In the summer of 1822, a stout young man with a broad forehead, deep-set eyes, and a determined expression stepped ashore and wandered into the raw streets of frontier Detroit. His name was Lucius Lyon, and if ever there was a man who epitomized the “spunky” Yankee, it was he.¹ Born at the turn of the nineteenth century in Shelburne, Vermont, Lyon came from a middling background and had only a common school education and four years’ experience as an apprentice surveyor. At twenty-two, he had no money and scant prospects in his native New England. Faced with this, Lyon...

Today when we think of the word “Yankee,” we often think of it simply as a synonym for “American,” or, more specifically, as the nickname for Union Army soldiers during the Civil War, or perhaps even a baseball team based in New York. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, “Yankee” designated a distinct ethnic group, if by that term we mean a group “with a shared culture and sense of identity based on religion, race, and nationality.”⁷ Yankees were fiercely proud to be the descendents of the first seventeenth-century English settlers to New England; in fact, the word Yankee...

Yankee immigration to Michigan was slow at first. The few that did migrate came in pursuit of commercial opportunities fueled by the fur trade, and all settled in one of Michigan’s only two population centers, Detroit or Mackinac Island. Before the War of 1812, two Yankees, Solomon Sibley of Massachusetts and Stephen Mack of Connecticut, had established shops in Detroit. Other Yankees were brought to Detroit during their Army service and stayed on once hostilities ceased. Detroit was also regularly visited by the ubiquitous Yankee peddler, who, with his clocks, tin ware, and other notions, was a familiar sight in...

Everything about the life and career of William Nowlin marks him as a typical Michigan Yankee pioneer farmer—except for the fact that near the end of his life he sat down and wrote a book about it.The Bark Covered House(1876) is one of the finest firsthand accounts of Yankee pioneer life in Michigan and is still a lively read even today. Nowlin relates how his father, John, barely able to compete because of the rising land prices in New York, became infected with “Michigan fever,” convinced that only there could he provide for his family and find...

By the late 1840s and 1850s, theDetroit Courier’spredictions were beginning to become a reality, at least in the Yankee-settled counties of southern Michigan. The worst effects of the economic depression of 1837 had faded, and many of Michigan’s pioneers were feeling prosperous and secure. Log cabins were quickly being replaced with Yankee versions of Greek Revival wood-frame or brick structures, especially the ubiquitous “upright-and-wing” houses so popular with Yankees from Upstate New York.¹⁶¹ And despite the fact that a raft of state-sponsored internal improvements, including canals and railroads, had fallen victim to the economic downturn, roads had improved...

The Civil War stimulated Michigan’s economic growth, catalyzing its transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy.²¹⁶ During the war, extractive industries in Michigan such as mining and logging grew by leaps and bounds, and manufacturing exploded. Acute labor shortages caused by the war created markets for new labor-saving machines and more efficient production processes. Moreover, the war closed the Mississippi River, the major route to national and international markets for much Midwest grain. To take advantage of this, Michigan provided greater outlets to the East by investing in its railroad network and expanding its transportation infrastructure generally, which in...

Despite financial success and the continuing promise of Michigan’s growing economy, many of the state’s Yankees began to feel a nagging sense that their social position was becoming precarious by the end of the nineteenth century. They were not alone. All of Yankeedom, it seems, was gripped by an acute anxiety that Yankees were ineluctably losing political, economic, and cultural control of their communities and regions, and thus, too, their status as a chosen people. Yankees were especially concerned by the changing nature of American society due to urbanization, industrialization, and large-scale foreign immigration. The coastal cities of New England...