About the Historical Society of Greater Lansing
The Historical Society of Greater Lansing was founded in 1955, but it dates its work to 1947, when the earlier Lansing Historical Society held its first meeting in March, incorporated in August, and gained nonprofit status in December. That first society set up in loaned space at Lansing City Hall in January 1948, counted 129 charter members by its first annual meeting that May, and quickly took on projects that still define the organization: collecting and defending Lansing's historic street names, gathering the research collection of the unofficial city historian J.P. Edmonds in 1950, and mounting exhibits of the Theodore Foster Sr. and Chester Ellison collections at the public library in 1954. Dr. Madison Kuhn, a Michigan State College historian, urged the group early on to become the community's resource for historical questions. The society went dormant in the early 1950s and was reorganized in 1955 as the Historical Society of Greater Lansing.
Today the society is an all-volunteer organization governed by a nine-member board of directors. It has no museum building of its own; instead it works through four stated values, collaboration, education, preservation, and access, which in practice means partnering with the Capital Area District Libraries, presenting lectures and exhibits, safeguarding structures and materials, and helping people do research. Programs, lectures, exhibits, and tours are free unless otherwise noted, and summer walking tours of downtown and the neighborhoods are a long-running staple. Current projects include documenting the neighborhoods removed for the construction of Interstate 496 and restoring the Rogers-Carrier House.
The society also publishes. Its most recent book is The Lansing I Knew by Mary Jane McClintock Wilson (2021), and its website maintains an annotated bibliography of Lansing history that singles out a few reliable starting points: Birt Darling's City in the Forest (1950), Justin Kestenbaum's Out of a Wilderness (1981), and James MacLean and Craig Whitford's Lansing: City on the Grand, 1836-1939 (2003).
Collections and Research Services
The society's online Knowledge Base gathers documents, images, and research it has accumulated over the decades, arranged by topic: lists of Lansing mayors, clerks, and council members; early Lansing African American history; the origins of street names; architectural sculpture on downtown buildings; "Things Not Here Anymore"; the police and fire departments; the photographer F.N. Bovee; the city's wayfinding signs; the mural artist Harry Winfield; and an oral history with Dr. Richard Johnson, along with videos of past programs.
Its collecting policy focuses on ordinary objects of 19th- and 20th-century Lansing life, grouped under headings such as Lansing Learns (school yearbooks, uniforms, report cards), Lansing Shops (downtown and Old Town store memorabilia), Lansing Governs, Lansing Eats (restaurant menus and signs), Lansing Plays, and Lansing Heals. Because the society does not run a reading room, researchers with family or house questions should combine its Knowledge Base with the local history holdings of the Capital Area District Libraries and email the society at info@lansinghistory.org for referrals. Our guides to dating a house and finding old neighborhood photographs explain how to use those library collections.
Planning Your Visit
There is no fixed visiting address; the society's mailing address is P.O. Box 12095, Lansing, MI 48901, and no telephone number is published. Lectures, exhibits, and walking tours are announced on the society's website, its email list, and its social media accounts, so check lansinghistory.org for the next event and its venue. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in the city's past. Two statewide institutions in our directory are also useful to Lansing researchers: the Historical Society of Michigan, headquartered in Lansing, and The Henry Ford in Dearborn.
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