Henry Hulbert
Judge, Board Member
Photo: Wayne County Board of Auditors
In 1919 Judge Hulbert took action that lead to the passing of Act 392 of the public acts of 1921. It provided that any county with in the state should have the power, by resolution of its Board of Supervisors, to provide for the care, custody, and maintenance of feeble-minded persons within such county.
The son of a Civil War officer, Henry Schoolcraft Hulbert was born in Utica, New York on July 2nd, 1869. As his middle name suggests, he was named after his uncle, the great Michigander Henry Rowe Schoolcraft; explorer, surveyor, geographer, Indian agent, geologist, and discoverer of the Mississippi River's source. Hulbert came to Detroit as a child though he had to quit school at age 15 to support his family by getting a job as a messenger for Governor Russell Alger in 1885. One of Hulbert's favorite stories that he liked to recall came from that time in his youth while he was working in Governor Alger's office. Alger was walking past Hulbert's desk one day just as a football rolled out from under it into the fastidious governor's path. Alger proceeded to kick the offending football, presumably to teach Hulbert a lesson, but as he kicked it the ball sailed directly into one of his decorative mirrors, completely shattering it.
Hulbert was a Wayne County judge for almost 50 years and in fact was Wayne County's first Juvenile Judge, having been appointed to the position in 1909 despite having no formal legal training. His obituary in the June 5, 1959 Free Press claimed that Hulbert's court became one of the most outstanding in the United States and the judge won an international reputation. Other positions which he held included chairman of the County Election Commission, and he was trustee of the Cranbrook Foundation, the Cranbrook Institute of Science, the Edwin S. George Foundation, and St. Luke's Hospital; he was a member of the Detroit Athletic Club, Detroit Golf Club, Detroit Boat Club, St. Joseph Episcopal Church, and an Arch-Deacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio. He never went to college but received honorary degrees in law from University of Michigan, University of Detroit Mercy, and Wayne State. Hulbert retired from the bench to become Vice President and head of the Trust department of the National Bank of Detroit, and later the director of the Automobile Club of Michigan.
He was involved in the betterment and enrichment of the greater Detroit community equally as much as Tracy McGregor; indeed he was Tracy's most trusted colleague, and they were close friends for the better part of 30 years. For a time Hulbert himself was both a trustee and founding member of the McGregor Fund, and the Thursday Noon Group, who (so named because of the day and time they chose to meet in the old Pontchartrain Hotel).
The Thursday Noon Group comprised 25 prominent Detroit businessmen, doctors, and lawyers, and was an early philanthropic club which tied together several of the progenitors of the Wayne County Training School. Among the achievements of this group that preceded, and apparently built up to the conception of the WCTS, was the reform of the Detroit House of Corrections around 1917, whose old downtown facility had degraded into essentially a filthy, neglected, overcrowded dungeon; the Thursday Noon Group led a staunch public campaign that resulted in the construction of a newer, up to date Detroit House of Corrections in a more rural setting in Plymouth Township in 1927 with McGregor chairing its commission, and was considered a model of its kind.
The inception of the Wahjamega Farm Colony was another result of McGregor's and the Thursday Noon Group's spearheading at public institutions. In spring of 1913 Hulbert and McGregor, along with fellow Thursday founder Fred M. Butzel, began to focus on juvenile delinquents, the mentally ill, and especially epileptics a group they discovered to be rapidly growing, but who were currently being housed in asylums and prisons, not receiving proper care. These three men organized resources to found an institution specifically for the appropriate treatment of epileptics, and succeeded in passing Public Act 173 to create the Michigan Farm Colony for Epileptics at Wahjamega (later known as Caro State Home), which opened in 1914 by transferring epileptics out of the overcrowded Lapeer State Home.4 In 1928 McGregor completed a study of Michigan state hospitals bringing to light their overcrowding and long waiting lists, and beseeching state lawmakers to react to the inadequacy. The result was almost $120 million in appropriations from 1930-1932 for the expansion of both Lapeer Home and Wahjamega, and for the creation of Ypsilanti State Hospital.
Judge Hulbert is equally remembered for his contributions to the field of astronomy. Hulbert built his own observatory in the Wayne State neighborhood at age 18, and formed a friendship with George Gough Booth, the Detroit newspaper magnate and philanthropist who founded Cranbrook. Hulbert was the one who persuaded Booth to include astronomy in the Cranbrook curriculum, donated his own three-inch telescope to the private school, and then purchased a six-inch on its behalf as well. When the original Cranbrook observatory proved to be flawed, Hulbert and his colleague Robert McMath (also a Thursday Noon member) asked Booth to consider another one elsewhere, and were surprised when he drew up plans for a new observatory combined with a museum to be designed by McMath himself. Thus, the Cranbrook Institute of Science was formed in 1930, with Hulbert and McMath as its curators and trustees.6 Their main idea was to do something that no other observatory had ever done before�produce motion pictures of celestial objects. Though they intended this to be merely educational and spark youngsters interest in astronomy, the director of University of Michigan's Astronomy Department saw the work the two had done and decided to collaborate with them, finding not just educational, but true scientific value in their motion picture work.7 They then developed a new instrument called a spectroheliokinematograph, which allowed them to observe and film solar prominences and flares. This also required their development of a new type of ultra-smooth telescope tracking drive, regulated by cycle output from Detroit Edison's generating station, designed especially for astronomical motion picture photography.8 In 1933, Hulbert won the Wetherill Medal for his work in photographing the sky.9
Related Items:
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Manual of Wayne County 1926 PDF
Manual of Wayne County 1930 PDF
Northville Historical Society Photos