I thought I was looking at the campus as it had been.
Pettibone’s map
Darwin Pettibone’s map of Ann Arbor is dated 1854. The University Library has it online, along with an enlargement of the campus. I started with the streets, then spent more time on the small drawing of the university at the left of the sheet.
Between Mason Hall and South College there’s another building. The library’s exhibit calls it West Front Michigan University. In the drawing, it looks as settled as its neighbors.
The older plan
The exhibit’s caption stopped me. That middle building was never built. Pettibone’s depiction of campus draws on an 1840 plan, fourteen years before the map’s date. The library says no copy of the original plan survives.
I’d already started wondering when it had been pulled down.
The two wings
The Bentley’s building chronology puts the old Mason Hall in 1841 and the South Wing in 1849. They were there by the time Pettibone’s map appeared. The Old Medical Building followed in 1850, and the Observatory in 1854.
Around the edges
I want to know what Pettibone expected a reader to make of that picture in 1854. Had the proposed campus become a familiar image, or was it still a future someone hoped to build?
Next I’ll compare the map with later campus views, including the small scenes printed around the edges. I’d been treating those as decoration.