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

416 South Ashley Street
SToledo, Ann Arbor and Northern 1889
Michigan Railway Depot
The passenger depot for the Toledo, Ann Arbor and Northern Michigan Railway, affectionately known as "Annie," is one of the few reminders of Ann
Arbor's "second" railroad. Second because it could never compete with the
glamorous passenger trains of the Michigan Central Railroad, whose station on
Depot Street now houses the Gandy Dancer Restaurant (see 20).
Annie was always the "people's railroad." It took families from town to picnics
at nearby Zukey or Whitmore lakes, or further north to resorts in Traverse
City. Lela Duff wrote: "It's true that the Ann Arbor station never had about it
the glamour for townspeople that attached to the Michigan Central. One seldom saw expensive luggage bearing foreign labels piled up on the platform.
But the place was not without drama. Patients who had to be lifted on stretchers... on their ways to the local hospitals were no rarity. In the resort season
too there was a special gaiety about the place... "
Annie was the brainchild of James M. Ashley, an energetic man who had been
governor of the Montana territory, a United States congressman from Ohio,
and a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. In a eulogy at the Unitarian Church
in Ann Arbor in 1897, he was described as a large man, "intellectually, physically, and morally. There was nothing petty, small or mean about him." The
name of the street upon which this station stands was changed to Ashley to
honor him.
James Ashley built the railroad to connect his home town of Toledo, Ohio to
the wheat and lumbering industry in northern Michigan. Always struggling
financially, the line managed to open in 1877 and reached Ann Arbor in June
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