David McCollum's House

David McCollum's House. . David T. McCollum was thirty-three years old when he arrived in Ann Arbor from New York State in 1832 with a wife and five children.. The following spring he became the bookkeeper for Anson Brown and Co. McCollum was a leader in the Methodist Church, a strong abolitionist, and a one-time candidate on the Liberty Party ticket. He was also Register of Deeds and Treasurer of Washtenaw County. The family lived in a home on Broadway before his first wife died in 1840., In 1842, after a second marriage to former school teacher Sarah Ann Berry from Massachusetts, McCollum bought the 1838 Sinclair house at 1223 Pontiac. During those early years McCollum added a separate kitchen at the rear and acquired adjoining lots with a tenant house, a woodshed, and a large barn to accommodate four cows. Six children were born to that second marriage., McCollum was a 49er and employed his financial skills as clerk for a large Ann Arbor group in the rush across the continent to the California gold fields. For many years McCollum and prosperous Pontiac Trail neighbor and paper mill owner Jonathan H. Lund operated a store on Broadway near Canal Street. McCollum made frequent trips to eastern cities to buy stock for the store-by railroad to Detroit, next by boat across Lake Erie, and then by canal boat, stage, and railroad., McCollum died in 1880 and was buried in Fairview Cemetery in sight of the home he loved. Members of his family continued to live in the house until 1925. , Poet Robert Frost lived in the house while he was Artist-in-Residence at the U-M in 1925-26 (left). It is believed that while there he wrote two of his best poems: "Spring Pools" and "Acquainted with the Night." In the next to the last stanza he refers to "One luminary clock against the sky”-thought to be the clock tower on the old county courthouse which would have been visible from north of the Huron River in the 1920s., The architecture of McCollum's home was much admired by Professor Emil Lorch, head of the U-M College of Architecture. In 1936 Henry Ford dismantled the house and moved it to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. It was restored to its original appearance and can still be visited as the Robert Frost House.