Besties for the Resties: George Mitchell and Almeron Whitehead

Friendship can be a very powerful thing. It can empower an individual and redirect their life and sometimes it can reshape the fabric of an entire community. Today’s podcast has two subjects because it is impossible to cover one of these individuals without talking about the other. Almeron Whitehead and George Mitchell met at work in their late teens and they were inseparable for over 60 years until they died… and even then, their burial plots at Greenwood Cemetery here in Birmingham are right next to each other.

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

Friendship can be a very powerful thing. It can empower an individual and redirect their life and sometimes it can reshape the fabric of an entire community. Today’s podcast has two subjects because it is impossible to cover one of these individuals without talking about the other. Almeron Whitehead and George Mitchell met at work in their late teens and they were inseparable for over 60 years until they died… and even then, their burial plots at Greenwood Cemetery here in Birmingham are right next to each other. 

                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.

                George Mitchell was born in Birmingham in 1854 to Robert and Emmeline Holley Mitchell. Like Minnie Hunt Saltzer a few episodes ago, he also wrote an account of growing up in Birmingham. But, unlike Hunt Saltzer’s account, he admits to almost committing manslaughter twice in his book “The Story of My Life”. George Mitchell loved playing the relatively new sport of baseball and when he was a kid, the street in front of the National Hotel at the corner of North Old Woodward and Hamilton was a favorite spot for kids to congregate and play. Once, he batted a ball straight into the gut of a girl on a wagon, who then fell over like she was dead. Thankfully, Birmingham’s first doctor, Ebenezer Raynale, ran to the scene and was able to revive her. The second incident was when George batted a ball through the window of a nearby barber shop. The client at the time was reclined and lathered up, but thankfully the barber hadn’t yet commenced shaving so the razor blade was nowhere near any throats (although glass shards did rain down on both client and barber).

                Was George Mitchell good at baseball? I can’t say but he did stick with it. In his teens a groups of young men aged 11-16 from Birmingham played baseball against teams from nearby communities and I bet you’ll never guess the name of Birmingham’s team. Go on, take a wild stab. You probably didn’t guess “The Hungry 9”, did you? Apparently, the team once stopped for lunch on their way to an out-of-town game and while the boys were munching away, an onlooker asked who the young men were. A player waved a sausage in the air and exclaimed, “We are the Hungry 9 and don’t you forget it!” And the name stuck. Honestly, more sports teams need to be named random phrases like that.

                George also writes about knowing Martha Baldwin as a child. She was his teacher in the one year that she taught at Birmingham’s red schoolhouse (now the site of the Birmingham Museum). Of all the teachers he had, he wrote, he remembered her the best. She also helped him write a paper later on on Native Americans. The paper was so good that Mitchell was asked to read his paper aloud to the whole school but he ended up running away so to not have too. He was embarrassed, he wrote, that most of the work was Martha’s and not his and he didn’t want to take credit that wasn’t rightfully his. Our ethical king.

                Like a lot of young men of his era, George went to work at 16 years old. He writes warmly of working for John Allen Bigelow, he roomed upstairs from the store, made $100 a year and was treated like a member of the Bigelow family.

                We don’t have time here to go into everything about John Allen Bigelow or his career as a general store owner in Birmingham but luckily, we have a whole podcast episode dedicated to everyone’s favorite train stealing, one-armed insurance salesman. But, the important facts here are: 1) Bigelow “meets” Isabel Whitehead during the Civil War while serving with one of her brothers, Richard, and 2) one day Richard was called away to a skirmish while writing a letter to Isabel and Bigelow, worried that he might not make it back to finish it, sends off the letter with his name signed on it. 3) Isabel, intrigued, wrote back to Bigelow and their friendship and correspondence lasted several years. 4) Bigelow wrote a will in the back of his 1864 diary outlining that he wanted all of his possessions split between his parents and Isabel Whitehead of Pontiac if he were to die. 5) Thankfully, Bigelow survived and he and Isabel probably met for the first time in late 1864, after Bigelow lost an arm and was sent home. They married in the spring of 1865. 6) In the years following, they set up shop in Birmingham where John became postmaster, a notary public, ran his own general store and sold insurance as well as being a member of Birmingham’s Masonic Lodge.

                At the time George began working for Bigelow in 1870, Bigelow was the village’s Post Master. Post Master was a political appointment and, since Birmingham didn’t have one dedicated post office building, the post office would be relocated every few years to whatever shop, building or business that the Post Master also owned. So, in Bigelow’s case, the post office was run out of his general store and Mitchell helped the mail come in and go out of Birmingham. He worked for Bigelow for two years and said that he never had a cross word from either Mr or Mrs Bigelow and that they treated him like family. Towards the end of his career, George would serve as the village’s postmaster as well.

