Collections : [University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library]

Professor of architecture at the University of Michigan; includes correspondence, professional organizational activities files, documentation, photographs, and architectural drawings accumulated during his work with the Michigan Historic Buildings Survey

The Emil Lorch papers are valuable for their documentation of the career of this important architectural educator and for that material about Michigan architecture and historic structures that Lorch accumulated in the course of his professional study and organizational involvement. The collection includes extensive correspondence with many of the country's leading architects, most notably members of the "Chicago School," and architectural educators, and manuscript and photographic documentation resulting from Lorch's involvement with the Michigan Historic Buildings Survey and various restoration projects, including Mackinac Island.

Pioneer in the private camping movement, founder and director of Al-Gon-Quian Boys Camp on Burt Lake in Cheboygan County, Michigan, and officer in the American Camping Association. Correspondence, articles, speeches and photographs; also Camp Al-Gon-Quian materials, including program files, reports, roster files, and published yearly programs; materials of King family, missionaries in China; and plans of Twining home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, originally designed by Albert Kahn and his associate Malcolm for Louis A. Strauss.

The papers of Herbert Twining, except for an earlier family letter from 1888, date from the 1920s to 1980. The collection is broken down into a series of personal and family materials, a series on Camp Al-Gon-Quian, 1931-1967, and photographs.

Photographs (positive and negative), slides, and transparencies taken by the company's photographers to document company activities, products, services, employees at work and at leisure, company exhibits and commemorations, and the response of the company to natural disasters and civil disturbances.

In 1993, Michigan Bell as a corporate entity was subsumed within the Ameritech Corporation. As a by-product of this reorganization and the downsizing resulting from it, the company agreed to deposit with the Bentley Historical Library its extensive archive of photographic images. Totalling approximately one million images, the Michigan Bell Telephone Company photo archive consists of negatives, copy prints, and color transparencies taken in the period since World War II (the bulk beginning in 1949). The collection does not include photos taken since 1983; interspersed throughout, however, are numerous images from before 1949.

The collection has been maintained in the order received with two principal series: Positives and Negatives.

The content of the photographs in the two series varies considerably. Naturally the collection documents the products of the company (phones and other communication devices) and the services provided (e.g. employees at work or the company reacting to a specific customer need). These photos were taken both to inform the general public as accompaniment to press notices and advertising copy and as a communications vehicle within the company, informing employees through the company news publication, Tielines, of activities going on in other divisions of the company or among the various regional Bell offices.

More importantly perhaps, the collection has value for its documentation of events and activities that are common to all large companies. These include images relating to: 1. The activities of employees within the corporation at their work (office workers, repairmen, operators, various support personnel, managers, etc.); 2. The activities of employees outside their work routine as members of corporate social groups (i.e., the company baseball or ice hockey team), at home engaged in leisure time activities, or involved in company-sponsored charitable or public service functions; and 3. Commemorations of specific milestones or events (company parade floats, area office open houses, corporate displays at public events such as fairs, etc.).

In addition, the collection documents the extraordinary and unforeseen as the phone company reacts to events and emergencies not within its control (floods, tornadoes, fires, the 1967 Detroit riot, strikes, and the like) or as a participant in history-making events (the announcement in Ann Arbor of the success of the Salk polio vaccine or the preparation involved in the 1980 Republican National Convention that convened in Detroit).

Businessman with the S. S. Kresge Company (later K mart Corporation) and philanthropist. Business records, materials relating to philanthropic activities, notably documenting the work of the Kresge Foundation, and family materials; also organizational materials, speeches, and photographs and motion pictures.

The Stanley Kresge Papers, an important source for the researcher interested in the history of the S.S. Kresge Company/K mart Corporation; the work of the Kresge Foundation; and the Kresge family, have been divided into six series: Kresge Company/K mart Corporation; Kresge Foundation; Organizations; Personal; Speeches; and Visual Materials. The collection has now been microfilmed to allow inter-library access to the collection. These 21 microfilm rolls comprise the bulk of Kresge's collection. Excluded from the microfilming have been a few folders of restricted financial materials, two oversize ledgers, and, of course, the motion picture films. The following finding aid is a guide to the entire collection with appropriate indication of files and other materials not part of the microfilm edition.

Church organized in Plymouth, Michigan in 1856; congregational minute books, 1856-1947; board of stewardship minute books, 1959-1967; announcement books, 1931-1960; subject files relating to the church's history, its administration, buildings, pastors, and activities; church publications; visual materials; and sound recordings.

The records of the St. Peter's Evangelical Church cover the period of 1856 to 1985 with the majority of the materials falling within the years of 1916 to 1960. The early records are in German, but most of the records from about 1920 are in English. The record group contains documents pertaining to the founding and history of the church, as well as its articles of association, bylaws, and constitution. Financial reports from 1939 to 1952, general correspondence, membership records, publications, announcement books, and records of the meetings of the Church Council and various committees from 1856 to 1961 are also included. There are photographs and pictures of the various pastors who have served the church over the years. Other audio/visual materials include slides, and cassette and reel-to-reel tapes.

The record group is arranged in ten series: Record Books, History, Operational, Buildings, Pastors, Congregation, Church Activities, Publications, Visual Materials, and Sound Recordings.

Dearborn, Michigan newspaper publisher; candidate for mayor of Dearborn in 1957. Papers relating to the Dearborn Independent newspaper; collected materials detailing the career of Dearborn mayor Orville Hubbard; campaign files documenting Mills' unsuccessful bid to unseat Hubbard in 1957; and photographs.

The Mills collection, approximately 1.3 linear feet of correspondence, clippings, photographs, and related materials, covers the period of 1920 to 1988. The great bulk of the collection dates from the years of the late 1940s to 1957.

Although Mills was a newspaper publisher for a long period, the Mills collection relates only in part to this phase of his life. The great majority of materials concern his unsuccessful campaign against Orville Hubbard in 1957. Of interest are the series of articles that Mills wrote, titled "How Dearborn got a dictator mayor."

A series of photographs that Mills collected are of especial importance. Many of these do relate to the activities and operation of the Dearborn Independent, to the cities of Dearborn and Fordson, and to Mills' extensive ties with the Ford Motor Company and the Ford family.