A third volume devoted to Washtenaw County [Mich.] edited by Byron Alfred Finney.

CHAPTER VII

EDUCATION
UNDOUBTEDLY Michigan offered to the settlers the best of locations and the most magnificent natural resources along with the
natural drawbacks of swamps, etc., but other states offered its settlers
equal advantages, yet Michigan outstripped them in many ways. It is
the opinion of the writer that it is not so much location or natural advantages that secures exceptional business and educational success, but
rather the personality of the people who originate and develop those
matters and to the fact that there were a sufficient number of men and
women among the early settlers of Michigan able to mould and form
the general outlines of policies to be pursued in the development of
the country that he ascribes the splendid results. Samuel W. Dexter, one
of the first to come into the county, was a graduate of Harvard and left
Boston for Michigan, not that there was no place for him in his native
state, but that he was fired by the enthusiasm of many people concerning
the possibilities presented by the vast western country. The fact that
for several years after reaching Michigan he and his family lived in a
small log cabin on the banks of the Huron and that he, himself, carried
the mail, on horseback, from Ann Arbor to his settlement once a week,
made him none the less a scholarly man.
Those things had to be done and if the best men would do the unpleasant things for the accommodation of their fellow-settlers they were
bound to be done the better. James Kingsley, who came to Ann Arbor
in 1826, was well educated. His influence was always exerted in behalf of the schools. Munnis Kenny, who came to Washtenaw county
in 1829, was a graduate of an eastern college, afterwards receiving his
degree of A.B. at Williams College. He had spent all his life, up to
the time of his coming to Michigan, in academic pursuits and in the
society of the cultured and refined, and while he did not find anything
in pioneer life that was congenial to his tastes, he did not hesitate in
the work that he had set out to do, and was none the less an educated
and cultured man. Charles G. Clark, who came to Ann Arbor in 1829,
had received his education at Amherst; I. M. Weed, who was a graduate
of the University of Vermont, was one of the number first in the
county. Orange Risdon, who came in the early twenties, when there
were but very few white men in the county, was quite a mathematician
and a good surveyor. In running through the list of names of those
who first settled in the county one is able to cite dozens of men
and women their equal. The early settlers of Washtenaw county took
immediate steps toward establishing places of learning for their children, in fact gathering together the boys and girls and placing them
under teachers before school houses could be provided. Temporary
rooms were secured in crude and unfinished dwellings, and, as there was
at the time no provision made for raising money by taxation for the