Birmingham's #1 Hater: Minnie Hunt Saltzer

Minnie Hunt Saltzer considered herself the foremost expert on the lives of Birmingham’s pioneers made it one of her life’s goals to educate everyone on it. Unfortunately, her stories contained more prejudice, unchecked gossip and pettiness than facts. We take a look at her life, her writings and just what they can tell us about Minnie Hunt Saltzer and Birmingham.

To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website.

For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.

Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Transcript

   1935 wasn’t a great year for a lot of people: a global depression was on, there were wars and political tension ramping up towards war in Europe, Africa and Asia.  And here in Birmingham there was talk of the schools closing for several weeks-not to give the hardworking students a break but because the district had run out of money. 

                When times are hard we humans need to take refuge in something and for many of us that means remembering simpler and better times. Responding to this need, the Birmingham Eccentric Newspaper printed a column by long-time resident Minnie Hunt Saltzer about growing up in Birmingham in the 1890s and early 1900s. But nostalgia can often come with personal biases and less than accurate memories, and some of these made many readers rather upset.

                This is Birmingham Uncovered, a podcast by the Birmingham Museum, where we are exploring the diverse and compelling lives that built Birmingham Michigan into the community that it is today. First, some background on Birmingham: we are a city of approx. 20,000 people over 4.73 square miles, approximately halfway between Detroit and Pontiac in Oakland County. This area was occupied by members of the Three Fires Confederacy of Indigenous People before white settlement in the area started in the late 1810s. Birmingham became a city in 1933 and today is known as a prosperous and multi-faceted community with a thriving cultural scene.

                If you wanted a column about the “good ‘ole days” in Birmingham, you didn’t have to look further than Minnie Hunt Saltzer. Her pedigree (as she’d be the first to tell you) could be traced back to the very beginnings of white settlement in what would become Birmingham with Mary Anne Beardslee. 

                Mary Anne Beardslee was one of the first schoolteachers in the area and boarded with the John  West Hunter family (check out our episode on the Prindle sisters for more info on the Hunters and the other first families in the area) in their home in the 1830s. She lived in the attic bedroom with a small window facing the Saginaw Road (now Woodward Ave.).

                The story goes that Mary Anne fell in love with a man named Marcus Culver who had to make frequent business trips to Detroit and, as she had an excellent vantage point to seeing everyone who was coming or going from the small settlement, could see when Marcus was coming and could arrange an “accidental” meeting.

                If life won’t give you the meet-cute worthy of a small town romance novel, you’ve got to make your own through some light stalking. And of course they got married. Marcus died a few years later and Mary Ann remarried but that’s not the point. Also, for legal reasons I am not advocating that you lightly stalk your crush. 

                Minnie Hunt was born in Birmingham to James Hunt, a descendant of Mary Ann Beardslee  and Emily Leet in 1876. Her younger brother, Ernest, was born in 1889. Both sides of Minnie’s family were from Birmingham and were connected to or knew many of the other families in Birmingham in the mid to late 1800s. 

                Birmingham in the 1880s and 1890s, during Minnie’s youth, was a bustling village that was rapidly growing. Things like the light rail streetcar system, which made it easy to go into Detroit or Pontiac for shopping or the theater, and department stores like Levinsons made the village of Birmingham feel cosmopolitan while still retaining a “small town” feel where folks knew their neighbors.

                In 1899, Minnie married Harry Paul Saltzer in Ontario, Canada. Harry had moved to Birmingham in 1896 and taught piano. In the 1900 census, Harry and Minnie were living with her parents in Birmingham (old friend of the podcast John Allen Bigelow was the census taker) and by the 1910 census they had their own home on Townsend Street where they lived with their two children- Grace, who was born in 1901 and Charles, born in 1908.

                Harry and Minnie appear to have moved to Pontiac after their children grew up and moved out, by the 1930 census they are in Pontiac where they have one boarder living with them.

                By the 1930s, Birmingham was a very different place than it had been when Minnie was young. For one thing, cars now whizzed down Woodward Avenue, which had already been expanded once in the decade before to better accommodate the large number of cars on the road.The town had expanded dramatically too. The cars had brought new families to town as folks who worked in the auto industry moved in and advertisements, like the ones that ran for the Quarton Lakes subdivision, touted the good roads and the fact that Birmingham was only a 20-30 minute drive to Detroit.

