauley was an ardent outdoorsman who spent his weekends duck hunting in the Erie marshlands. (He was also a hobbyist wood-worker who, upon his death, left behind “one of the finest private workshops in the country” in the basement of his Grosse Pointe home.4)
His memorial sculpture at Elmwood, if you hadn’t guessed or recognized it, is the work of Marshall Fredericks, Michigan’s favorite sculptor of enormous figures and charismatic animals. It’s an obvious homage to Macauley’s love of the outdoors as well as a symbol of the soul taking flight after death. “Flying Wild Geese” is one of those famous Fredericks sculptures that you will now see everywhere. Next time you do, remember that it started as cemetery art!
Well that was a whole journey. This all started because over the weekend I got to share some of Elmwood’s history on a birding walk with the (soon-to-be-renamed) Detroit Audubon Society. The valley along Bloody Run and by the pond is a good birding spot, plus it felt appropriate to highlight the one bird-themed work of cemetery art I could think of. (Later on the walk someone spotted a stone eagle on top of an obelisk; noted for next time!) I expect there will be more birding walks at the cemetery in 2024, so stay tuned for more info if that sounds like fun.
Some links
I am sure you do not need me to tell you this but the Michigan DNR is accepting public comment about what to do with the historic Belle Isle Boat House through Dec. 31 (via a wildly slanted briefing memo but we can talk about that another time). Go tell ‘em how you feel about irreplaceable old boat houses.
Ste. Anne’s restored a big old church bell from 1848 that hadn’t been rung for 25 years.
How the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald inspired advancements in meteorology.
Andy Warhol’s mod wedding at the Michigan State Fairgrounds. This is also a whole journey.
One more holiday-related little history letter coming your way in 2023. It’s been so nice to be back in touch!
Other accounts are not so suggestive: Clarence Burton argued in 1922 that the Burroughs company was mostly seeking a less unionized labor environment.
The Burroughs Adding Machine Co. building still exists! It’s a historic building hiding behind a cardboardesque ‘60s retrofit; you know the type. Today it’s the corporate headquarters of Henry Ford Health.
It’s going to drive me crazy forever not knowing why Boyer chose Detroit in the first place, but I loved this simple and snobby explanation in a Jan. 28, 1900 story in The Detroit Free Press: “The removal to Detroit is largely a matter of sentiment. ... It will, it is said, erect an expensive factory, move its plant, furnish transportation to from 200 to 250 employees who come with it, chiefly because Detroit is a better city than St. Louis in which to live and enjoy life.”
Albert Kahn designed the Macauley family home at 735 Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe. After Macauley’s death, Estelle sold the house to Alfred P. Glancy Jr., who used Macauley’s basement workshop to build a legendary model train layout. Glancy was fatally injured in a burglary at the home in 1972 and his family had the house razed after his death. Glancy’s model train layout is now at the Detroit Historical Museum.