                He also met Almeron Whitehead at Bigelow’s store. And just a note on the name, in some older presentations you will find museum staff pronouncing his first name “AL-meron” but recently members of the family approached us and told us that they pronounce it “Al-MARE-on” so we made the change. Almeron is one of several individuals who we’ve recently changed how we say their name based on feedback from their families, many of whom still use these names in the present or in the recent past.

                Almeron was the younger brother of Isabel Whitehead Bigelow, John Allen’s wife. Isabel and Almeron were both born in Pontiac to Almeron and Mary Ann Mais Whitehead.  Our Almeron was the youngest of nine total children and was born in 1851, making him 3 years older than George. 

                Almeron completed two years of high school in Pontiac and then, like George, left school to work as a clerk in a store.

                Almeron, or “Whitey” as he was known to his friends in Birmingham, most likely moved from Pontiac when his sister married John Allen Bigelow in 1865 or shortly thereafter to work for his brother-in-law.  Almeron also earned $100 a year and was given lodging above the store.

                We don’t know if Almeron was a menace on the baseball diamond like George, but they were both in the same club, the Eccentrics. But wait, I hear you say, that’s the name of the Birmingham Newspaper! And I hear you, but before there was a newspaper, there was a club. Some people just aren’t very creative when it comes to names… we aren’t even the original Birmingham, and there’s at least 16 out there in the United States alone. 

                The Eccentrics were a club formed in 1875 by 9 young men in Birmingham. Almeron Whitehead and George Mitchell were founding members along with WC Jenks, F Randall, M Randall, J Opedyke, E Parker, J Alger, and W North. 

                Why the name? There have been several famous clubs named the “eccentrics” or “Eccentric Club” in England, the more famous one was founded in the late 1700s in London.

                Clubs like the Eccentrics were spaces were like-minded men could come together and discuss new ideas, relax, give back to the community and/or have some fun. The two biggest before the Civil War were the Masonic order or the Masons (which also had a chapter in Birmingham) and the Order of the Oddfellows. But, as industry picked up after the war and more and more folks moved into cities and towns, more fraternal clubs and secret societies popped up. Some of these clubs were very specific, limited to men who worked in the same profession or were of the same religion, while others were broader. 

                If you were a fan of theatrics and dressing up, many orders had secret initiation rituals, secret handshakes and costumes. And, of course, one had to have a snazzy name to attract potential members. Listeners who remember our episode on Martha Baldwin might recall that she was a member of the Order of the Good Templars, a society that advocated for temperance and which, contrary to the times, admitted both men and women. We do not know if the Birmingham chapter of the Good Templars had a dress code, but could you imagine accidently walking in on a meeting and seeing everyone dressed up like crusaders? It would look like either the smallest renfair or the most lit DnD party. I would love to see Martha Baldwin dressed up though, it would be a fun counterpoint to the photos that we do have of her where she looks oh so serious. 

                By the turn of the 20th century, over 20% of American men were members of a fraternal order or secret society. Many women joined auxiliary orders or formed their own as well.

                Sadly, we know nothing of any of the secret rituals or handshakes that the Eccentrics used, if they had any secrets or rituals at all. The accounts that we have of the group’s activities focus on social outings, like going to plays.

                That wasn’t true for the young women’s group that formed in Birmingham after the Eccentrics, though. The Washingtonians, or the Tonies for short. The Tonies had secret passwords, handshakes, signs and badges. Their secret meetings were held at the home of Jennie Keyes and a secret scrapbook of dreams was solemnly kept and added too.

                Ultimately, neither group had the same lasting effect as other social groups and secret societies, the Tonies and Eccentrics were all largely married and busy with families by the mid-1880s, but it was an important outlet for young men and women in Birmingham to get together with each other and let their hair down a little.

                The Eccentrics weren’t the only clubs that Mitchell and Whitehead joined in their lifetimes though, both would also join the Birmingham chapter of the Masons. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, if you were involved in any sort of business ventures in Birmingham, you were also a Mason. Masons formed networks that helped each other out socially and economically. Before the chamber of commerce, groups like the Masons fit that niche.

