History
Ann Arbor's city parks sit on the ancestral and traditional homelands of several indigenous Native peoples. Read a
land acknowledgement from the city and learn more about the early history of the land
here.
Erected in 1898, the first ‘livery’ on the Huron River in Ann Arbor was the U of M Boat house. Despite the name, it was a private enterprise. Built by Paul G Tessmer, the boat house was located on the North Main Street edge of Argo Pond. Tessmer had 160 canoes, all of them built by himself, and 40 rowboats for rent.
In 1914 the Edison Company, which had acquired the waterpower rights on Argo Pond, rebuilt the Argo Dam. The beach was a gift from Detroit Edison which had bought the present Argo Dam in 1905 to generate electricity. In 1917, the company offered to develop the beach if the city would pay for its upkeep. The city accepted the offer, and Edison trucked in loads of sand and built a pier, three docks, and a beach house. The city paid a nominal rent of $1 a year before eventually buying the facility in 1938 for $100. The docks were placed in increasingly deeper water—the first at four feet, the next at about eight feet, and the last at twelve feet. Swimmers had to pass proficiency tests to go out to the deeper docks. The last dock had a tall tower, about ten feet. When people wanted a break from swimming, the beach had a volleyball court, horseshoe courts, a slide, and a grassy place under a willow for picnics
The casino inside was famous for its collection of coin-operated orchestrions, melodeons, and other antique mechanical music boxes. In 1936, when Detroit Edison drained Argo Pond to repair the dam, the city took the opportunity to improve the beach, cleaning the river bottom of debris, deepening it, and bringing in clean sand. The next winter the city built an island dubbed "Clever's Folly" after alderman Arbie Clever, who had pushed for the beach improvements. Clever's Folly is now overgrown, and birds nest where local teens once sunbathed. The beach closed for good at the end of the 1948 season. The buildings at the beach were demolished four years later.
At the end of the 50s, the business became Wirth's Canoe Livery, owned by Jack Wirth. In 1958, Jack earned the city's citation for heroism as a result of rescuing a 15 year old boy who fell from the train tracks into the Huron River. In 1964, a massive storm passed over Ann Arbor and heavily damaged Wirth's Livery. In 1970 the City of Ann Arbor bought the property from Jack and Barbara Wirth. In April, 1971 the Ann Arbor parks department constructed the Argo Park Canoe Livery, a bit upstream from this site.
The Argo Park Nature Area began to take shape in 1963, when the city made a massive river front purchase from Detroit Edison that reshaped and now defines Ann Arbor's waterfront. The city purchased Barton, Argo, Geddes and Superior dams from Edison for about $400,000, and slowly began to develop parks associated with those facilities. In the Argo area, that purchase included the pond, the dam, the land upstream of the dam along the river (including the hillside to the east of the pond between Longshore Drive and the river, which is now Argo Nature Area), the river below the dam (including what is now known as the Argo Cascades), and a little bit of land along the banks of the Huron.
Parks Department landscape architects Joe Ruppert and Tom Raynes designed the original proposed development plan for Argo Pond and surrounding area downstream. The cost of the development was estimated at $250,000, to come from the $3.5 million bond issue passed by voters on April 5th1971. At one time it was seriously proposed to fill in the raceway and make additional parkland there. But because the value of the raceway, both aesthetically and as a fishing site, was realized, another solution was sought.
In 2004, a state dam safety inspection for the Argo Dam found the earthen embankment (a structure considered part of the dam) was badly eroding, raising the prospect of a failure. The City needed to correct the issues identified by the state dam safety inspection. A vigorous community debate ensued over whether to repair Argo Dam or remove it. Finally the state, which regulates Argo Dam, ordered the city to improve the toe drains along the embankment to prevent its collapse.
Within a city-public task force working on the problem, a new idea emerged: replace the headrace with a free-flowing channel. Besides its obvious benefits for paddlers, this solution would mean most of the embankment would no longer be structurally part of the dam, removing it from state control. After months of discussion, the city and state signed a consent agreement in May 2010: the city could either fix the toe drains or replace the entire headrace with a channel of falling water.
