The Woman Ann Arbor Is Named After Had Slaves

Ann Arbor — The high-achieving undergrads and crunchy urbanites have made this city a haven for the socially progressive.

So it’s kind of a weird thing that the city is named after a woman whose family owned slaves.

So few people know about this that the city’s name survived the 2020 BLM reckoning, even while Democrats held every elected office in the city.

History’s weird, but here’s the truth: In 1824, two men named John Allan and Elisha Rumsey met in Detroit and decided to explore the Michigan hinterlands. Following Native American trails, they came to a bend in the Huron river and found a large oak-covered hill with a nearby stream, perfect for a mill.

Allen and Rumsey registered their plat in Detroit, paid the Feds $800, and officially recorded the name of their new hamlet as “Annarbour” in May 1824.

So who was Ann?

Strangely enough, both of their wives had that name: Ann Isabella Allen and Mary Ann Rumsey.

If it was known locally at the time which Ann the town was named for, that got muddled. By 1927 a folk story emerged that Mary Ann Rumsey was sitting under some grapevines near Allen's Creek, and someone asked what she called the spot. She supposedly said: "This is Ann's Arbor."

But given that the name of the town was recorded in May, and Mary Ann didn’t come to Ann Arbor until October, that story doesn’t pass the sniff test. And Mary Ann didn’t go by “Ann” anyway.

A historian named Russell Bidlack cleared it up: John Allen had surely named it for wife, who actually went by Ann, because he used the strange spelling “arbour,” which was popular in his native Virginia.

And so the city was almost certainly named for Ann Isabella Allen, a southern woman of privilege. When Ann was born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1797, she wasn’t even named Ann. Originally named Agnes Barry, her family took to calling her Ann Isabella after her mother, who died giving birth to her.

Her father passed away when she was three, and she was sent to live with her aunt and uncle, who owned slaves. She grew up with the comfort of having blacks attend to her and family's needs.

And once that life ended, and she went to join her husband by covered wagon on the Michigan frontier, she was none too happy about it. She went from Southern comfort to a land of muddy roads, roaming hogs, and frightful cold. In a letter to her son, she wrote: “When I look back, all that I had is gone to the four winds; when I look forward, all is darkness.”

Brutal for Michigan. Our fifth-largest city is named for someone who didn’t particularly like it here, and left the first chance she got. In 1844, her son came and brought her back to her native Virginia, where she lived out her days. Not ideal.

But history’s weird. As radicals tore down statues and renamed streets and schools in 2020 and beyond, Ann Arbor’s name never came under scrutiny.

I guess Arbor, Michigan, just wasn’t good enough.