Late in the afternoon of June 6, 1950, a fire erupted inside Haven Hall at the northwest corner of central campus. The nearly 90-year-old building, built during the Civil War, was a known fire trap.
The Michigan state fire inspector had warned university officials three years prior, “Remove this building and replace with a fireproof structure, as this building is a serious fire hazard.”
But on that late spring day, the building was bustling with activity, as students took exams, professors held office hours, and staff worked at the Institute for Public Administration and the Bureau of Government, both located inside the building.
Originally constructed in 1863 as U-M’s Law School, the building had gotten a new name — Haven Hall, named for former U-M President Erastus O. Haven — in the early 1930s, when the Law School moved to the Law Quadrangle.
By June 1950, Haven Hall housed several LSA departments. As firemen blasted flames with giant water hoses, students sprang into action, scaling the hall’s fire escape to climb inside the burning building and haul out typewriters, papers and books.
Despite these heroic efforts, the fire raged for hours, and thousands gathered on State Street and North University Avenue to watch. By nightfall, Haven Hall had been destroyed, along with anything left inside.
Thankfully, no one died that day, but in a time long before the iCloud, the destruction of intellectual property was devastating. Faculty and graduate students lost thousands of pages of work, often the result of years of research.
Initially, the cause of the fire was undetermined, with the Ann Arbor fire chief suggesting its origin may never be known.
But later that summer, a troubled 30-year-old doctoral student named Robert H. Stacy confessed to an ex-girlfriend that he’d started the fire. Although she reported his admission to local police, Stacy was not arrested until October of that year.
In a confession Stacy later said was coerced, he said he ignited the fire by tossing a lit match into a pile of paper on the second floor of Haven Hall. Stacy also confessed to starting other fires on campus, including in the University Library and Alumni Memorial Hall.
more INFORMATION
- Learn more about the Haven Hall fire at the Heritage Project
Although he recanted this statement, Stacy was eventually tried and convicted of arson, spending six-and-a-half years in prison in Jackson. After his release in 1957, Stacy moved to upstate New York, where he became a professor at Syracuse University. He reportedly kept the details of the fire and his jail time a secret from his employers and most family and friends. He died in 1994.
Haven Hall was eventually rebuilt in a new location on South State Street and opened its doors in 1952. The site of the original hall remains empty.
