On the morning of June 6, 1950, a group of students at the University of Michigan walked into Haven Hall for their sociology exam. A few hours after they finished, the room burst into flames.
Built during the Civil War, Haven Hall was one of the oldest buildings on campus, and the news of its destruction spread faster than the fire itself. Some frantic students worried about the blue books and papers they had turned in only hours prior, anxiously awaiting a policy on exams ruined in the fire. Staff members scrambled to relocate the exams still scheduled for Haven Hall. The Board of Regents finalized plans for an addition to Angell Hall, replacing classrooms lost in the fire.
Meanwhile, Palmer A. Throop, an associate professor in the History Department, grappled with the loss of something priceless: years of personal research. Throop had spent a decade developing an in-depth analysis of the intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance. With the support of various fellowships, he studied abroad in Italy, amassed a personal library, and wrote a manuscript that was 75 percent complete at the time of the fire.
Throop’s work was gone in minutes. Anything that wasn’t reduced to ashes was destroyed by water. In the days after the fire, local newspapers barely mentioned the lost research; they focused on the physical cost. Several professors lost research, but the regents of the university privately admitted that Throop “suffered a greater loss in the fire in Haven Hall than any other member of the staff.”
Throop’s public response to the fire was upbeat: He declared that he would immediately begin to rewrite his manuscript. The university granted him a sabbatical for the second semester of 1950-51, and Throop assured the regents that he would be able to make significant progress in restoring his research. But if he ever finished his book, he never published it. Throop’s retirement memoir proclaims that his “bibliography, though not extensive, is remarkable for its precision and depth.” It’s mostly a description of his talent as a lecturer, and does not mention the fire.
In the next decade, the Michigan Daily only mentioned Throop in scattered reports of the panels he was a part of and the lectures he taught. If Throop was haunted by the fire, he did not say so publicly. But he did hint at it in the May 4, 1961 issue of the Daily.
Beneath the headline “The Teaching of History: ‘BOW LOW TO CICERO!’” he complained that students viewed history as nothing more than a “memory marathon.” They retained historical facts like they were math formulas, only to forget them when they finished the course. Students might get straight As, but the true value of an education, as Throop said, is “whatever survives the fires of the final blue book.”
Audrey Rosenberg is a first-year student at the University of Michigan who plans to major in history. She researched and wrote this article as part of her summer internship at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.
Sources consulted for this article include College of Literature, Science, and the Arts records and News and Information Services Faculty and Staff files, both found at the Bentley Historical Library, and "The Arsonist Was a Scholar" by Kim Clarke on the Heritage Project website. Other resources include the Faculty History Project and the Michigan Daily.