                We metro Detroiters have been measuring distance in minutes for at least 100 years and that’s one thing that has stayed the same.

                Speaking of the Quarton Lake subdivision, it had been annexed to the village in 1922, nearly doubling the size of Birmingham. The subdivision was built to the west of the Mill Pond, now expanded and re-christened Quarton Lake. The homes in the subdivision had to pass certain requirements as to quality, price and square footage. There were also strict rules against the keeping of farm animals. At the time, these houses represented the utmost in quality. 

                Cars weren’t the only thing that had changed the face of Birmingham in those intervening years. By 1935, Birmingham was a city with a stately newly built municipal building, public library and community house. Outhouses were a thing of the past for most residents and most homes boasted electric lighting with modern appliances. As Minnie points out in one of her columns- gone were the days when the local stores would carry only local products or in-season produce, a Birminghamster could walk into the grocery store and buy bananas grown in South America anytime of the year or perfume made in Europe. 

                But while progress had been made, a global depression made some feel like the country was in decline. We’ve talked about the Great Depression, as well as the Great Depression before the Great Depression, in other episodes but just to recap: the traditional start of the Great Depression is the Wall Street crash of 1929, when the value of many stocks plummeted, although many banks had already failed around the United States throughout the 1920s-particularly in small, rural communities. As the United States was by then a major player on the global economic scene, this lead to shock waves throughout the world and just about every nation felt its effects. Steep declines in production and rising unemployment (in 1933, almost a quarter of the total US workforce was unemployed), as well as disasters like the droughts in the western prairies lead to a rise in poverty and food insecurity.

                And while things in Birmingham weren’t completely dire during this period, the effects were still definitely felt. The Community house offered services to help the unemployed back on their feet, teachers were paid in scrip that could be redeemed at the Community House for goods rather than money and many in the community had trouble paying their property taxes. Others were worried about the rise of unemployment in older teens and young adults, who were unable to leave their family homes and create lives and homes of their own due to not being able to find a job post high school graduation and college or trade schools were out of reach for many. 

                Taxes were the most pressing issue that dominates the local coverage in the Birmingham Eccentric newspaper in 1935. The Birmingham schools relied on those tax dollars and without them, couldn’t keep their doors open. A two week long break in place of spring break was being proposed in order to stop costs from rising while the city sought to get those delinquent payments in. Some politicians proposed forgiving property taxes that year, prompting a slew of editorials and letters to the editor debating whether such a scheme was fair to those who had paid already or where the necessary funds for the city and schools would come from if not property taxes. 

                Why not then, look back and fondly reminisce at a time when Birmingham was growing, prosperous and had a sense of well-being and an optimistic outlook? 

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                Minnie Hunt Saltzer’s first column appeared in the March 7, 1935 issue of the Birmingham Eccentric and started with the following editor’s note:

                “Minnie Hunt Saltzer was born in 1878 on a farm on West Maple avenue, near the present site of the Oakland Hills Country Club. When she was four years old, she moved with her parents, James B and Emily Leete Hunt, into Birmingham, and lived here until moving to Pontiac in 1918. Her grandfather, James M Hunt, operated a general store for years on the site of the present Levinson building on Woodward Avenue and her husband, the late Harry P Saltzer, gave piano lessons to Birmingham music students for years. 

                “Thus Mrs Saltzer literally grew up with the town, its people and its institutions. She begins here a series of reminiscences which aid to be of interest not only to those old residents or descendants of old residents who are mentioned in her articles, but to newcomers who are interested in Birmingham from a historical standpoint. The articles will appear in the Eccentric each week.”

                A correction ran the following week to apologize to a still living Harry Saltzer. The article she wrote tell us more about what impressed Minnie than about Birmingham or what its residents might find interesting. On the whole, the columns are fairly mundane. One lists the streets and who or what they were named after, including the fascinating fact that Oak Street was named after Oak trees that lined it. Truly mind blowing stuff. Others just compose a list of who lived in what house on a particular street when Minnie was growing up, which is less fun if you truly do not care about that particular house or knowing the complete family tree of the people who lived there for three years in the mid-1890s. Ever listened to somebody tell a story about somebody at their place of work that you do not know and the storyteller feels compelled to tell you a whole bunch of irrelevant details like how old this person’s sister-in-law’s nephew is? Yeah, its like that.