                Around this time George Mitchell changed jobs and worked in another store in town, Frank Hagerman’s, because that store had a Western Union Telegraph Office and George wanted to learn and work the telegraph. He also started seeing his future wife, Hannah Cory, who was also born and raised in Birmingham. From that day on, George wrote, George and Hannah “rode double” their whole lives and he refers to her simply as “Han” throughout his book.

                On September 26, 1877, George and Hannah married and moved in together above the store that George clerked in. They eventually had three children, Dr Carrie Elizabeth Mitchell, born in 1884; Eugene Mitchell, born in 1889 and sadly died in 1890; and Emmeline Mitchell in 1895.

                George and Hannah eventually built a house of their own, but he wrote that they missed their first home over the store. 

                Almeron married Emma Bodine in 1877. The Bodines are one of those Birmingham families whose name pops up a lot, just like the Corys (the family that George Mitchell married into) do.  Sometimes it seems like everyone in 1800s Birmingham was related by marriage to each other. But I guess that’s just what happens when nobody seems to want to go very far down the road to find a partner. Almeron and Emma had one son, Raynale Almeron Whitehead, born in 1886.

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                It wasn’t long before George and Almeron decided to go into business together.

In 1878, utilizing a $90 used table-top printing press that they had shipped from Boston and taught themselves how to use, they published the first issue of the Eccentric newspaper. The first issue was a single page with four columns of tight print. Each issue was a very affordable 2 cents each or a year subscription for 50 cents. For comparison, in 1874 the average price for a bushel of potatoes was 75 cents, a pound of roasted coffee would set you back 30 cents and renting a four room house was about $12 a month. Feel free to take a break here and have a good cry about the state of the present housing market if you need too. 

In a salutation to the readers in the first issue, the editors write that their object in publishing the newspaper was “to furnish a live home paper, replete with all the news of the day, but more particularly the local items of importance occurring in Birmingham and immediate vicinity, at a price so low that few, if any, can truly say, ‘I cannot afford to take a wide awake home paper.’” In 1879, the name of the paper was changed to The Birmingham Eccentric. Even though both wrote for the paper, Almeron took on the primary editorial role.

What exactly did it mean to be a “wide-awake” paper in 1878? The year the Eccentric was founded was only 18 years after the monumental election of 1860, when the youth vote (and let’s be clear, young white men) helped propel Abraham Lincoln to victory.  “Now the old men are folding their arms and going to sleep,” said William H. Seward while campaigning for Lincoln, “and the young men are Wide Awake.” Wide Awakes were a club within the Republican party primarily composed of young white men ages 15-40 (although, like we saw with the other fraternal organizations we talked about, women’s auxiliary orgs were also founded). The wide awakes enjoyed dressing up and marching around, two things that would come in handy when the organization pivoted to promoting military enlistment for the Union in the following Civil War. 

After the Civil War, the term broadened somewhat to refer to young people who were politically aware and active. This would define George and Almeron, who followed local and national politics closely and who were only 24 and 27 respectively. In some respects, it’s kinda like the 1870s version of the word “woke”, which once had a narrower and specific definition within the Black community but is now widely used to refer to actively paying attention to current events, particularly when social justice issues are involved (or, if you are within a certain segment of the population, it refers to anything you don’t particularly care for).

And yes, the paper did cover important local news but “important” is really in the eye of the beholder here. It covered news like who had out-of-the-village visitors, who had recently taken up a new hobby like painting and who was on the guest list for parties that had taken place. Though it was rapidly growing, Birmingham was still a fairly small place where neighbors were all up in each other’s business. This historical oversharing is very useful to historians because we can piece together who was living where at what time, who was hanging out with who and to get a picture of what life was like at the time and what interested Birmingham residents. Historians are very nosey people. I became one to touch old things and to learn all the gossip about dead people. 

But just imagine finding out that your supposed good friend didn’t invite you to a party held last Friday via the newspaper. The messiness that arose from this sort of reporting probably would put every reality tv show on the Bravo network to shame. 

And sometimes Whitehead and Mitchell were a part of the stories they were reporting on. In the November 17, 1893 issue there is a front page story about a bet between George Mitchell, noted as the “junior editor of this great moral engine” and HC Wilson. Mitchell bet Wilson $3 that Grover Cleveland would win the election while both were in a state of being “rosey”-or, as we today would say, drunk as a skunk. The stakes were an oyster dinner, and a mile and a half ride in a wheelbarrow accompanied by a band. Mitchell won and the wheelbarrow ride became a parade through town with banners and children running alongside. Two photos were taken and for copies, readers were advised to contact “Whitey”-or Almeron. One of those photos was printed in the Eccentric, check out our shownotes to see it.

