EMU has just won an award for preserving the several historic buildings on its campus.
Now all they need to do is to bring back Tubal Cain Owen's magical curative water well, which he called "Atlantis." Its gigantic wooden derrick once towered above the spot where the old Roosevelt High School now stands on EMU's campus.
Tubal Cain Owen was not a man to do anything by half-measures. When he drilled for water and struck a vein of smelly reddish-brown liquid of questionable ingestibility, did he drill elsewhere? No! He marketed the heck out of it! Owen sold his water across the nation as a life-giving elixir--even as a cancer cure. It was Ypsilanti's golden age of dubious curative water, just shy of the turn of the century.
But the glowing testimonials festooning Owen's miracle beverage withered away with the 1906 Pure Food Act. Also, "local residents complained of the yelling of the patients at Owen's house of healing so the state condemned the property, claiming that the sanitarium posed “a serious menace to the social life of the Normal College,” allowing it to then “acquire” the land for the college's use. The Roosevelt Building was constructed on the site of the former Owen home as a high school for teacher training."