                Sometimes though, we can glean something about Minnie’s childhood and adolescence in the articles. We learn that she used to sing a lot in church, and that she enjoyed playing pranks and that she was in a photography club in the 1890s. All fun details that can tell us a lot about Minnie as a person but I’m not sure how much use it would be to somebody who moved to Birmingham in the 1930s.

                And sometimes we learn things about other people too! Like how Mrs Lee once fell down the steps and broke her hip and wasn’t discovered until the next morning when the fish peddler came to the door and heard her moaning. She lingered “near death” for a few weeks before passing away. Listen, I never said it was fun facts. But it says something about Minne’s possible lack of sensitivity, or what she thought was just a rousing good story at someone else’s expense. 

                And sometimes we get stories and rumors secondhand and we aren’t sure quite how to take them. In her August 29, 1935 article she recalls two stories involving the National Hotel, a landmark establishment in Birmingham dating back to the 1840s. One is where she witnessed a runaway child being held in the hotel until his parents could arrive, because Birmingham at that time didn’t have anywhere like a jail to detain folks. She also writes about how she heard that the hotel had to institute a new rule at their masquerade balls where the organizers pulled each attendee to the side and would make them remove their masks to ensure that they weren’t Black. This was after consternation from some ladies who had danced with a masked Black man in prior years.

                Minnie tells us she didn’t attend the balls and doesn’t inform us how or from who she learned this information. It’s an odd story because we have no corroborating evidence of it and we have lots of newspaper and personal accounts of masquerade balls, most of which were put on by the Ladies Library Association, that took place during Minnie’s childhood in the 1880s and 1890s. Nor do we have accounts from the Black folks who lived in the area of something like this occurring or of white ladies finding out they had unknowingly danced with a Black man. We have to ask ourselves, why is Minnie telling this story at all?

                When we at the museum talk about Birmingham’s Black history, we are often asked if folks like George and Eliza Taylor, who lived in Birmingham in the 1890s and were both formerly enslaved, faced discriminatory attitudes. What we know is that they were both well liked and part of the village community, and no racist accounts about them or any other Black residents have been documented.  And we simply haven’t come across anything like the masquerade ball story that Minnie recounts. Is it perhaps a story that Minnie heard somewhere in her youth but attached it to the masquerades at the National Hotel? One thing we know in the museum field and phycology has firmly established: human memory isn’t exact and can be an amalgam of various experiences that get blended together, even though the individual is certain of their accuracy.

                For the rest of 1935, Saltzer’s column carries on, talking about the old mill, or how Halloween was celebrated when she was a kid, who went to what church. That year the Birmingham Eccentric was about 12-13 pages long and published weekly. Local news took up the most print space because it was largely assumed that folks also subscribed to a daily newspaper like the Detroit News for national and international news. Her column bounced around the Birmingham Eccentric between the society updates and editorial pages.

And for those who don’t have much experience with a physical newspaper, let’s talk about how folks might have read the Eccentric. Sure, you’d have your big stories on the first page and the following pages you would have your national and international news, society updates, school happenings and editorials, columns and letters to the editor along with cartoons and cartoon strips. While some folks might have sat down and read the full thing cover to cover, many readers would hop around. Maybe you first see if they printed your letter to the editor, then you check out the scores from the high school football game, then you read the comics, then the latest news about the war in Algeria, etc. For this reason, most papers kept columns and sections in the same place every single issue so that readers had predictability and could quickly flip to their favorite column or section.

Growing up, my hometown had a rash of outdoor rug thefts and you bet that every week I turned to page 4 of my local paper to read the crime blotter to see which business or restaurant the outdoor rug thief had targeted the week before. And hey, if that was you, could you reach out to me? I’m not going to dox you I just have questions.

Going through the 1935 and 1936 issues of the Birmingham Eccentric you see the same thing, regular columns are usually always printed on the same page as they were the week before and are often in the same place on the page as well.

Except for Minnie’s column, her’s shows up all over the place. Even the historical happenstance column, which reprinted pieces of news from the Eccentric 5, 10 and 25 years previously, stays in the same place issue after issue. And in some issues Minnie’s column doesn’t appear at all. So I have to wonder what this means?  Perhaps Minnie had missed her deadline or maybe there wasn’t space for it. This and the fact that nobody ever was published writing into the Eccentric in praise or correction of anything Minnie wrote leads me to suspect that her column wasn’t very popular. 

Well… nobody wrote in about it until February of 1936, after it had been appearing weekly for nearly a year. In January Minnie took a creative leap with her column and decided to add in more personal details about the folks she mentioned in her column and… it didn’t go over very well. 

In her January 30, 1936 column she talks about the Harris family, a Black family that lived in Birmingham continuously in the 1890s all the way up to the 1970s. This was the first time that Minnie  mentioned any of the Black families in Birmingham and she really shouldn’t have. Historical language and content warning: in the passage I’m about to read Minnie uses a word to describe John Harris that is today considered a slur and even Back in the 1930s has a contemptuous and insulting connotation. I am going to read it because it is historically accurate and gives necessary context. 

Saltzer starts by describing the Harris’ home, which she says that residents called “the Hen Coop House” because, she states, of its shape and how it was built in the way that many Black homes in the south were built. Then she goes on to describes the home’s owner, John Harris

“Mr Harris was at that time the only negro resident of the town and was called “Darkey Harris”. He was quite black and his beard was sprinkled with grey. He was married three times and each wife was a white woman. He had a son and a daughter. The son was Abraham Harris, better known as Abe.”

Everything she says about the Harris family is wrong and untrue which we’ll unpack. She goes on to say that her mother helped nurse Mrs Harris before she died and then shew continues the narrative by describing some other families that lived on the street including a motherless boy who got into so much mischief he was sent to reform school and how that made him a “worthwhile, law abiding citizen” and Mrs Kittie Chatsfield who wore a wig because she was completely bald, had no eyebrows or eyelashes and had a speech impediment. (Thank goodness she included these relevant and necessary details. Don’t worry though, Kittie at least was always neatly attired and a wonderful housewife, thank goodness).

If you find yourself thinking, wow, that’s all kinda mean spirited sounding, you are not alone. This was the first and only time when letters to the editor about her column were sent to the newspaper, and none of them were positive.

The editors must have been reeling. Two of them were printed in the next issue, February 6, 1936 underneath an editor’s note that states that Saltzer’s column was not fact checked because it appears under her own name and that they regret any inaccuracies and will pass them on to Minnie. And that, furthermore, Minnie requested permission to print her articles and that the editors of the paper really have nothing to do with it. Way to backpedal, 1936 Eccentric editors.

The first letter printed after the editor’s note is from Abraham Harris, who Minnie identified as John Harris’ son and I want to read it in full because it is one of the most politely cutting things I’ve ever read. Another content warning here: Abraham Harris is going to use some terms and descriptors that are not used today to describe people but included to for historic accuracy in his own words.

“Dear Sir: Please publish this reply to Mrs Minnie Hunt Saltzer’s article under the title of “Birmingham Before Today”. 

“While I am, and always have been an ardent reader of your paper, the Eccentric, and while I have believed your policies and their principal well-founded, I am compelled to answer the article written by Mrs Saltzer as a misstatement of the fact.

“In the article under the title “Birmingham Before Today” Mrs Minnie Hunt Saltzer should have obtained true facts before writing an article about any of her past neighbors.

“First: The house in which John Harris and family lived was not called “the hen coop house”. Whether it was built like other houses occupied by colored people in the south I cannot say; but, the house was old at the time it was purchased by John Harris by a white family.

“Second: John Harris was of Indian blood. His father was a full Cherokee and his mother was a half-breed. John Harris was of the complexion of his father. John Harris was never called “Darkey” Harris by any self-respecting people of any race, to his face or in secluded places. Mrs Saltzer knows better. Why she should write such an article is not only an insult to me but a disgrace to the Eccentric.

