I have been doing a lot of walking around Ypsi taking pictures and I decided I would visit all the museums and art galleries and share some of what I find.
Ypsi has a interesting history, like many of our small Michigan towns, it was once a booming area of industrial wealth. Spawing from investments from cities like Chicago and Detroit, Ypsi was once a major part of the Michigan buisness circuit. In fact, while Ypsi was booming and bustling, Ann Arbor was just a small farm town. Well things have defnitely changed for Ypsi, no longer a major railroad hub (since there are no longer really any trains), its rich historical buildings give us a glimpse into the past of this little Michigan town.
Here are some photos of cool houses and historical buildings I've captured while walking around the area.
So Ypsi has A LOT of churches. This one is particularly awesome. In the neighborhood of this church there are four others (in like a 2 block radius). They are all older. The middle round window that looks kinda like a flower, is Tiffany and Co. glass design from the late 1800's. This building was established in 1857, but redesigned in 1899.
I really liked this brick house right off of a main street in Ypsi. I think this is considered a gothic design, whatever its called its a really awesome house.
This is another gigantic church in Ypsi, this is only 1/2 of the building. The picture on the right is a close up of the door.
So the building on the left is The Ladies Library (1858), and the one on the right is The Ladies Literary Club (1840's Greek revival). These are where upper class women would gather to socialize, since there weren't very many places at the time that this was acceptable. The library is now a private residence, but the literary club is still functioning. The window above the arch in the door that says Ladies Library is another Tiffany glass window, it is restored but being kept at the history museum.
So, the next place I checked out was The Firehouse Museum. This isn't so much an Ypsi history museum, but a general history of Fire Fighting in the United States. They did have a lot of stuff from Michigan, however. Here are some photos.
Can you guess what era the one on the left is? I think hippies just masked it as a fire truck so they could get around without any trouble.
All in all they had about 20 different fire trucks from all different eras. They were all restored and in really good condition.
They had a gigantic collection of toy fire trucks of course, old and new.
So i thought these were pretty wild. They are called "fire grenades" and they were common in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Basically, as the advertisment in the background shows, you hurl them at fire and they explode. Full of what I'm sure was probably extremely dangerous chemical fluid, they aided in putting out the fire. So this was before the advent of the fire extinguisher.
This is came after the fire grenade, this is a tube containing powder that you were to throw on the fire. The cannister specifically says to "throw violently."
This is a news report on the Detroit fire of 1805. "A gentleman arrived... with unpleasant news of the entire destruction of the town of D'Etroit by fire. It caught in a situation, from which the wind, which then blew hard, wafted the flames throughout the whole of the place within the stockades, and the inhabitants, having but one engine, and that being rendered useless after a few moments working were unable either to extinguish the fire or to save the most valuable part of their property..."
A big collection of old microphones, bells, lights and other accessories of the fire trucks.
A big collection of Smoky the Bear memorabilia. This poster shows an old Smoky praying to god that we are careful and prevent forest fires.
And last, but not least, here is this old Sega video game called Brave FireFighters that was probably at some mall in the 90's. I wish it was turned on!
Well hope you enjoyed the pictures. I'll put some more up when I visit the other museums and historic distric areas.
No comments:
Post a Comment