Historic buildings, Ann Arbor, Michigan / by Marjorie Reade and Susan Wineberg.

631 Second Street
Circa 1885 Wiegant-Hochrein House
The vernacular character of this house establishes it in no specific style group
but it is an attractive house, representative of its type in the area. When built,
it was identical with the home at 632 South First Street, (see 51).
Cabinetmaker Christian Wiegant and his family were the first occupants.
Cousins of the Wiegants, Michael and Mary (Graf) Hochrein, came with their
children in 1884 from Germany where Michael had been a baker and an overseer on a nobleman's demesne. Their third son, Ferdinand, was apprenticed to
cabinetmaker Wiegant and together with his wife, Caroline (Radtke), became
members of the household. In the 1890s the Wiegants moved around the corner to Mosley, leaving Ferdinand and Caroline to raise their seven children in
this house. Ferdinand worked in the Allmendinger organ factory and later
became an assistant to Silas Douglass at the Ann Arbor Gas Company.
The brickwork had already been painted when Mathematics Professor Fred
Gehring and his wife Lois purchased the house in 1956. They replaced the dirt
floors of the fieldstone basement with concrete and contemporized the house.
Later Clarence and Ruth Roy renovated and landscaped the house in a charming and harmonious fashion. Clarence, a landscape
architect, selected a ground
cover of pachysandra for
the front yard. Ruth, an
interior decorator, chose
shutters rather than curtains to show off the unusual framing of the livingroom windows. Bricks for
the back yard wall were
salvaged in 1965 from the
wreckage of Ann Arbor's
old City Hall.
NRHD, OWS

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