“Third: John Harris never had any children of his own. His first wife had two children by a former marriage. I am not the son of his, but a nephew. I have never lived in his house. He was married only twice, not three times. 

“Your last paragraph relative to your mother, Mrs Emily Hunt, a lovely and honorable woman, nursing and assisting in whatever way she could, was the noble spirit in which women of true blood and American Patriots showed their loyalty to the cause of true womanhood.

“The article is indeed a disgrace and an insult to the cause for which your mother, as well as other mothers so faithfully performed.

-Abe Harris”

In addition to Abe’s excellent take-down, I should also add that Birmingham during Minnie’s youth and adolescence had several Black families. We’ve discussed George and Eliza Taylor in an earlier episode and you can find out more about the Harris family, who had Black, Native American and white ancestry in our virtual exhibits on our website. Come to think of it, Minnie never mentions the Levinsons, Birmingham’s first Jewish family that were living in town at the time or John Muhammed Ali, who immigrated from India and who was living in Birmingham with his wife and children. It does kind of fly in the face of her claim in her first column that everybody knew and got along with everybody.

A letter the following week from a self-described Birmingham old timer who knew John Harris backs up Abe by saying that nobody called John by the pejorative nickname she used. The adjective ”darkey” referring to Black individuals first entered print in the 1770s and carried a negative and insulting connotation then which the word still has. No other source we have found recounts folks in Birmingham ever referring to their Black neighbors in such a fashion. Both publically and privately, we can only find evidence of folks referring to their Black neighbors in respectful or neutral ways. And, many of the respected Birmingham adults of Minnie’s youth, including John Allen Bigelow (legendary among train thieves and census takers who didn’t take their jobs seriously, check out his episode) were friends of the Taylors and Harrises. 

Where did Minnie Hunt Saltzer get this language from? Well, it’s possible she heard it from her family who just happened to be way more bigoted than everybody else in town (which we have no evidence of) or she picked it up as an adult. 

You know when things get bad and folks look for an easy scapegoat to place all the blame on? Folks were anxious and in uncertain times, we psychologically look to ascribe our fears to some outside threat. There was a lot of that going around during the Great Depression. A lot folks were blaming Jewish people for the bad economy and the Henry Ford anti-Semitic bandwagon.  And the KKK were undergoing in the 1920s and ‘30s. Even in Northern States and places like Oakland County, Michigan which were bastions of the abolitionist movement in the 1800s, active chapters of the Klan took root. Racists are an uncreative bunch incapable of learning new tricks so they trotted out the same tired tropes of Black people and derogatory references. This could be the source of some of the language we see evidence of in Minnie’s description of John Harris. Let me be clear, I’m in no way saying that Minnie was associated with the Klan, but the language and stereotypes that racist and bigoted white culture was using to describe minorities was surfacing more and more in media at the time, and Minnie may have been influenced by it.

 The letter following Abe’s letter took affront to Minnie’s description of hairless Kittie Chatfield and the motherless boy and called them “disparaging” and asked why pick on folks who weren’t around anymore to defend themselves? 

A retraction never appeared in Minnie’s following columns but she does write her own letter to the editor a week later that pretty much comes straight from the playbook of the “sorry if you were offended” non-apologies of today. 

“I have no tome of Birmingham history to which I can refer. If, I am in doubt about a certain fact I either attempt to verify it through other residents here or I simply say that I believe it to be true.” She goes on to say that she meant no offense and she believed that she was describing John, Kittie and the bad boy in positive terms. She doubles down that John was indeed referred to as “darkey” and that the house was indeed called the hen coop house. One thing about Minnie, she’s gonna keep digging that hole.

Nobody ever wrote in to back up Minnie’s statements and, as I previously stated, a letter appeared in that same section of somebody who was a friend and contemporary of John Harris and the motherless boy to state that Minnie was flat out wrong. 

And while she didn’t apologize, she does get much more careful in her columns after that, she quotes a lot more from older Eccentric articles and uses many more statements like “I remember”, “I believe” or “as I understand”. These qualifying statements hardly ever appear in her prior columns.

Her column continued for several more years but never seemed to get much attention. New columns focusing on news of movie and radio stars and real life adventures we placed in more prominent locations in every issue. Personally, I too am way more interested in details of Mary Pickford’s second marriage than in who lived in the third house down Merrill Street in 1892. 

