Prettyman’s Boarding House

The Campus Club

Prettyman’s Boarding House

1885-1914

Famous Campus Landmark Disappears



Prettyman’s Boarding House – Alias The Campus Club – Is Raized To Make Room For New Dental Building.  Football Training Table Was Established At “Prett’s” And Was Maintained There Until 1914, When University Purchased The Property.



PRETT'S" is being torn down! The famous boarding house, of the triumvirate which one reigned at the top in student popularity in Ann Arbor for many undergraduate generations, is in the hands of the wreckers. It is being demolished to make way for the new Dental Building, which will occupy its site at the corner of North University Avenue and Twelfth Street, to the north of Barbour Gym. Today it is little more than a rapidly dwindling pile of rubbish. Within another week it will be just a hole in the ground, into which a steam shovel—probably the famed "Alfred"—will move before long to begin operations on another Campus building.


Since 1875 this residence has been a Campus landmark. It has been altered and remodeled, as have so many structures, which have been in the path of University progress. It has been put to varied uses. The majority of its life has been spent in the guise of a servant to the University community which, by reason of its location, it was committed to serving. Since 1914 it has actually been the property of the University and used by the institution for its own purposes.


But it gained its chief fame in the days from 1885 until 1914. During that time it was the Campus Club—alias Prettyman's Boarding House. Prettyman's, Chubb's, Freeman's — those were the largest and the most popular of Ann Arbor's boarding houses in the days when the vast majority of the student body used this type of service for their meals."Prett's" went out of existence in 1914. Chubb's lasted much longer, bu tit fell victim to State Street changes and now is the Wolverine cooperative eating club. Freeman's held the fort as the last survivor until it met the same nemesis that "Prett's" is now experiencing - the expansion of the University.  Freeman's went when the new Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies was erected.


Horace G. Prettyman '85, three-time Captain of a Michigan Football Team and at the same time Manager and oft times Coach too, started The Campus Club in 1885. He and his bride purchased the house that year and started the Club. He always referred to his establishment as The Campus Club, but the students affectionately called it just "Prett's." The house had been built about 1875 by Judge Page, and it was from him that it was purchased. Sixteen students were taken in as roomers, the best suite rented for as high as $1.50 per week for each of the two students who occupied it.


Board cost $2.50 per week at"Prett's," and that was about the top price in those days. But Mrs. Prettyman was something of a dietitian and her husband was the expert buyer that his later business success proved. Both were extremely popular and many is the student who found in this childless couple a "Campus father and mother."  There is the story told of the palatial private car which often was parked in the Ann Arbor railroad yards while its owner hurried up to the Campus to visit his patron and patroness of undergraduate days—the Prettymans.


"Prett's" was the first boardinghouse to use student help. The practice soon became general. But supremacy was really established when the Varsity Football Training Table was started there a few years before the turn of the century. When Fielding H. Yost came to Michigan in 1901 he continued to use "Prett's" for his boys, keeping the training table there until about 1909. Mr. Prettyman prided himself on the fact that he never took a cent of profit on this venture. A Varsity man himself, he considered this a part of his service to Michigan athletics.


Mr. Prettyman added to the residence he had purchased from Judge Page. One of his improvements was the stone porch which the wreckers cussed and perspired over rather strenuously last month. The stone wall of that porch went twelve feet underground for its foundations, the portion below the surface being the wall for a vegetable room. And that vegetable room was somewhat famous. Into it each fall was dumped two carloads of potatoes, cannily purchased at a good price. That supply more than lasted the year out and was often traded, during the spring, at a substantial profit, for groceries and meats in Ann Arbor stores.


In July of 1914 the University purchased the property. The Varsity training table had already been moved to Dave Willitt's Oyster Bar on State Street and Prettyman's Boarding House—The Campus Club—went out of existence.


Until 1925 the spacious home was used to house nurses from the Homeopathic Hospital, now South Department. From 1925 until 1937 it was used as a Hospital Ward Helpers' home. Last year, when the need for accredited League Houses for women students became acute, it was leased to Mrs. Lucy E. Austin, popular rooming house landlady, and she cared for a large number of women students. She was prepared to open the home again on the same basis for the present school year, and considerable manipulation was necessary to provide for the girls who had already made reservations there, when the news of the new Dental Building construction was announced. And so another Campus landmark becomes just a memory.


The Michigan Alumnus, November 12, 1938, page 101







Horace Prettyman