The Michigan Military Academy

IN THE SUMMER OF 1874, a Detroit High School drill teamA set up camp for a fortnight on Orchard Lake’s southeastern shore. The site was ideal-far enough out in the country (twenty-six miles) from the bustling 100,000 Detroiters to give the cadets a taste of “roughing it,” yet near enough to Pontiac to be easily accessible by the Detroit & Milwaukee Railroad. The group’s leader was duly impressed, but what excited him the most was a martial-looking building on the northeast shore, the Orchard Lake Hotel.

This bizarre three-story structure of red brick, with its two cylindrical towers and its corbeled cornices, looked like a castle. Built in 1858 by Joseph Tarr Copeland upon his retirement from the state supreme court, the ten-room house had been converted into a resort hotel in 1872 by adding two wings. However, the five-year depression following the panic of 1873 virtually killed the enterprise.¹

After that summer encampment, the drillmaster, Captain Joseph Sumner Rogers (1844-1901), tried to sell the idea of establishing a military school. Having no funds of his own, he finally managed to borrow a few thousand dollars from Governor John Judson Bagley and other prominent Detroiters. In 1877 Rogers bought the hotel, and on September 4 the Michigan Military Academy was incorporated.

Rogers, like Copeland, was a native of Maine. When sixteen, he had joined the Union infantry. During the Second Battle of Bull Run he suffered a severe head injury, which may have been the cause of frequent illnesses in later years. His enlistment up, he returned home to complete his schooling at the Bucksport Seminary in Bangor. In 1864 he re-enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Thirty-first Maine and was mustered out a year later as a captain and brevet-major. He clerked at the War Department in Washington until 1867, and then re-entered the army as a second lieutenant in the First U.S. Infantry Regiment. Seven years later he was assigned as a professor of military science and tactics at Detroit High School.²

Rogers’ institution was closely modeled after West Point, especially in its gray and white uniforms and its postgraduate course offering a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. Two prep-school curriculums were offered-an English commercial course and a college preparatory course-and all cadets were trained in basic infantry and artillery tactics. The President of the United States appointed a regular army officer as professor of military science and tactics, and the War Department furnished all military equipment except the uniforms. To attract members for the school band, reduced tuition rates were offered the musically talented.

Claiming its students would be better educated because of their being “removed from every evil influence that surrounds the town,” the school’s catalogs warned:

• Students expelled from other schools need not apply; and, in no case, will applicants be received from other institutions, without proper testimonials of good moral character.
• As this academy is by no means an asylum for the vicious and unmanageable, such young men, if known, will in all cases be rejected; and any Cadet who fails, after trial, to manifest the honor and self-respect that mark the gentleman, will be discharged.^{3 B}

Once the federal government recognized the school, the Michigan legislature quickly followed suit. Although the state never appropriated any funds toward the academy’s operation, Rogers was granted a colonelcy in the state militia, annual inspections of the school were ordered, and the graduates were accepted as militia lieutenants.

Eventually, the school attained not only regional but national distinction. In 1887, Rogers’ cadets took first prize in the National Drill Competition at Washington, D.C. Two years later the academy won recognition at the New York’s Washington Centennial:

• In all the parade there were four bodies that struggled for applause as the most automatic, rigid, and perfect marching bodies. These were the West Point Cadets, the Seventh Regiment of this city, the boys of the Michigan Military Academy, near Detroit, and the Twenty-third Regiment of Brooklyn.⁴

The army was as impressed with the school as were civilians, as one official report shows:

• This Academy still maintains its place as the leading military institution of the country, outside of West Point, and in all its details it is the most complete and thorough school of the kind I have ever inspected. The state may well be proud of Orchard Lake Military Academy, and the young men it graduates.⁵

Moreover, Cornell and the University of Michigan waived entrance exams for academy alumni, and the University of Chicago offered a special scholarship to academy graduates.

Despite these achievements, the school was continually in debt, as increasing enrollment required expanded facilities. In thirty years, nine major buildings, most of which remain today, were added to the campus. Never endowed and never aided by the state, the school was perpetually in debt for these improvements. Rogers spent $325,000 on the academy; yet, at his death the school was still $100,000 in the red.⁶

Annual enrollments rose steadily from 43 the first year to 138 by 1883. Thereafter the number fluctuated between 90 and 180. To obtain federal supplies and army personnel, accommodations for 150 cadets had to be maintained, yet in most years enrollment fell below this figure. Unfortunately, most academy records have been lost or destroyed, but some statistics are available from school catalogs:

Since 483 had graduated by 1904, and perhaps 75-100 more in the remaining three years, only one out of four of an estimated 2,500 entrants received diplomas or degrees.

The number expelled cannot be determined, but many youths apparently found the isolation and rigorous training too spartan and left. Two of the academy’s dropoutsD later became famous. John Christian Lodge, who attended the academy for only half a year before resigning in January, 1881, later became a formidable and popular member of Detroit’s Common Council and that city’s mayor in 1928. Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the famous Tarzan novels, attended in 1895 and was slated to graduate that year, but his name is not included in alumni listings of the academy’s subsequent catalogs.⁸

For those who did persevere, the academy provided a good education. Most went into business, a few into the army. The most notable graduated included:

• Harry Lovejoy Rogers (class of ‘84), son of the academy’s founder, became supply officer to Pershing’s Mexican Expedition in 1914 and served as chief quartermaster of the American Expeditionary Force in France, 1917-18.
• Edwin Baruch Winans, Jr. (class of ‘86), son of Michigan’s twenty-second governor, commanded the Thirty-second Division’s Sixty-fourth Infantry Brigade in France in the First World War, and was superintendent of West Point in 1927-28.
• Henry Rogers Seager (class of ‘86) became a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and wrote a number of books, including Principles of Economics (1913).
• Daniel Read Anthony, Jr. (class of ‘87), son of the Leavenworth Times editor, was elected mayor of Leavenworth, Kansas, 1903-05, and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1907 to 1929.
• Sewell Lee Avery (class of ‘92), board chairman and president of Montgomery Ward from 1931 to 1956, attracted nation-wide publicity for his defiance of the War Labor Board during the Second World War.
• George Veazey Strong (class of 1900) became head of military intelligence in World War Two and served as an advisor to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference.
• Frank Joslyn Baum (class of ‘02) wrote a biography of his father, To Please a Child (1961), which depicts the life of Lyman Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).⁹
• Frederick Smith Strong, Jr., (class of ‘04), son of the academy’s commandant, served the village of Orchard Lake in various official capacities from 1928 to 1940. During World War Two he was chief engineer of supply in the China-Burma-India theater. Promoted to brigadier general in 1944, he currently is a trustee of the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills.¹⁰

Unfortunately, most of these men did not achieve success before the demise of the academy and its founder. From Colonel J. Sumner Roger’s viewpoint, the school’s outlook seemed rather bleak. Not foreseeing the fruits of his labor, he must have felt quite discouraged. Pecuniary difficulties weighed so heavily on the colonel that they undermined his health, and he was forced to step down from the superintendency for a year in 1892. At the turn of the century he was again taken ill, just as a major crisis struck the academy.

A student riot occurred on December 10, 1900, which developed into a full-scale revolt the following day, ostensibly because of food shortages and mistreatment. On the door of the castle, the colonel’s residence, cadets painted, “Down with the Dog.” Delegates presented an ultimatum to the ailing superintendent at his bedside, demanding that both Rogers and his quartermaster resign. When Rogers presented the boys’ grievances to the faculty, they sided with the students, making it obvious to the colonel that the teachers were not only abetting the rebellion but were probably its instigators. Thereupon Rogers dismissed two ringleaders-men who happened to be the ones most popular with the students-Major W.G.S. Lowe and Principal W.F. Edwards. The remaining faculty resignedE, but the school’s trustees sided with the founder, suspecting faculty complicity because of their earlier, abortive demands for pay increases.¹¹

On the seventeenth, cadets from Illinois held a meeting at the Palmer House in Chicago to present the issue to their parents (nearly half the enrollment that year hailed from that city). Principal Edwards afterwards addressed the meeting and described Rogers as an “Òunbearable martinet who can’t get along with anyone.”¹²

That same day an editorial in the Detroit Free Press defended Rogers by ridiculing the students’ supposed grievances. After all, “the cadets were not sent there to cultivate epicurean taste.”¹³ A week later Rogers attended a similar meeting in Chicago to defend his own stand. He pointed out that the crisis would never have arisen had not the Spanish-American War forced the federal government to withdraw the academy’s regular army officer. His place was filled by a state militia officer, whose lower disciplinary standards clashed with those of the regular army devotees. Rogers promised things would get back to normal in January, as the government was assigning Captain B.A. Irwin to the academy. Nevertheless, when the school reopened with new instructors,¹⁴ attendance dropped to 19 from the 141 of the previous fall, although late arrivals brought the number up to 110.

The academy was saved, but not its founder. For over a year he had been seriously ill, and the rebellion aggravated his condition. Specialists in Baltimore and New York who were consulted concluded that Rogers suffered from a mysterious and incurable “affection of the brain.”¹⁵

Rogers was indeed a tragic figure. He had nursed his pet project on shoestring financing for twenty-three years, only to see it undermined in the end. That his younger son was implicated in the rebellion must have been doubly heartbreaking. Yet had he lived another twenty years, he could have taken great pride in the achievements of his elder son and other alumni. But even in death, fate was not kind, for on the same day, within an hour of Rogers’ passing, President William McKinley died in Buffalo, New York. Rogers’ obituary, relegated to the back pages of local newspapers, went almost unnoticed.

General Harris Ansel Wheeler (1850-1931), then with the Illinois National Guard, came to salvage the academy. He was Rogers’ brother-in-law and a native of the same town in Maine. Wheeler had served as the school’s first quartermaster. Since then he had become a successful inventor and manufacturer of Wheeler Coach Seats in Chicago. He attained his rank as a brigade commander in the Illinois National Guard and as an aide-de-camp to the governor. Faced with the academy’s $100,000 indebtedness, the general spent much of his own money on the school in a futile attempt to balance the books, but he was forced to resign in 1906 to forestall his own bankruptcy.^F

Ironically, Rogers’ widow rejected an offer of $250,000 for the property after the founder’s death; eight years later she was forced to sell out for one-third that amount. On December 30, 1908, the school closed, and on June 1, 1909, a court approved its sale to Detroit’s Saints Cyrillius and Methodius Seminary.

Though ignored by the history books,¹⁶ the academy did leave behind reminders of its brief and colorful past-the castle and several other distinctive buildings. Yet the passing stranger, intrigued by the unusual architecture will not be aware of its former usage, for no commemorative plaque adorns the site. There is a historic marker^G at the lake, but it advertises the legend that Chief Pontiac roamed the area. While no proof supports this claim,¹⁷ the academy, on which there is ample information, remains unidentified. Thus the past is not only forgotten but becomes twisted in modern perspective.

Notes

¹Sylvester Bretschneider, “Cadets, Canons, and Caissons,” 1909-1959: Fifty Years at Orchard Lake, a reprint from The 1959 Eagle, yearbook of the Orchard Lake Schools, p.14.

²Cyclopedia of Michigan: Historical and Biographical (Detroit: Western Publ. & Engr. Co., 1890), p. 124.

³This quotation appears in several editions of the schoolÕs catalogs. These catalogs are preserved by the Burton Historical Collection in the Detroit Public Library and by Father Joseph Swastek at Saints Cyrillius and Methodius Seminary, current owners of the academy property.

⁴Harper’s Weekly, May 11, 1889, p. 379.

⁵Colonel E.M. Heyl, Inspector General, Division of Missouri, “Annual Report to the Inspector General at Washington,” 1892, as quoted from the academy’s Circular to Parents (no date), p. 16.

⁶Thaddeus D. Seeley, History of Oakland County, Michigan (2 vols.; Chicago: Lewis Publ. Co., 1912), I, 339.

⁷N/A = not available.

⁸Stanley Jasspon Kunitz and Howard Haycroft (eds.), Twentieth Century Authors (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942), p. 227.

⁹It is ironic that Baum sent his son to a military academy, for he himself had suffered a nervous breakdown at the Peekskill (New York) Military Academy. The numerous jibes at army officers in his books do not suggest any admiration for the military. Daniel P. Mannix, “The Father of the Wizard of Oz,” American Heritage, XVI (April, 1964), 38.

¹⁰Frederick Smith Strong, Sr. (1855-1935), twice commandant of the academy (1886-89, 1895-98) and once superintendent (1902-04), had fought in the last campaign against the Sioux in 1881 and in the Spanish-American War. As a major-general in 1917, he headed the Fortieth Division of the American Expeditionary Force in France.

¹¹Pontiac Evening Press, December 24, 1900.

¹²Ibid., December 17, 1900.

¹³Detroit Free Press, December 17, 1900.

¹⁴The former faculty announced intentions to establish a new school at Benton Harbor, but evidently the project never materialized.

¹⁵Quite possibly it was a result of his Civil War wound, compounded by the strain of running the school.

¹⁶Samuel Durant and Henry Bailey Pierce’s History of Oakland County, Michigan (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts, 1877) was written before the academy’s founding, while Seeley’s History (see note 6) and Lillian Drake Avery’s Oakland County (New York: National Historical Association, 1924) were published after the schoolÕs closing.

¹⁷Personal letter, September 16, 1965, from Howard H. Peckham, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Mr. Peckham is one of the leading authorities on eighteenth century midwestern history. The legend that Chief Pontiac was buried in the lake’s Apple Island is also far-fetched, as he was assassinated near St. Louis, Missouri. It is unlikely that his remains would have been hauled such a distance.

A. At the same time that Rogers was employed by the Detroit High School, he was also volunteering his time to train the Pelouze Corps, a Detroit-based groups of cadets (aged eleven to sixteen) named after their founder, Brigadier General Louis H. Pelouze. The cadets primarily trained at Fort Wayne in Detroit, but occasionally set up encampments at Grosse Isle and at Orchard Lake (Camp Manchester). It was the Pelouze Cadets, and not the Detroit school students, that set up encampment at Orchard Lake. Governor Bagley was on hand to review the cadets campsite.

B. There were certainly exceptions to this rule, as former cadet, Edgar Rice Burroughs, had been expelled from Phillips Academy (Andover) before being accepted into the Michigan Military Academy. Burroughs would later go AWOL and afterward was accepted back into the academy.

C. Enrollment numbers for 3 additional years (1888, 1903 and 1905) were added to Starbuck’s original data.

D. Edgar Rice Burroughs never dropped out of the academy. Although period newspaper articles and the 1895 school catalog list him as being a graduate, he did not actually graduate. In a letter dated April 24, 1917, William H. Butts, assistant dean at the University of Michigan, gave this reason for Burroughs not graduating: “He (Burroughs) left the school one week before graduation on account of ill health. Otherwise, he would now have a diploma from that institution. The school has disbanded and for that reason it does not seem possible to give him a diploma at this date.” This account was probably not fully accurate. Burroughs did not graduate because he had not finished the required courses is probably closer to the truth. In spite of this, the following year (1896), Burroughs was employed by the academy as instructor of cavalry and the Gatling gun, tactical officer and teacher of geology. He was also given the position of assistant commandant of cadets, and even acted as full commandant when Captain Fred A. Smith was recovering from an illness.

E. Further research indicates that not all of the staff members resigned, but the majority did leave the academy and were replaced when the cadets returned in January.

F. A letter written in 1962 by 1902 MMA alumni, J. Paul Wait, contradicts Wheeler’s account of the downfall of the academy. In the letter, Wait says, “... one explanation we had about that at our reunions was that General Wheeler who got control of the school and probably the ownership, lost it trying to corner wheat on the Chicago Board of Trade.”

G. Since the original publication of this article, the property has been designated as a Michigan Historic Site.
 
 

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