Birmingham Uncovered

Send us a Text Message.What image comes to mind when I say the word “Birmingham”? I’m going to take a wild guess and say that it’s probably not Shetland Ponies. But, for a period of a few decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Birmingham was the premier place in the country to get a purebred Shetland Pony. And the subject of this podcast episode, Fenton Watkins, spent a great deal of his life working with those ponies, bringing joy to pony enthusiasts and the tourists on Boblo Island who rented the pony concessions that he and his uncle’s farm provided. For photos and other documents related to the episode, check out our websiteFor questions, comments or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.Minnie Hunt Saltzer considered herself the foremost expert on the lives of Birmingham’s pioneers made it one of her life’s goals to educate everyone on it. Unfortunately, her stories contained more prejudice, unchecked gossip and pettiness than facts. We take a look at her life, her writings and just what they can tell us about Minnie Hunt Saltzer and Birmingham.To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website. For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.It is just not fair that the life and work of Harris Machus gets overshadowed by the disappearance of a certain Teamster from the parking lot of his restaurant. This is us putting some respect back on Machus’ name by exploring his exciting life and business savvy that changed dining in Birmingham forever. This is the fourth episode in a limited series with the Birmingham Shopping District where we explore the evolution of Birmingham’s retail environment. To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website. To learn more about the Birmingham Shopping District and to see upcoming events, check out their website. For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.When Nathan Rosenfield brought Jacobson’s Department store to Birmingham in 1950 there was only one huge problem-shoppers didn’t have anywhere to park! Rosenfield would radically alter not just the shopping landscape forever but the urban planning one as well. This is the third episode in a limited series with the Birmingham Shopping district where we look at the evolution of Birmingham’s retail environment.To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website. To learn more about the Birmingham Shopping District and to see upcoming events, check out their website. For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.For some Birminghamsters, the story of department stores in Birmingham begins and ends with Jacobson's, but the story doesn't start there. In 1896, two Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe changed the retail environment in Birmingham forever by opening up the first department store. Gitel and Morris Levinson weren't just retail pioneers though, they were also the first Jewish family in Birmingham and can tell us a lot about the Jewish American experience in the late 1800s and beyond.This is our second episode in a series with the Birmingham Shopping District, where we look at the evolution of Birmingham's retail environment.To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website. To learn more about the Birmingham Shopping District and to see upcoming events, check out their website. For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.   When Edwin O’Neal opened his harness shop in 1885 he probably never dreamed of exactly what the landscape of Birmingham would look like at his retirement. His business straddles the period where horsepower was shifting from literal horses to how we measure a car’s engine’s power. This is a the first episode in a limited series with the Birmingham Shopping District where we look at the evolution of Birmingham’s retail environment.To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website. To learn more about the Birmingham Shopping District and to see upcoming events, check out their website. For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.What Birmingham would be like today without Martha Baldwin is hard to picture. She has an outsized legacy that would be far too much to cover in one episode, so over however long this podcast runs we are going to be breaking up her life and legacy into thematic chunks. And since I write the scripts, the first chunk that I’m choosing is how Martha, in an age before women could yield political power, used instead the power of threats to do two things that would change the Birmingham landscape forever: getting a new home for the library and the construction of Baldwin School.To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.Robert Opdyke took a train from Birmingham to Detroit and was never seen again…until his son received an alarming telegram several years later. Robert’s story is one of business and failure in mid-late 1800s Birmingham. To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material about the mill and the Opdyke family, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers

Send us a Text Message.John  Allen Bigelow was a man of many talents but taking life too seriously wasn’t one of them. Come along with us as we sneak into the Union Army to fight in the Civil War twice, form a love connection with a good friend’s sister, steal a train, brand ourselves as a one-armed insurance salesman and give future historians headaches with our inability to walk in a straight line with one of Birmingham’s most colorful characters. To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material about John Allen Bigelow, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.The world has always been ending, which means there's always a candidate or two around waiting to be cast in the role of the Antichrist. In the late 1700s, a friend or family member of Rhoda Bingham Daniels wrote an 8 page manifesto about how Napoleon Bonaparte was the figure the book of Revelations in the Bible warned about. Why Napoleon? And what exactly did the end of the world look like for an American in the late 1700s?To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.Rhoda Bingham Daniels was a direct descendant of a famous puritan minister back East, which meant letters from the family contained more hellfire and information on how babies are evil than you might expect. This story has everything: TULIPs, sex cults, lying toddlers and an intimate look at religion and family life in early 1800s Birmingham. To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material about the Binghams, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Send us a Text Message.It took George Taylor 4 weeks along the Underground Railroad before he achieved freedom. In the following decades he got married, adopted a child and helped to found a still active church community in Kansas before settling in Birmingham, where he became the village’s first Black property owner. Come along with us as we trace George’s epic journey and talk about our continuing research into Birmingham’s Underground Railroad Connections. To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material about the Taylors, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, our amazing volunteers and the descendants of the Taylor family.

Send us a Text Message.Ziba Swan was an early Birmingham settler who is perhaps best known today for donating the first ½ acre of land to make Greenwood Cemetery, but he was a lot more than just a land-donator. Ever wondered just what a battlefield doctor during the War of 1812 would have done? Come along and find out.To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material about Swan, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum as well as the Swan family.

Send us a Text Message.The lives of Margaret, Olive and Mariah Prindle were three sisters who really did everything together-including moving out to the middle of nowhere. When Margaret and her husband, John West Hunter, moved to what would become Birmingham in 1819 they also brought his parents, and siblings along with Margaret’s unmarried sisters. Theirs is a story of love, marriage and family in the early 1800s.For transcripts and additional materials, check out our website!For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum

Send us a Text Message.The term “founder” can be a tricky thing. Can someone really “found” a place that already had people living in it? Does a “founder” have to do anything other than just be the first? In some older historical material for Birmingham, four men get called Birmingham’s “founders”, which is problematic in itself because three of those men moved to the land they purchased with families, so why aren’t their wives, siblings and parents called “founders”? This becomes even more problematic when we consider that one of those “founders” didn’t even live on the land he purchased in what would become Birmingham and maybe only visited once. This episode we are looking at that guy. Benjamin Kendrick Pierce, the founder who wasn’t: why he never even lived here, what his legacy was and why he has so many things in Birmingham named after him. To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material about Pierce, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum

Send us a Text Message.Elijah Fish was a prominent abolitionists and his gravesite is part of the National Park Service Underground Network to Freedom. How did one brother become a respected minister and human rights campaigner while the other committed Oakland County’s first murders? And how did Birmingham and Oakland County become a hotbed of the abolitionist movement? To access a full episode transcript as well as to read the newspaper and family accounts referred to in the episode, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, in particular Leslie Pielack and Donna Casaceli, who have been hard at work uncovering the Underground Railroad Network in Oakland County. Thanks also to members of the community who, like the Fish family, provided the museum with their family’s stories. 

Send us a Text Message.In 1825 a tiny settlement along the Saginaw Trail was rocked by a double murder. The intertwining stories of Imri Fish and his victims, Polly and Cynthia Utter, can tell us a lot about early migration to Oakland County, early 1800s mental health care and how that small settlement started congealing into the Birmingham we know today.To access a full episode transcript as well as to read the newspaper accounts and court documents referred to in the episode, check out our website.For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org. Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, in particular Leslie Pielack who located the court records for the United States vs Imri Fish and Brittany Phalen, who transcribed the documents, including a rather grisly coroners report that I’m sure wasn’t very fun first thing in the morning. Thanks also to members of the community who, like the Rowley family, provided the museum with their family’s stories.