Central Campus Flagpole (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

 flag  Add category

The flagpole was one of the items the university obtained from the World's Columbian Exposition, held in 1893 in Chicago. Other major items which the university acquired from the Expo were the Frieze Memorial Organ, now in Hill Auditorium, and two large murals or lunettes by Gari Melchers, now in the main reading room of Hatcher Library. Early in 1898, the regents authorized spending $375 to purchase the flagpole; it was installed in July 1898. An item in the Michigan Alumnus reported: "A flagstaff recently purchased by the Regents of the University of Michigan has been set in place in the center of campus. It consists of a steel tube of 77 feet long, sunk ten feet in the ground, surmounted by a ship's mast 95 feet long." For years the rumor persisted that the ship's mast was from the USS Maine, whose sinking in Havana Harbor ignited the Spanish-American War. However, the Maine was sunk in February 1898, while the ship's mast on the flagpole had been at the Expo in 1893. The USS Maine's masts are at Arlington (main mast) and Anapolis (secondary mast). The 164' flagpole originally sat further into campus, south of its current position and closer to the old general library building. In 1899 an old gun or Spanish Mortar was placed at the base of the flagpole as a memorial to UM men lost in the Spanish-American War. When the old library was demolished in 1918 to make way for the new Graduate Library, the flagpole was moved to its current position, and the Spanish mortar was relocated as well. The black and white photo shows the flagpole (with ship's mast attached) being raised when it was moved in 1918. Sometime in the 1960s the ship's mast at the end was replaced with a plain steel tube.