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Welcome to the County Seat! You’ve made it to Ace #2!
Before Ann Arbor was even built, you could tell it would be an important town: There was a blank space left on the first map where the future county courthouse and jail would be built. We might not think of courthouses and jails as all that exciting, but they were when towns were just being founded almost two hundred years ago. Why? Since each county only had one of each, all court cases in the county—from civil lawsuits to criminal trials—would need to be brought to Ann Arbor. In addition to the jobs it created for its own employees, the courthouse also drew a steady stream of customers to nearby hotels and restaurants, which provided beds and food for all the people traveling to do business at the courthouse.
Most of the court cases weren’t like the ones you might have seen on television. When Ann Arbor was new, most of its cases involved land. There were farmers registering land deeds (papers proving who owned a piece of land—like receipts), people buying and selling property, and boundary (or "property line") arguments between neighbors. Do you know what a boundary is? Do you ever fight with a brother or sister about what “space” belongs to you in the house or the car? Same kind of thing—only bigger.
The court heard its first case in 1827 and only four years later the village had six attorneys. Back then you didn’t necessarily have to go to law school to call yourself a lawyer—you could study on your own. Even John Allen (remember him from the crash course you read about Early Settlement?) read for the law after founding Ann Arbor and by 1831 he was trying cases in court.
The first courthouse had actually been someone’s private house. It was called the Gregory House and stood on the corner of Huron and Main Streets. There was so much business, however, that Ann Arbor soon needed a bigger building. So, the much more impressive Washtenaw County Courthouse was built in 1878. You can get a sense of how important the courthouse was to Ann Arbor by comparing the two buildings. Can you tell the old courthouse from the new one built in 1878?
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What looks the same? How are they different? How do you think you’d feel walking up the steps of the new courthouse?
Just to Think About: