The public astronomers of early Detroit
An undated Jex Bardwell photo of an unidentified man with a telescope in Campus Martius. From the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.
Albert Vernon Phister used to drag his gigantic telescope to downtown Detroit to show people the stars. He would get some goofy questions: Is the sun inhabited? Can you tell if it will rain tomorrow? But he took them with good humor and talked about how a telescope worked and what you could use it to see. He charged a few cents for a look through it.
Phister, by trade, was a printer — a veteran of the business staff of the Detroit Free Press and one of the city’s first newspaper linotype operators. Astronomy was his avocation, and he was part of a small but avid community of amateur astronomers who stargazed in Detroit around the turn of the 20th Century.
In fact, astronomers in Detroit in this era were all amateurs, so far as I can tell. There were no public astronomical observatories in the city, although the misleadingly named Detroit Observatory at the University of Michigan was established in 1854. Michigan State University also had an observatory, built in 1881, that was recently rediscovered while workers were installing some hammocks. At this time there were no universities in Detroit, let alone the kind of university that would have an observatory.1
Still, there were astronomy enthusiasts in Detroit, and some of them had telescopes. A June 1892 article in the Detroit Free Press attempted to list them all. Former Michigan Secretary of State Gilbert Osmun owned one. So did recent Detroit High School graduate Charles F. Tallman (class of ‘92). Henry S. Hulbert, then 23 years old, owned a telescope made by John Brashear that was “equatorially mounted in a compact observatory at his home, and governed by clock-work of his own manufacture.” The paper’s source for all of this? It’s our sidewalk astronomer Mr. Phister, who kept an inventory of Detroit’s astronomical instruments and their owners. (“If there are any others owning telescopes in Detroit they are requested to send their address to A.V. Phister.”) Phister, by the way, owned a four-and-3/8ths-inch Brashear telescope mounted on a portable tripod, the better for lugging around town.
The largest telescope in Detroit was part of the private astronomical observatory of Oscar E. Cartwright at his home at 165 Elmwood Avenue, just outside of the cemetery gates. You can see it on the Sanborn Map, clearly marked “Astronomical Observatory”:
Corner of Macomb and “Cemetery” if you’re not sure where to look.
Professionally, Cartwright was co-owner, with his brother J.H. Cartwright, of the Cartwright Bros. Granite Co., which made stone monuments, funerary memorials and mausoleums. (This may explain his proximity to the cemetery.) His telescope was a six-inch refractor made by Alvan Clark & Sons, instrument makers who were world-famous for repeatedly making the largest telescopes in the world. It was supported by an iron pillar that ran top-to-bottom through the middle of the Cartwright home and into its foundation, stabilizing the telescope against street rumblings and other physical noise.
In 1888, at the Lick Observatory in San Jose, Calif., a Clark 36-inch telescope that had taken five years to make became the largest telescope in the world.2 This is locally relevant because in 1892, an astronomer at the Lick Observatory, E.E. Barnard, “discovered” Amalthea, the fifth known moon of Jupiter and the first to be identified since Galileo. I use scare quotes because Oscar Cartwright would claim for the rest of his life that he had found Amalthea first, had discussed it in astronomical circles, and that Dr. Barnard — able to confirm its existence only because he had access to the world’s largest telescope — had refused to share the credit. Cartwright apparently brought this up to anyone who would listen; the story turns up in the report of a mine manager who was with Cartwright on a prospecting expedition to a granite lode in Point Mamainse, Ontario, in 1894.
Cartwright often opened his observatory to the public for interesting astronomical events and to raise money for local charities, by way of a few-cents charge to see the stars. “Mr. Cartwright not only enjoys showing his pets to visitors, but he is very seldom without visitors at night time when there is anything that can be seen,” the Free Press reported in a “House Envy”-type feature about the observatory in 1891.
In 1892, both Cartwright brothers, A.V. Phister, Henry Hulbert and others (several women among them, including Anna Briscoe, Mary Campbell, Emma Williams, and the otherwise unnamed wives of A.P. Backus, A.F. Blanchard and J.T. Sterling) organized an amateur astronomy club — the Astronomical Society of Michigan, they called themselves. The group met monthly for a few years, hosting readings and lantern slide shows, discussing the latest scientific papers, and collecting materials for an astronomy library.
The society seems to have petered out after a few years. Then, in 1896, a tragedy in the community inspired a brief revival: Oscar Cartwright caught pneumonia and died at the untimely age of 45.3
Members of the old Astronomical Society organized a stock society to raise $2500, through the sale of $25 shares, to buy Cartwright’s telescopes and other instruments. (It’s not clear how they planned to solve the problem of the large Clark telescope that, a reporter noted, “stands imbedded in ten feet of ground on solid masonry.”) A.W. Blain, the superintendent of Elmwood Cemetery, led the membership charge. The society may not have raised enough money to buy all of Cartwright’s equipment, but it did well enough to persuade his widow Nota to keep the observatory open to the public and to hire a director, Samuel Stewart, to run it. On July 28, 1897, the Cartwright Observatory hosted visitors for a viewing of a partial solar eclipse.
At the same time, members of the old Astronomical Society of Michigan were trying to get the group together again under the new name of the Detroit Astronomical Society, with A.V. Phister as its president. The group met once, in July, at the Cartwright Observatory, enrolled 17 members, and named A.V. Phister as president. At a follow-up meeting in August, only Phister and a Detroit Free Press reporter showed up.
Nota continued to live at the old observatory on Elmwood Avenue until at least 1910, though public programs at the observatory are not reported much after 1900. (That year, it was used by an ornithologist to track bird migration along the Detroit River by the light of a full moon.) In 1902, a Detroit News story described the observatory as “deserted,” though it conceded that Nota still opened the observatory by request from time to time. The fate of the observatory after Nota moved out — in 1920 she is listed in the Census as living on St. Clair street with one of her children — will probably haunt me forever.4
Painting of the 1918 solar eclipse by Howard Russell Butler. Source.
But the earth keeps turning. In 1918, A.V. Phister, “probably the best-known astronomer in the city,” was the expert source for a Detroit Free Press story about the upcoming June 8 total solar eclipse. Phister advised the paper’s readers that all views would be good views of the eclipse — a yard, a rooftop, wherever — and to protect their eyes with a piece of smoked glass.
Phister, then 78 years old, told the paper he planned to bring his telescope to Cadillac Square for anyone who wanted to take a closer look.
He died the following year. “Detroit streets miss amateur astronomer,” the headline in the Windsor Star read.
Wayne State University “existed” at this time only as a few unaffiliated professional colleges around the city. But just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, I reached out to WSU for more info about the history of their astronomical observatory. Thanks to Dr. Jerry Dunifer, Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, for this more modern historical context: The university set up a rooftop observatory in the mid-1970s, outfitted with about eight 6-inch telescopes for student use. Two observation domes were installed on the roof in 1990, which have had a number of different telescopes mounted in them over the years. Currently, the largest telescope in the observation dome is a 16-inch reflector made by Meade Instruments.
Ten years later, another Clark telescope, this one at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisc., took over the title. Also, amazing fun fact: James Lick is buried in the foundation of his observatory !!!
It was one of the great disappointments of my professional life to learn that Oscar Cartwright is buried not at Elmwood, but at Woodmere. You LIVED ACROSS THE STREET FROM ELMWOOD WHAT THE HELL OSCAR!
The neighborhood around the cemetery changed dramatically during the 1970s, in the final phases of a broader urban renewal plan that had begun in nearby Lafayette Park in the late 1940s. The Cartwright home and observatory would have been torn down then, if not well before, during a major “blight clearance” effort. Also: One more thing about Nota! After Oscar’s death she worked for 25 years as a matron in the Detroit Police Department. You’re welcome for the free historical novel idea, “Victorian working woman lives alone in dead husband’s abandoned astronomical observatory for 25 years.”