Midwest Guest

Stay at the Sauder Heritage Inn to extend your Sauder Village visit

You can easily spend the better part of two days exploring the historic Sauder Village in Archbold, Ohio, and booking an overnight stay at the neighboring Sauder Heritage Inn allows out-of-town visitors to easily make a weekend of visiting the village.

The 98-room country inn sits steps from the village entrance and includes many amenities to help make the most of your overnight visit.

The inn, built in 1994, recently underwent an expansion with a three-story addition to house a wing featuring an indoor pool, hot tub, pool deck, game room and exercise room.

Common areas like the lobby are comfortable places to sit or meet with a larger group.

I loved discovering numerous gathering spaces tucked around the grounds, including an outdoor seating area with a water feature, which a few ducks deemed a great place to relax as well!

I also loved the homespun touches with the inn's decor that included lots of beautiful quilts hanging on the walls and this unique QR-code quilt displayed in the lobby (yes, it works with a standard QR reader!).

If you prefer camping, the Sauder complex has a campground with 48spaces that include back-in sites and sites accessible for those with special needs that is near the village. Campers can use the inn's amenities like the indoor pool and hot tub, free Wi-Fi, game room access, laundry facilities, showers and, for a small extra fee, the inn's continental breakfast.

We enjoyed having a continental breakfast in the activity room under the "Great Oak", included with our room at the inn. The 25-foot-tall tree is a man-made marvel with a 35-foot canopy and a four-foot diameter trunk that offers a pleasant way to enjoy the feeling of dining al fresco.

We walked across the parking lot from the inn to enjoy dinner at The Barn Restaurant. The 350-seat restaurant was a dilapidated barn that sat on the Mose Stutzman farm just two miles northeast of Sauder Village when village founder Erie Sauder acquired it to restore as a restaurant.

Many folks couldn't envision what Sauder saw in the then-rickety structure, but today the restaurant has several spacious dining areas and serves more than 200,000 meals each year.

Can't decide what to eat? Give the restaurant's buffet a try.

The Sauder Village in Heritage Inn campus includes a Sauder Furniture store and outlet, the Founder's Hall performance and exhibition center, and the Doughbox Bakery.

We made sure we stopped at the bakery before leaving the area to take a taste of the village home with us. The peanut butter blossom and monster cookies were among our favorites.

The frozen cookie dough of frozen unbaked pies might have tempted us if we'd had a cooler or a shorter drive home!

Sauder Village and the campground are open from late April through late October, while the Sauder Heritage Inn, Doughbox Bakery, Sauder Furniture store and performance center are open year round.

Sauder Village is easy to find, just a few minutes off the Ohio Turnpike at exit 25 and about an hour's drive from Toledo, Ohio or Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Thanks to Sauder Village for providing village admission, lodging and meals during my recent visit for my review, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Sauder Village: A living Ohio history timeline

Sauder Village near Archbold, Ohio is a beehive of activity as craftspeople welcome visitors to their workshops, farmers tend to their fields, while villagers worship and go to school as nearly 100,000 people visit this living history site each year in northwestern Ohio.

Things weren't always so lively in this corner of northwestern Ohio, though.

Few people dared to travel to, or settle in, this area during the early 1800s as Ohio began developing as a state.

The so-called Great Black Swamp covered a 1,500-square-mile area in the state's northwestern corner and the northeastern corner of what would become Indiana. Native Americans forced into the swamp by westward expansion kept their settlements on the edges of the swamp, even as the area proved to be a fertile hunting ground.

The first European settlers to venture into the area were Mennonite immigrants who arrived in 1834 seeking freedom from religious persecution and affordable property.

The Mennonites set to the hard work of draining the swamp so they could farm it. Within 10 years, they drained much of the swamp, and the area became some of Ohio's best farmland by the end of the nineteenth century.

Woodworker Erie Sauder descended from those early settlers, and historic Sauder Village was his way of honoring their hard work and sharing his heritage with younger generations.

One of the first buildings visitors see when entering the recreated historic village is the small woodshop from the Sauder family farm where young Erie, born at Archbold in 1904, began following in his grandfather's footsteps to become a woodworker.

Sauder started his own business in 1934, making chicken coops, cabinets and other items needed by local farmers. His company grew from being a small home business, becoming the largest ready-to-assemble furniture company in the country and continuing today under the leadership of a third generation of Sauders.

The idea for Sauder Village came when Erie Sauder began giving tours of his furniture factory.

Sauder embraced new techniques and technology as his furniture company grew, but he worried that future generations might not appreciate the effort, artistry and entrepreneurship of their own ancestors that made today's successes possible.

Sauder bought 15 acres for his re-created village in 1969, opening Sauder Village to the public in 1976 as a living history site with several dozen buildings and other structures from the area to create a nineteenth-century style village.

Erie Sauder died in 1997, but his legacy lives on at Sauder Village, which is an 80-acre non-profit site and Ohio's largest living history destination.

One of my favorite sections of the village is at the entrance where two concentric circles of workshops and stores circle an open courtyard. Knowledgeable guides greeted us at each stop to explain and demonstrate crafts like basket making (I bought one of those baskets as a birthday present for my mom), broom making, glass blowing, pottery, blacksmithing, woodworking and printing.

Erie Sauder insisted on having costumed guides welcome visitors at each stop, rather than making visitors listen to recorded explanations or tour buildings with static displays of artifacts.

Sauder Village visitors can also move through a living timeline through Ohio's history. The "Natives and Newcomers" area evokes Ohio's earliest days and on through the 1830s. The "Pioneer Settlement" illustrates the beginning of European settlement in the 1830s and follows though into the last decade of the nineteenth century. Plans call for developing another section of the timeline to move from the very late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.

The "Little Pioneers Homestead" features pint-sized buildings designed with Sauder Village's youngest visitors in mind.

If it's raining or particularly hot when you visit the village, you can pop into the air-conditioned museum building to check out Erie Sauder's eclectic collection of artifacts that includes everything from cars to commodes, and everything else in between.

The museum building also houses a 3000-square-foot quilt store and temporary exhibits like the knitted presidents show we saw (yes, it's just what it sounds like, a pretty amazing collection of knitted likenesses of every U.S. president from Washington to Obama).

Sauder Village hosts special events like antique car gatherings, farm demonstrations and quilt shows throughout the season, which runs from mid-April through October.

Admission is $15 for adults, $8 for students ages 6-16 and free for children age 5 and younger. You can easily spend two days exploring the village, so the best deal may be the two-day admission pass that costs $20 for adults and $10 for students.

Thanks to Sauder Village for providing village admission, lodging and meals during my recent visit for my review, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Lockport Covered Bridge, vintage style in northwest Ohio

I love old covered bridges, but it's interesting to discover newer covered bridges constructed in a traditional style like the Lockport Covered Bridge we discovered just a few miles from Sauder Village in northwestern Ohio.

We've visited Ashtabula County in northeastern Ohio along Lake Erie in the past, and I've written about that county's 18 covered bridges. Former Ashtabula County Engineer John Smolen began advocating the construction of modern covered bridges in the 1980s as a safer, more durable and more economical alternative to constructing or repairing old metal and concrete bridges.

The idea of building new covered bridges intrigues me, so it was fun to find the Lockport span over the Tiffin River in Ohio's Williams County in the state's northwest corner.

A wooden covered bridge, built in 1871, stood at this crossing until a steel truss bridge replaced it in 1919. An earlier covered bridge also reportedly crossed the Tiffin River east of this crossing as early as 1860.

Williams County officials replaced the old steel truss bridge at the urging of their then-County Engineer Walter Schelling who was also a fan of the historic construction techniques.

The county secured some Federal funding for the project and worked with an engineering and architectural firm in Toledo (SSOE) to design a bridge using traditional construction techniques that could also meet modern standards for height and weight requirements.

Riverbend Timber Framing of Blissfield, Michigan consulted on the project. Riverbend is one of the country's largest post-and-beam construction companies and constructed all of the oak frame components for the bridge, precutting and pre-fitting them before delivering them for assembly at the Tiffin River site.

The Lockport Bridge is almost entirely made of wood. There are no steel beams supporting the bridge and the few non-wood components of the bridge include a lightweight concrete deck supported by wooden structural members, a tin roof covering the pedestrian walkway on the bridge's south side, concrete abutments and a few steel tension wires.

The completed bridge opened to traffic on June 19, 1999.

The three-span Howe side truss bridge is 176 feet long and 30 feet wide. Its construction cost $1.7 million, but county officials don't anticipate much in the way of maintenance costs beyond removing the occasional graffiti with a little sanding and possibly treating the wood to ward off insects (I doubt that will do much to ward of the mosquitoes we encountered as we took photos at the bridge early one evening and the next morning!).

The Lockport Bridge differs little from historic covered bridges except for its size. It meets modern bridge requirements by being large enough and strong enough to allow a semi truck to pass through the span.

The Lockport Covered Bridge is about 5 miles west of Sauder Village and north of Stryker and near the Goll Woods Nature Preserve. The online directions I found were slightly muddled or disagreed with each other, but we found it easily enough by just plugging in the coordinates we found at several sites into our car's GPS.

Want to learn more? Check out Williams County Ohio by Kevin M. Maynard, which has photos of three different bridges at this Lockport crossing (the 1871 wooden covered bridge, the 1919 steel truss span and the 1999 covered bridge).

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Marking Ohio Art origin in Archbold, Ohio

I spotted this historic marker when we drove through Archbold, Ohio recently, and, you guessed it, I insisted we turn back and check it out!

I immediately recognized Ohio Art as the producer of the iconic Etch-A-Sketch drawing toy, but I didn't know about the company's connection to this northwestern Ohio town.

The Etch-A-Sketch, introduced in the United States in 1960, became wildly popular. It still remains an important part of Ohio Art's product line, but I found that the company began producing toys and other novelties a half century before any of us twirled those Etch-A-Sketch knobs to create pictures.  

Henry Simon Winzeler was born near Archbold in 1876, becoming a dentist and opening a dental practice in Archbold by 1900.

It seems that Winzeler was more interested in art than dentistry, though.

He drew inspiration from an oval mirror he saw in a clothing store owned by his aunt and began manufacturing oval frames.

By 1908, Winzeler sold his dental practice to embark on his new career. He borrowed $300 and rented space in downtown Archbold to open his frame-making business with 15 employees. He also financed the frame business with money from his Hub Grocery store on the same block that he also opened in 1908 and continued to run through early 1909.

During Ohio Art's earliest years, Winzeler sent the frames to Toledo for metal stamping and painted the stamped frames at his Archbold plant.

Winzeler bought his own stamping plant and consolidated his production in 1910.

The company sold many of its frames with images like religious scenes, still life subjects, landscapes and cute cupids as production neared 20,000 units per day. Ohio Art sold its products through major store chains like Sears, Kresge's and Woolworth's and began to expand into making toys and other items.

Winzeler needed to expand his business a few years later and requested a loan from a local bank to do so. The bank wanted too much of the business in order to issue the loan, so Winzeler turned to private financing to expand and move the company to nearby Bryan, Ohio in 1912.

The company's product line through those early years in Bryan included the frames with painted scenes, as well as miniature metal windmills, a toy monkey that could climb a string, sand pails, toy cars, tea sets and drums.

Henry Winzeler retired from active day-to-day involvement with Ohio Art in 1927. He retained ownership of the company as his then-15-year-old son Howard began working his way up through the company ranks.

Henry Winzeler died in 1939, and Howard Winzeler moved into upper management at the company.

Flash forward to 1959 when a French electrician named Andre Cassagnes took a new toy he invented to the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg, Germany.

Howard Winzeler saw the toy at the show, but it didn't really interest him at the time. He changed his mind after seeing the mechanical drawing toy a second time and invited Cassagnes to meet with his toy company's engineers in Ohio to perfect the product and launch it in 1960.

The Etch-A-Sketch became an instant baby boom hit in Christmas of 1960, quickly becoming the top selling toy in the United States that season.

Ohio Art continues to produce other toys and items, but the Etch-A-Sketch remains the mainstay of their product line, selling over 100 million units in dozens of countries over the years. Some even credit the toy with pulling the company through some bad economic times when its appearance in two of the popular Toy Story movies during the 1990s boosted sales.

The Winzeler family sold its controlling interest in the company by the 1970s and Cassagnes died earlier this year at the age of 86.

Ohio Art, which remains one of the oldest toy companies in the United States, maintains offices in Bryan, although it moved production of the Etch-A-Sketch from Ohio to China at the beginning of this century.

Who knew?

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

R.E. Olds' Lansing legacy

I love checking out the story behind historical markers and finding connections among different Midwestern states. Visiting the R. E. Olds Transportation Museum in Lansing, Michigan, gave me a chance to do both of those things at once.

We discovered a marker in Geneva, Ohio, at the birthplace of automotive pioneer Ransom Eli Olds several years ago, and I loved visiting the museum in Lansing to learn more about his life in Michigan.

Ransom was born in Geneva in 1864, where his blacksmith father, Pliny, owned a small machine shop. The Olds family moved to Cleveland in 1870 and to a small farm nearby in 1873.

Young Ransom showed a real aptitude for mechanics, but while on the farm, he learned he disliked relying on horses for basic transportation. He wondered if a steam-powered carriage might be a more reliable, predictable, economical and less smelly way to get around.

The family moved to Lansing in 1880, when Lansing was a depot town of 8,000 residents and home to the then-new Michigan State Capitol Building,

The young R.E. apprenticed at his father's new machine shop in Lansing, eventually bought into the business and began experimenting with building steam engine vehicles.

In 1887, R.E. developed a three-wheeled steam vehicle. He continued tinkering with his vehicles, moving on to developing gas-powered engines in the 1890s after seeing the newest engine technology on display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

Olds had many ideas, but he needed to expand again in order to make his ideas a reality. He sold his business to lumber and copper magnate Samuel L. Smith in 1899 and stayed on as the company vice president and general manager.

The company moved to a large factory on Detroit's Belle Isle to make gas and electric vehicles, including the prototypes of the famous Curved Dash Oldsmobile.

The Detroit plant burned to the ground in 1901, and Olds converted an undamaged foundry building into a temporary assembly factory and made 425 cars there.

Quarter-scale REO replica built in 1905, used for marketing and promotional events

People often credit Henry Ford with creating the assembly line, but it was R. E. Olds who first came up with the idea of moving parts around the plant floor on wheeled carts for a progressive car assembly system in 1901 in order to meet demand for his $650 Oldsmobiles. Ford later improved the idea by putting the whole concept on conveyor belts.

Olds left Olds Motor Works in 1904 over disagreements with the Smith family and Olds' deep desire to make affordable and easy-to-operate cars for the masses. The Smiths ended up selling the original Olds company to W.C. Durant and the then-fledgling General Motors in 1908.

Meanwhile, Lansing lobbied successfully to bring Olds back to the city.

In Lansing, Olds continued to develop Oldsmobiles, REO automobiles and a line of trucks that included the first real pick-up truck in 1915 called the REO Speedwagon.

REO Speedwagon? Yup, the popular 1970s and 1980s band got its name from a truck that band member Neal Doughty studied in a transportation history class as an engineering student.

Remember Eric Forman's Vista Cruiser in "That 70s Show"?

R.E. Olds phased out of the REO company in the 1920s and 1930s. REO continued as a truck maker through 1975 and Oldsmobile continued as an automotive company until the early 2000s.

R.E. left an imprint on Lansing throughout the years. He helped finance buildings like the Olds Hotel, which today houses the office of the state's governor. He also financed the building of Olds Hall at Michigan State University with a $100,000 donation after its Engineering Building burned to the ground in 1916.

Olds also purchased over 37,000 acres of land in Florida to develop a community for working families in 1913. He lost nearly $3,000,000 in trying to develop the area before liquidating his holdings there in the 1920s and 1930s, but the town of Oldsmar still exists today as an example of quiet "old Florida" in densely populated Pinellas County between Tampa and St. Petersburg.

R.E. Olds had many philanthropic interests, and he established the REOlds Foundation in 1914. The organization still continues to support community-based education, family, health care, animal welfare, environmental and other causes in the Greater Lansing area.

R.E. Olds died in 1950, but his legacy lives on at the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum, opened in 1981.

1953 Oldsmobile '88'

The museum's collection includes more than 50 vehicles ranging from the 1880s through the earliest years of the twenty-first century as well as engines, lawn mowers, bicycles, signs, and other artifacts related to Olds and his life.

The museum is open 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday year round. It is also open from noon until 5 p.m. on Sundays from April through October. Admission is $6 for adults, $4 for students and seniors or $12 per family.

Want to learn more about R.E. Olds and Lansing? Check out R.E. Olds and Industrial Lansing by Michael Rodriquez or Ransom E. Olds: America's First Automotive Pioneer by Daniel Alef.

Thanks to the Greater Lansing Michigan Convention and Visitors Bureau for sponsoring my visit to Lansing, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Lansing area attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Take a walk though Michigan's history

Walking through Michigan's Historical Center in Lansing is one of the best way to experience the state's history from its earliest prehistoric days, through the days of majestic forests and First Nation people, through its European settlement and move to statehood in 1837, and through to the present day.

Visitors start on the museum's first floor, moving through 26 permanent galleries on four levels that tell a roughly chronological story of the state through artifacts and walk-through exhibits that put visitors in places like a forest with a rustic cabin, an early courthouse with Michigan's first governor, an underground copper mine, a one-room school, a late nineteenth-century lumber baron's home, a 1920s street scene, the 1957 Auto Show in Detroit, and an Upper Peninsula picnic in the mid-twentieth century.

The museum originally moved into a space on the fourth floor of the then-new State Capitol in 1879 as the Pioneer Museum under the auspices of the Pioneer Society.

By 1913, the museum desperately needed more space for artifacts and visitors.

That year, the state established the Michigan Historical Commission and the Michigan Historical Museum became an official state museum

In 1922, the museum moved to a larger space in the nearby State Office Building (now the Lewis Cass building) in downtown Lansing.

In 1939, the museum had 7,000 artifacts when cleaning and inventorying the artifacts became a Works Progress Administration project.

The museum outgrew its space in the office building and relocated to the historic Turner House, the home modeled after President Washington's Mount Vernon home and former home of a local business man and his family.

The museum moved to the lower level of the Michigan Millers Mutual Building in 1980 as the expansion of Lansing Community College surrounded the home and resulted in the state selling the home to the college.

The State Library enjoyed a similarly long and peripatetic history, starting in temporary quarters in 1828 as a repository for territorial legal and historical documents. The library, like the museum, moved to the State Capitol building in 1879 and followed it to the State Office Building where a fire destroyed 20,000 books and damaged 30,000 more in 1951.

In 1989, the Michigan Library and Historical Center building opened as the first building specifically designed to house the library and historical collections for public use.

The building, literally built around a Michigan white pine tree, features a copper-clad outdoor courtyard and glass atriums that create a spacious atmosphere with plenty of room to house the multi-floor museum in the east wing and the State Library, with over 3.2 items, in the west wing.

The State Historical Museum and the State Library also offer a range of services well beyond the walls of their Lansing home.

The library consults with libraries throughout the state and offered one of the first online libraries with the launch of Michigan eLibrary (MeL) in 1998.

The State Historical Museum assists in interpretation and exhibiting artifacts at a dozen museums and historical sites operated jointly with the Department of Natural Resources across the state that include the Copper Harbor Lighthouse, the Sanilac Petroglyphs, and the Hartwick Pines Logging Museum.

My favorite exhibits at the museum in Lansing include the displays in the Growing up in Michigan section that has the Auto Show display and 1950s and 1960s era homes, a section of the first mile of concrete in the nation (built in Detroit along Woodward Avenue) and the three-story topographical map of Michigan.

Michigan State Library is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Friday or 24/7 on the Web.

The Michigan State Historical Museum is open 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Saturday and 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. on Sunday.

Museum admission is $6 for adults, $4 for senior, $2 for children ages 6 to 17 and free for children younger than 5. There is a $2 discount available for those registered for a Michigan Recreation Passport (added to your Michigan license plate registration), and admission is free to everyone on Sundays.

Want a little advance planning help with your visit? Check out the museum map and a number of games, activities and stories about museum artifacts specifically geared to kids.

Want to learn more about Michigan's history? Check out Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State by Willis Dunbar and Michigan: A History by Bruce Catton.

Thanks to the Greater Lansing Michigan Convention and Visitors Bureau for sponsoring my visit to Lansing, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Lansing area attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

A fine finish for the Michigan State Capitol

I remember visiting the State Capitol in Michigan years ago, and those old days, we found our state rep crammed into a tiny office on a "half-floor" that we had to access from a stair well.

Today, those crazy cramped floors no longer exist with much of the building's interior restored to its original architectural glory courtesy of an early 1990s restoration.

You can take a guided tour of the Capitol on most weekdays or take a self-guided tour of the Capitol with the aid of a booklet available online or at the information desk near the public entrance. Visitors can see the legislature in action from upper level galleries when the House and Senate are in session, or they can view broadcasts of the proceedings on cable television.

Michigan State House chambers

We joined Matt VanAcker, director of the Capitol Tour and Information Service, for a walk around of the building on one recent morning, finding his tour a good way to become re-acquainted with the building after all of these years and learn a lot of fun facts that really brought the building's history to life.

Michigan's current State Capitol is the state's third capitol building, and Lansing became the state's capital city when legislators voted to move it from its original location in Detroit.

That first State Capitol in Detroit was a red brick, Greek Revival-style building designed by Obed Wait in the early 1830s. The building had a 140-foot-tall tower, cost $24,500 to construct and started life as the Territorial Courthouse.

Michigan's first state constitution in 1835 directed the legislature to pick a permanent capital city by 1847. Fierce lobbying by cities that included Detroit, Ann Arbor, Jackson, Marshall and Grand Rapids over Michigan's first decade as a state followed and Lansing, a tiny backwoods settlement at the time, became the choice of legislators.

They saw locating the capital away from the Canadian border as wise, making it easier to defend should British forces decide to attack from Canada. The location also made the capital more accessible for much of the population and would boost settlement and the economy in western Michigan.

Israel Gillett designed the first temporary capitol building in Lansing as a two-story white frame building with green shutters. This building cost $22,952.01 and served as the state government's home until construction of the current capitol in the 1870s.

The first two capitol buildings came to a fiery finish. The Detroit building became a school and burned to the ground in 1893, and the first Lansing capitol building became a factory before it burned to the ground in 1882.

Several of the governors' portraits in the State Capitol rotunda

Michigan launched a competition for a State Capitol design in 1871. Architects had strict guidelines and a $1.2 million cap for their designs.

The competition drew 20 entries and judges selected Elijah E. Myers of Springfield, Illinois to design Michigan's building because of the simplicity and cost-consciousness of his plans.

Myers modeled his design on the nation's capitol in Washington, D. C.

He saw the nation's capitol as a strong symbol of American democracy and unity with its symmetrical design and central dome and added those elements to his design for Michigan. Myers became one of the most prominent post-Civil War architects of public buildings and went on to design capitol buildings for Colorado and Texas.

Myers' plan for Michigan's capitol called for a four-story, 139-room building with a 44.5-foot diameter rotunda topped with a 160-foot-high dome. Grand staircases in the north and south corridors of the building led to the upper floors.

Floors in many public spaces were black-and-white Vermont marble and limestone, while Illinois limestone and Ohio sandstone faced the Neoclassical Italianate-style exterior.

The interior of the building looks ornate to modern eyes, but Myers included some clever cost-cutting features.

The "marble" columns are cast iron, wood and plaster finished to a realistic-looking faux finish and "walnut" woodwork is a more economical Michigan white pine painted in a wood-grain finish to look like the more expensive wood.

Translucent glass floors allowed natural light to help save costs by illuminating lower levels via glass ceilings in larger rooms like the House and Senate chambers.

A crowd of 7,000 area residents and 30,000 to 50,000 visitors witnessed the laying of the capitol's five-ton granite cornerstone in 1873.

Building construction cost $1,427,743.78 (more than $23 million in 2013 dollars), and Michigan taxpayers footed the bill with a six-year state income tax.

The January 1, 1879 inauguration of Governor Charles Croswell also marked the building's dedication.

The building earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and became the second state capitol building designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1992.

However, the building suffered several indignities through the years.

Those who drafted the 1963 version of Michigan's constitution talked seriously about replacing the capitol, and the installation of those cramped half-floors I mentioned to create extra space for offices happened in 1969.

The State Capitol managed to survive and officials embarked on an extensive renovation and restoration of the building in the late 1980s. The three-year project, completed in 1992, restored the building to much of its original splendor by getting rid of those infamous half-floors, improving access for the disabled, repainting the dome to match the exterior of the building and refreshing the building's impressive faux finishes and other interior artwork.

Today the capitol building houses the two legislative chambers, the Senate and House leadership offices, the ceremonial offices of the Governor and Lt. Governor and few other staff offices.

Two legislative office buildings across the street from the capitol building, plus buildings for the Supreme Court and the Michigan Library and Historical Center several blocks east of the capitol, now house many of the government functions once housed under the capitol's roof.

Thanks to the Greater Lansing Michigan Convention and Visitors Bureau for sponsoring my visit to Lansing, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Lansing area attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Midwest travel links for May 2013

Check out some great Midwest-related stories I found online this past month:

Farmers' markets are taking over the U.P. this summer-We love visiting local farmers' markets when we travel, and since June will find us in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Joe's round up of markets in the U.P. at Upper Peninsula's Second Wave is especially timely for me this month.

Farmers Markets in Cincinnati & Northern Kentucky-Katie posts this handy list of fresh markets in the Cincinnati area at Family Friendly Cincinnati.

One of my favorite scenes from Detroit's Eastern Market

15 great spring hikes-So, you just hit the market for your fresh food fix; hit the trails for a little fresh air fix as well. Here are some great ideas for hikes as spring blooms into summer in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa at Midwest Weekends.

Minnesota Highway 61 Road Trip: Red Wing, Wabasha, Kellogg-There's not much that I love more than a good road trip, and I'm glad to see Linda and her kids back out on the road at Travels with Children. Seeing the Largest Boot in Red Wing scored a place on my Midwest bucket list long ago, and it looks like the big boot was just one of many great stops on this tour!

Exploring St. Louis with kids-Sarah hits the road at Wandering Off to check out St. Louis, Missouri with its iconic Gateway Arch and great family-friendly fun at the city's zoo, art museum and science center. She even includes a couple of great sounding suggestions for dinner and a sweet treat after a day of exploring St. Louis.

Thank you Carl Fisher and James Allison-Road trip fans may know Carl Fisher as the "Father of the Lincoln Highway", but Fisher, along with his bicycle club buddy James Allison, had a big role in the development the Indianapolis Speedway, the Indy 500 and Indianapolis as a center for automotive manufacturing. Check out this story by Dennis at the Historic Indianapolis blog for more on this story.

Marker in Beaverdam, Ohio

Celebrating the Lincoln Highway-I've explored the Lincoln Highway through Ohio, Indiana and parts of Illinois, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but another thing on my bucket list is to drive the entire length of this (America' s first) transcontinental highway. LuAnn shares a little history and a few highlights of the fabled route through Nebraska at her self-titled blog.

Columbus: A Hidden Gem-I've long heard about the fabulous architecture in Columbus, Indiana, so this story by Amy about the city at the Indiana Insider caught my eye. While the architecture is what drew my interest to the city, Amy points out that there is also plenty of public art, an extensive system of pubic walking/bicycling trails and a historic downtown to check out in Columbus.

Recovering the City's Lost Culture-I love bed-and-breakfast inns that preserve the architecture and history of a particular place. This story by Katie and Aaron at Urban Milwaukee tells about the Manderley B&B at Andrew Parker's Victorian-era home in this Wisconsin city's Historic Concordia community.

The Beautiful Fashion in Kent-I already wanted to visit Akron, Ohio to see its well-regarded and architecturally intriguing art museum. Visiting the fashion collection at Kent State University near Akron also made my must-do list after reading Whitney's story about it at the Discovering Ohio blog.

Marshall Field Family Memorial Monument-One of the country's richest men, a late-in-life second marriage, the scandalous death of a son and a pricy family memorial sculpture are all elements in this intriguing Gilded Age story. Check it out at Chicago's Designslinger blog.

Marshall Fields store in Chicago, 2005

The World's Largest Cuckoo Clock-...and now for something completely different! Tonya checks out the world's largest cuckoo clock in northeast Ohio at The Traveling Praters blog. This Guinness Book of World Records-listed attraction sat in front of a Walnut Creek restaurant for many years, but its future looked grim with the sale and closure of the restaurant. Fortunately, Tonya reports that a local business owner purchased the clock and began restoring it for others to enjoy. Looks like I just added another thing to my must-see list!

That's it for this month's Midwest travel links list. Do you have any favorite Midwest stories or blogs to share?

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Discover Sauder Village at Discovering Ohio

Northwest Ohio's history comes to life at Sauder Village where friendly and knowledgeable guides and craftspeople recreate village life in the area formerly known as The Great Black Swamp.

Even as Ohio became a state in 1803, European settlers didn't start arriving to drain the swamp and start farming the land until the 1830s.

Tim learns about an early Ohio trading post

A visit to Sauder Village in Archbold, Ohio allows you to figuratively step back in time to meet the state's early farmers and craftspeople to learn how they tamed the swamp and see how they lived and worked during Ohio's early decades.

Check out my latest story at the Ohio Tourism Division's Discovering Ohio blog this month, A walk through Ohio history at Sauder Village.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved