The University of Michigan Was Almost in Toledo

Toledo — The Saturday after Thanksgiving is the most important Big 10 football game. The Michigan and Ohio State football game is an annual re-enactment of the Toledo War of 1835.

This rival tension is hottest in Monroe County and Toledo—a divided region with Buckeyes marrying Wolverines and producing mutant children. Some love Cleveland baseball. Others love the Detroit Lions. Ever since the Toledo War, the Glass City has always been in-between two worlds. Every Michigan vs. Ohio State watch party is a house divided.

The Toledo War began because of a contradiction between the law and the maps of the time. According to law, the Michigan Territory’s southern border would be a line from the southernmost part of Lake Michigan running directly east to Lake Erie. Yet, several maps told different stories, some showing Lake Michigan as miles north of where it actually was, which put Toledo in Michigan. Others drew the line with Toledo in Ohio.

Toledo was becoming a commercial hub, so the legal battle began. At the end of the nearly bloodless war, Congress gave Toledo to Ohio, and Michigan received the Upper Peninsula.

But in the annexation, Toledo lost the University of Michigan.

Many were buying up land in the Toledo Strip until 1837. Even the Roman Catholic Church in Detroit obtained six sections from Indian tribes, which were eventually allotted to the University of Michigan. It needed more land for a new campus. By 1827, the university owned over 900 acres of what is now downtown Toledo, particularly the Warehouse District.

I went down to S Huron Street and walked by a plaque claiming the street is “One of Toledo’s oldest neighborhoods and originally in Michigan, Huron St. Village was considered as the site of the University of Michigan.” Yet, U-M denies this, saying “...the Trustees who oversaw U-M’s operations, quickly appointed a committee to select these lands—not to build on them, but to claim them, then sell them for profit.”

Yet this denial comes after years of most everyone in Toledo and Monroe County siding with the S Huron Plaque’s claim. Everyone here says U-M was going to be here. If it’s a lie, we believe it.

Here in the borderland, we love to throw out the factoid that instead of having the University of Toledo, we could have had the $21 billion fueling the city’s downtown. We don’t believe U-M’s claim. The history seems to agree, because discussions for a relocation from Detroit to Ann Arbor didn’t happen until 1837, when the dispute over the Toledo Strip was settled.

Now it is possible that U-M was only buying land in the strip to sell. But questions arise. Couldn’t U-M have been doing both depending on what happened in the battle for the Toledo Strip? Why did Michigan’s “boy governor,” Stevens T. Mason, muster a militia to take the strip? Doesn’t his energy show that Michigan as a whole really wanted Toledo? Why did U-M feel the need to buy an entire village within the city if not because Toledo was desirable for a university?

But past statements answer these questions. A 1907 article titled “The University of Michigan Once Owned One-Half of Toledo” appeared in the Toledo Evening Press. Albert Everett Macomber, a graduate of U-M’s law school who moved to Toledo, wrote the piece. His statements throughout agree with the plaque. He states that: “The University of Michigan has a local and romantic interest in her neighboring city of Toledo.” He also mourns that U-M sold the 916 acres for $20,000, about $20 an acre. The man clearly loved both U-M and Toledo and stated that the sale of the property was a wasted potential for the university.

But I wonder if the real reason Michigan denies Toledo is because of a football game.

At the Big House in 2008, the University of Toledo football team defeated the Wolverines 13-10. It was the only time the two teams ever faced. Here in Monroe County, where many of us are University of Toledo alumni and many are U-M fans, we love to talk about that game. And we still tell everyone that Ann Arbor was U-M’s back up plan.

If Toledo almost becoming Michigan’s premier academic town is an urban legend, we don’t want to know. I think history is clear that this was a possibility. Either way, we can only dream of the past.

The Warehouse District is the most Toledoish section of the city. The factories have been turned into restaurants, with a farmer’s market at the end of the street, and faded ads on the sides of brick that hail back to the city’s golden era. When I stand down there, I imagine the Big House along the Maumee, rising over a Rust Belt landscape.

But the truth is that the character of the people on the borderland wouldn’t allow for a fancy university. We love the tension of existing between two states. There’s more stake in a football game that way. We would have nothing to fight about anymore.