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Welcome to the Huron River! This is Ace #1. Can you think of how the river helped to make Ann Arbor successful? One way in which the river was important was the energy it provided to the first settlers. Keep reading and you will find out what they used this energy for.
Have you ever used flour to bake or wood to build something? If you have, where do you buy flour or wood today? The first settlers in Ann Arbor needed both of these things, but in the very beginning they didn’t have any stores that sold them. They had to build the stores, make the flour, and cut the wood themselves. Flour is made by grinding wheat. Imagine if every person who ate something with flour in it had to grind it from wheat by hand. That would take a lot of time and hard work!
Imagine also, that every person who built a house had to cut all the wood they used from logs. It would take longer to build a house that way. When people started building mills along the Huron River, it became much easier to get things like wood boards and flour. Mills used the energy from the river to get these jobs don. Do you know how a mill worked? Imagine putting a wheel into the water – the water would make the wheel go around, right? Now, attach that wheel to a post and the post would turn to. One more step…. attach the post to a grinding stone inside the mill and….Voila! As the water wheel turns, it makes the stones inside the mill turn too. If you put your grain between the grinding stones you’d get a nice, fine flour.
As the population of Ann Arbor got bigger, they needed more and more energy – more than water could provide. In 1884, Ann Arbor got electricity. In 1905, the Detroit Edison Power Company decided that the Huron River might be a good source of power for electricity and it began buying land along the river. The company rebuilt some dams that were already there such as the Barton Dam in 1912 and the Argo Dam in 1913 – to change them from water mills to electricity centers.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, they didn’t use electricity as often as we do today – they used it for streetlights and lamps. But we use it for much more than that today. Look around your classroom. Can you see three things that use electricity (besides the lights)?
Just to Think About: