Ann Arbor

a thriving inland city of southern Michigan. Population, about 15,000. It is the shipping point of a large agricultural and fruit growing region, and has prosperous manufactures of implements, furniture, wagons, pumps, and engines. The city is noted chiefly, however, as the seat of the University of Michigan, the oldest of a large group of state universities in the North Central States. It was established in 1837, the year in which the state was admitted to the Union. The intelligence, liberality, and scholarship that have characterized the University of Michigan have resulted in the development of one of the great universities of the world. It possesses a spacious campus and capacious buildings. There are various colleges, large faculties, including many professors of acknowledged scholarship, leaders in their respective departments of thought. There are over five thousand students. Public confidence in institutions of higher education supported by the state has won by the success of this state university. As a consequence the state university idea has been intrenched in the West as a part of a public school system connecting at every step with the district school. See University; Michigan