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| Samuel Zug |
In 1836 at the tender age of twenty-years-old, Samuel Zug came to Detroit, Michigan from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Using money he saved as a bookkeeper in the Pittsburgh area, he went into the furniture making business with Marcus Stevenson, a Detroit investor.
The
prospect of endless stands of pine, oak and maple trees as raw
material, and convenient access to Eastern markets by way of the Detroit
River for their finished products made Detroit an ideal place for a
young man to make his fortune.
But in 1859 after twenty-three years in the
furniture business, his partnership with Stevenson was dissolved leaving Samuel Zug a wealthy man to pursue real estate and political ambitions.
In
1859 (or 1876 depending on which source you choose), Samuel Zug purchased 325 acres of land along the Detroit River from Michigan's second Territorial governor, General Lewis B. Cass. Over 250 acres of the parcel was marshland with a sulfur spring bubbling up 1,200 barrels of mineral water a day.
The marshy peninsula of land was a part of Ecorse Township before it became the city of River Rouge. In unrecorded time, the land was rumored to be an ancient burial site
for a number of native American tribes known to inhabit the
area.
Samuel
Zug and his wife Anna built a home on the island, but after
ten years they decided that the marshland and natural sulfur
spring on the site proved too much for them to endure. The Zugs surrendered the
land to the red fox, water fowl, muskrats, and mosquitoes.
The croaking frogs and singing insects were left to serenade the damp night air because the island was virtually uninhabitable.
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| Short Cut Canal at bottom of map was Mud Run. |
The
Zug family peninsula became a man-made island overnight separating it
from the north end of Ecorse Township. The channel improved the flow of
the Rouge River into the Detroit River, but it did little to circulate water around the newly formed island, leaving a slow-moving backwater.
On December 26, 1889, Samuel Zug died leaving his holdings to his wife, Anne, who died on June 10th,1891. It has been reported wrongly that Mr. Zug died in 1896. My source for the correct date of Zug's death comes from his tombstone in Detroit's Elmwood Cemetery.
The Zug heirs sold the island
for $300,000 to George Brady and Charles Noble, who wanted to use the
site for an industrial dumping ground. The island was diked with
interlocking steel panels and back-filled with construction rubble and dredging waste to raise the ground above the water table and reclaim the land from its natural state.
Heavy
industry was about to move onto the island but Mr. Zug never lived to see it. The island's namesake was "Waiting for the Coming of Our Lord" as the inscription on his grave marker proclaims.
In addition to being a bookkeeper and the owner of a successful furniture manufacturing company, Samuel Zug also is credited with being one of the founding members of the Republican Party, which was considered to be the progressive party of the day. Their first official meeting took place on July 6, 1854, in Jackson, Michigan.
The Republicans were an abolitionist party that came to national attention when they won 33% of the presidential vote from the Democrats and the Whigs in 1856. Four years later in 1860, they broke through the two-party system and elected Abraham Lincoln to the White House.
Samuel Zug was an anti-slavery advocate long before Lincoln was elected and The Civil War began. He bought and set aside a parcel of land for refugee slaves in the city of Amherstburg, Ontario, Canada, a destination of the Underground Railroad. What other support he gave to the Abolitionist Movement is shrouded in the dim history of time and whispers of the unrecorded past.
+Samuel+Zug+Headstone+Monument.JPG) | |||||||||
| In Detroit's Elmwood Cemetery |
