Michigan Stadium Construction Photos, and The Buried Crane Myth (1927)

[A big thanks to Ira Weintraub down at WTKA 1050AM for passing these pictures along, who in turn got them from longtime WTKA caller ‘High Octane Mike’.]

Back in 1927, a gent named Harold Sherman lived in the Ann Arbor area and did something special.  He wandered to the Michigan Stadium construction site and snapped these shots.  They were passed along to his son Pete, who was kind enough to share.

I’m thinking they date to the late spring timeframe, 1927, a few perhaps later on.   Why?  Well, it appears as though we’ve got some cement work going on here and Yost solicited bids for the concrete work in March 1927 and started pouring shortly thereafter.

Enjoy:

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Don’t see a steam shovel or crane buried?  From my interview with Dr. Robert Soderstrom, author of The Big House:

MVictors: One of the greatest tales of Michigan Stadium involves a crane or steam shovel being buried beneath the stadium, lost in all that water and sand during the build. But you didn’t find any evidence of this in your research?

Soderstrom: [laughs] I was unable to confirm that and I’ve heard that story since I arrived in Ann Arbor way back in 1968. I could not find anything in the current literature, either in the Ann Arbor News or the Michigan Daily or anything. I can’t imagine that wouldn’t have been recorded by somebody if in fact they had lost a whole steam shovel.

The [excavator] lost everything else. I also asked his granddaughter and she said she never heard that story from her grandfather.

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