From the tale of a fiery nineteenth-century male suffragette to the forgotten founder of long-distance telephony, local author Laura Bien reveals the bizarre, baffling and oft-overlooked tales of Ypsilanti history. Scratch your head as Eastern Michigan University honors the area's onetime Potawatomi residents and its teacher school acculturates native children to white ways. Consider the earth closet, "? an indoor, nonflushing, composting toilet that's quite possibly the least popular invention in Michigan history. Witness a young artist's rise from Cleary Business College, which began as a penmanship school, to national fame or trade verse with Ypsilanti's unofficial nineteenth-century poet laureate, a poor farmer who became pen pals with John Greenleaf Whittier."