Calling their paper “this great moral engine” was probably a tongue and cheek joke. George, in his writings on his life, seems like a bit of a prankster, writing about bothering his former boss, Hagerman, by playing a cornet while he was working and playing pranks as a kid. Listeners who have heard our Martha Baldwin episode might remember that Mitchell and Whitehead were also suspected of writing in letters to the editor of the paper that purposefully sought to make the opponents to Martha Baldwin’s proposed public library look illiterate and uneducated. Not taking themselves too seriously is probably why both got along well with their former boss, John Allen Bigelow. 

And sometimes, they had to break the heartbreaking stories that were about their own families. On December 10, 1897 the duo reported on the crash of two DUR trolleys in the heavy fog. One of the causalities was Charles Whitehead, Almeron’s brother. 

In 1881 they started the Whitehead and Mitchell Grocery Store. They didn’t have a lot of cash to sink into stock right away, so they only carried a limited line of goods. Birmingham was still a village at the time but a rapidly growing one, and business opportunities along with it. Whitehead and Mitchell were savvy enough to tap into what their customers wanted and by the 1890s, the store was known to carry an excellent selection of groceries, medicine, furniture, drugs and crockery.

At that time, Birmingham didn’t have a bank. This meant that merchants and farmers had to hold onto their cash until they could go to a bank in Pontiac or Detroit. This also meant that they also couldn’t cash checks or draw from their holdings at other banks in town. That changed when Whitehead and Mitchell began to let folks use the safe in their store to hold their money in. Eventually they got a little capital of their own to invest and draw from and the Birmingham Exchange Bank was born. Despite initially being hesitant of the new venture, Almeron quickly took on the role of banker and George became the primary pharmacist in the store. Pharmacists at this time, didn’t need any special training and one could totally be a newspaper editor/pharmacist/bank teller and secret society member all at the same time with very little in the way of degrees or specialized training. 

Eventually, the Eccentric offices were also home to Birmingham’s telephone exchange. And because you have never have too many fingers in enough pies, Whitehead and Mitchell were also involved in real estate. 

Being in business together can put a real strain on friendship. The list of businesses that were started by friends whose friendship ended while running them would be endless. But George and Almeron made it work with THREE businesses. In 1912 the two amicably dissolved their partnership of the Eccentric and Mitchell took over as sole publisher, and in 1919, at the age of 78, he sold the paper.

In addition to his business relationship with Mitchell, Almeron Whitehead was also one of the founders of Birmingham Brick Limited, which produced 25,000 bricks per day and employed up to 14 men. Almeron was very busy. 

George and Almeron were in business together some 60 years! In addition to their various businesses, they both also held political offices in the village including postmaster and clerk. 

According to George’s book, “the Story of My life” the worst argument he and Almeron ever had was in their early days of running their store. As they were closing up, George asked Almeron if he had swept behind the counter and Almeron replied “If you can’t tell by looking, sweep it yourself”.

But, of course, this is George’s version of their relationship. We don’t have a book by Almeron in our collection with his side of the story.

One final anecdote: George Mitchell had firm opinions on fashion. On Jul 20, 1902, he wrote a letter to the editor of his own newspaper in which he relates how absolutely shocked he was to see a mother and child out and about where the boy was not wearing woolen stockings and the women exposed her ankle getting into the trolley. So, remember this as we go into the summer season in the northern hemisphere and you feel like dressing comfortably. 

George and Almeron changed the business and retail landscape forever in Birmingham but their partnership is notable even beyond that. Both were talented, visionary and hardworking and worked well together, whether it was business or maintaining a strong friendship. Almeron died in 1926 and George followed in 1929. 

But even in death, they are still side by side. George Mitchell’s grave is in the Northwest of section D of Greenwood Cemetery and Almeron Whitehead is right over the line into section F right next to him. They are close enough that George could hit his friend with a baseball bat or bother him by playing the cornet. And, it’s nice to think that two best friends who spent all of their adult lives together also get to be side by side for all eternity. 

Next episode we are diving into a relatively bright spot in the history of 1800s mental health treatment through the life of Washington Willits, the son of one of Birmingham’s first four landowners who spent time in the Utica, NY Insane Asylum, the premier mental health hospital of its time. 

I’m Caitlin Donnelly and thank you for joining us for this episode of Birmingham Uncovered. To see photos and other documents related to George, Almeron and some fun ads we’ve found in the Birmingham Eccentric over the years check out the link in our 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.