Two students joined her in breaking open the cabinet of an emergency fire hose. Foster and others grabbed empty jars, filled them with water and flung them at the flames. Across the way, at the Natural Science Building, Veo Foster and others watched as embers landed on the roof of their building. To the south of Haven Hall, firemen poured water on Angell Hall to prevent it from catching fire. “If it hadn’t been for the students,” the fire chief said later, “there’s no telling how far the fire might have gone.” Others helped firemen with the 10 hoses trained on the flames. Journalism students dragged typewriters and teletype machines onto the lawn. Even as dozens of Ann Arbor firefighters poured water on the fire, soaked students ferried materials from the burning building. Forming a human chain, they passed armloads of books and papers in an effort to save the materials.
#ANN ARBORM IFIRE WINDOWS#
As Veo Foster and her colleagues watched, the property of all those programs was now being incinerated.Īmazingly, students raced up the building’s exterior fire escapes, climbed through windows and grabbed anything they could. Haven – housed the History, Journalism and Sociology departments, as well as the Bureau of Government and the Institute of Public Administration. It sat at the northwest corner of the campus, and became headquarters for several LSA departments in 1933, when the Law School completed its move to the new Law Quadrangle at the opposite end of campus.īy the summer of 1950, Haven Hall – named for U-M’s second president, Erastus O. Haven Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus, was burning to the ground.Ĭonstructed during the Civil War, the building was the first home for the Law School. “The whole building looked like a huge furnace.”
#ANN ARBORM IFIRE FULL#
“Then we rushed to the corner and saw the fire in Haven Hall at full height,” she recalled. Realizing she was seeing a reflection, Foster quickly looked to the west. The windows of the four-story brick building shimmered with black and orange. As the 51-year-old employee prepared to leave the library and campus for home, her eyes were drawn to the east and the neighboring Chemistry Building. It was the late afternoon of June 6, 1950, and final exams were in full bloom. Foster was wrapping up another day as a librarian working in the Natural Science Building. Stacy would be proven wrong on both counts. And second, regardless of a jury’s verdict, his life’s goal of becoming a college professor was “all but destroyed.” He wanted Ruthven to know two things: First, he was wholly innocent. “Although perhaps I do not deserve one, I cannot claim an Alma Mater.” “I should like to say that never before have I felt as I do now the distance between myself and the College and University I have attended for eight years,” Stacy wrote in neat print to President Alexander Ruthven. And as he awaited trial, the University of Michigan – the place where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees and now taught as a doctoral student – had abandoned Stacy when he most needed support. The destruction of Haven Hall was a malicious act of arson, but not one he committed.
He was, he wrote, being falsely accused of setting a fire unlike anything U-M or Ann Arbor had seen in years. Stacy put pen to paper and tried to explain himself to the president of the University of Michigan. From his jail cell in downtown Ann Arbor, 30-year-old Robert H.
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