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Saltzer occasionally weighed in on the current happenings in Birmingham, and that went about as well as you might expect. In 1942, Birmingham’s Post Office was getting a mural through the Federal Art Project of the Works Project Administration (created to provide jobs and to lift spirits with public art during the Great Depression) and local respected mural artist Carlos Lopez won the bid. Lopez’s mural depicted a picnic of early Birmingham pioneers and attracted some controversy after many thought the painted figures were too dark complexed to look like “honest Americans” and that they looked like foreigners.

Minnie weighs in in an August letter to the editor, where she positions herself as an expert on what everyone in old-time Birmingham looked like. Just a reminder, she was born in 1876, many decades after the picnic which was described by an eyewitness named Fannie Fish in 1888. Minnie lambasts the “negroid features” of the figures in the mural which are at odds with what she describes as the “beautiful women and handsome men” of the time. But by that point, the mural was completed and the earlier controversy had quieted down after Lopez, in an earlier interview in the Eccentric, talked about how he was basing his figures off of portraits from the real-life people that were at the picnic and inviting his detractors to come and compare the portraits and his figures in the mural. In answer to charges that a local should have painted the mural, he talked about courting his wife, Rhoda, in one of the Birmingham parks and the owl that would attack couples walking the lovers lane and that he and his family currently lived in nearby Royal Oak. 

Minnie ends her letter by stating “in the event that a bomb should be dropped in these unsettled times I trust that it will blow that mural to Kingdom Come”. Yeah, this whole controversy was taking place in 1942 with WWII raging in the background. Wishing for the enemy to bomb your hometown in the newspaper just because you hate a piece of public art is…. Well, it’s certainly something. 

I’ll post a photo of the mural on our website, along with a link to a talk given by my colleague Donna Casaceli about the controversy over the mural. Fun fact: Donna is related, by marriage, to Minnie. Donna is also Cuban, which Minnie probably would have hated. And this is why I’ve never done my personal  genealogy, I don’t care to know what sort of weirdos are lurking in my family tree. 

Minnie Hunt Saltzer died in 1961 and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery, surrounded by the Birmingham old timers that she spent much of her life reminiscing about.

So what’s a historian to do with Minnie Hunt Saltzer? First hand accounts are always valuable and they can tell us a lot about how individuals lived in the past. But, it’s important to keep in mind that our memories of the past, particularly when we are fondly remembering our childhoods, are colored by our present attitudes and ideas. Adding to that, if you had an even somewhat decent childhood, you were probably shielded from adult anxieties and concerns that existed during those years. I see people my age talking about what a glorious time the 1990s were and how much simpler and kinder the world was than it is now. Our parents though, probably have a very different view and they look to the decade that they grew up in as the truly better time. Everybody yearns for a time before they had to pay bills and worry about the stock market, when their biggest concerns were long division and spelling quizzes.

Was the Birmingham of Minnie’s childhood truly the simple age where everybody knew and cared for one another? There probably was some of that, but somebody in 1961 reminiscing about the Birmingham of their childhood in the 1930s would probably say similar. 

Our memories are so often shaped by later experiences. For example, a happy memory of going to the beach with your parents may be altered by the hurt and pain of their later divorce. Memories of a diverse village may be whitewashed by racist ideologies we pick up later on. 

As historians we have to balance personal accounts and oral histories with the wider context of the times, newspaper and court records and other sources of information. Minnie is a really great example of this. Her particular take on the world, on what was important and valuable and what did not matter reflects not just her experience but how she was influenced by forces around her that she may not have been conscious of. 

Join us next time as we dive into the surprising story of how Birmingham was once the Shetland Pony capital of America as we examine the life and times of Fenton Watkins. It’s a story that has everything: Romance, the Gilded Age, Scotland, ferry boats and adorable animals. 

I’m Caitlin Donnelly and thank you for joining us for this episode of Birmingham Uncovered. To see photos and other documents related to Minnie Hunt Saltzer’s life and Eccentric columns check out our website, the link is in the shownotes. For questions, comments and episode suggestions, feel free to reach us at museum@bhamgov.org. Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.