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Hometown History - Visiting Marshall Tuesday, May 27 2008

When you think of Jamie Hyneman, you may think of the rugged, strait man to Adam Savage's crazy, cartoonism, but where did this bushy-faced, bald-man come from?

Marshall, Michigan.

Yep, that's right, smack dab in the middle of the big hand, southeast of Lansing and midway between Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor is the small town that brought the world the ying to Adam's yang.

Picture mini-Jamie, who probably still had that mustache and baret, blowing up G.I. Joes in the basement of Marshall home or planning how to launch the town's Brooks Memorial Fountain into the stratosphere.

Marshall is a town ripe with history, beyond the fountain, which is a Greek revival structure that marks the site of the town's first courthouse. The 19th century American small town architecture earned Marshall the status of National Historic Landmark District in 1991. The district includes over 850 houses and businesses.

Several notable sights are: the Grand Army of the Republic, built in 1902 to house Union Civil War Veterans and is now a museum; the Honolulu House Museum, built in 1860 by Abner Pratt, the first U.S. Consul to the Hawaiian Islands; the Capitol Hill School Museum, built in 1860, which was in use for 101 years.

The town was established in 1830. The early settlers expected the community to become Michigan's state capitol. Marshall was nominated as the state capitol in 1839 so they built the Governor's Mansion. They lost to Lansing, then a village of eight registered voters, in 1847.

By that time, Marshall had become the switching center for the young Michigan Central Railroad, which kept it alive and well during the Civil War era, dispite losing its big for the capitol.

In 1872 the rail yards were moved to Jackson, however in Marshall a new industry was growing. Marshall was becoming the Midwest’s patent medicine center. Then the Pure Food and Drug Act came along in 1906 and effectively killed off most of the patent medicine products. The town went into a bit of a slump; only two new streets were platted from 1872 to 1920.

Two Marshall citizens, Rev. John D. Pierce and lawyer Isaac E. Crary, innovated the Michigan School system and established it as part of the state constitution. Their method and format were later adopted by all the states in the Old Northwest Territory and became the foundation for the U.S. Land Grant Act in 1861, which established schools like Michigan State University all over the country. Pierce became the country’s first state superintendent of public instruction and Crary Michigan’s first member of the U. S. House.

Marshal was also a station for the Underground Railroad and a strong anti-slavery town.
In 1846 Kentucky slave chasers tried to capture escaped slave Adam Crosswhite and his family in Marshall. Leading citizens, in turn, arrested the Kentuckians and smuggled the Crosswhite family into Canada. The rescuers were convicted of “depriving a man of his rightful property” in Detroit Federal court in 1847. They paid fines, which they considered a badge of honor. The Crosswhite incident is mentioned on several of the historical markers in town. A few years ago the Marshall Historical Society marked Crosswhite’s grave (he had returned to Marshall after the Civil War) where he rests a few hundred feet from several of his rescuers.

Another important 19th century contribution from Marshall was the founding of a union, called the Brotherhood of the Footboard. A few months later the members realized that most people didn’t know what a footboard was, so they changed the name of the union to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, which is still one of the country’s strongest railroad unions.

The town only covers 6.1 square miles, with a population of around 8,000 people, but it is growing again, despite the setbacks history has given it. With all the history that permeates Marshall, it is no wonder that Jamie's creative juices were flowing. And with the small-town atmosphere, it's no wonder he felt the need to blow up G.I. Joes.