The Problem of the Hobo in Jail

One hundred years ago today, a "tramp" was housed in the city jail for vagrancy. The city jail (and city hall) was still the small building on the north side of Cross just west of the river. A hobo jungle existed just north of Forest Avenue near the river, and "tramps" hopping on and off of trains were common in the Depot Town neighborhood.

But what to do if the tramp potentially carried a dread disease? The Ypsilanti Daily Press discussed the options in a January 24, 1911 article.

"There has been some agitation among the city authorities during the past week as to what would happen if a tramp who has been confined in the city jail should become ill with smallpox as was recently the case in the Ann Arbor jail. How would he be cared for and where? The city has no detention hospital and no pest house to keep a person in. What would become of him and how could he be isolated from the public to prevent the spread of the dread disease?

"Mayor Towner stated to a Press representative today that he had given notice to the Board of Health that something definite must be done in the near future to proovide for such an emergency.

"One plan that has been suggested is that a portable pest house should be purchased by the city and placed on the property near the Water Works station [today Water Works Park]. These portable houses may be purchased of a firm in the northern part of the state at a reasonable figure. One or more rooms could be purchased just as desirable. These houses are strong and warmly built and are put together with staples.

"A meeting of the Board of Health and the Council will probably be held very soon to discuss the advisability of such a purchase."

Faint Voices from Ypsilanti's Onetime Hobo Jungles

Dusty Diary just heard the midnight train's 4 mournful whistles, and the distant clacking of its wheels through Depot Town. It is the day's last train, whose whoops every night remind me that I should already have gone to bed. It is the last of the 6 daily Amtrak Wolverine Line trains that pass through Ypsilanti:

7:35 a.m.: Westbound from Detroit
Just after noon: Westbound
1:10 p.m.: Eastbound to Detroit
6 p.m.: Eastbound
6:30 p.m.: Westbound
12:15 a.m.: Eastbound, home to Detroit at half past midnight

Dusty Diary is not the only one in Ypsilanti who listens for the last train. Hundreds of others, lost in time, also hear it, from Frog Island, from under a bridge, and from a forest near Depot Town.

They were the men, women, and children who rode the rails from town to town, seeking work, adventure, or flight from their pasts. They sometimes wound up in the old City Hall jail on Cross Street. The jail offered respite from another night outdoors in the jungle and a meal other than the slumgullion mulligan stew being cooked up over a fire and containing begged, borrowed, or stolen cabbage, onion, carrot, and maybe a few dogs'-meat butchers' scraps.

They camped in Frog Island and according to hobo Harold Jones, under a railroad trestle near Huron River Dr. (likely the Forest St. railroad bridge). A separate source once told Dusty D that a camp also once existed in the woods just northeast of the bridge.

In this 1995 Ann Arbor News article at left, historian Peter Fletcher is quoted as saying the old city dump on South Grove Road was also a camp: "There would be a dozen down there at one time." Dusty D is guessing that the dump in question is the old junkyard once on Water Street, and not the old city dump, 1945-1960s, that once stood at junction of Huron St. and I-94.

As to the paucity of local historical data on hoboes, Fletcher is quoted as saying, "It's just human nature to gauze over some of the negative aspects...we do a lot better remembering the positive things."

Nope. It's the forgotten and the deliberately forgotten who often have the most interesting stories. Dusty D imagines she can almost hear snatches of those stories, the voices and the smell of cabbage and coffee drifting from the nighttime jungle camp fire, passing the time till the midnight train.

Ypsilanti's 1980s Boomer Days Celebrated Hobo & Railroad Culture

The erstwhile Ypsitucky Jamboree is not the first festival to stir up controversy in town. For several years in the 1980s Ypsilanti celebrated "our railroad heritage and the hey-day of bums, tramps, and hobos" with a weekend festival called Boomer Days. A "boomer" is slang for a hobo "always on the go--he has a travel itch."

The July, 1987 Depot Town Rag featured this R. Crumb-esque figure of a hobo and a full slate of family activities.

Kids could take part in a carp-fishing contest in Riverside Park, and adults could compete in the "Coronation of the Hobo Royalty," or vote for their favorite "bum" with spare change, at the Cricket Box, 19 E. Cross St. There was also a hobo art display and hobo fashion show.

A "Mulligan Stew-Off" offered local cooks the chance to try their hand at making an authentic hobo jungle stew. The prizes for the stew-off included an oak bench and a "country wreath" to add elegance to one's jungle camp.

The July 'Rag notes that the 1987 Boomer Days is the "8th Annual," but James Mann & Tom Dodd's popular book Down by the Depot says that the fest ran for only 6 summers. It continues, "The concept proved enormously popular until the advent of homelessness in America. While some citizens were sleeping on sidewalks in refrigerator boxes all winter, it seemed a bit rude to be celebrating such poverty in an annual summer festival and the concept was abandoned."