By James M. Miller
Journal Staff Writer

The U.S. presidential election was in limbo; the Democrat had more popular votes than the Republican, and 20 electoral votes were in doubt.

Our founder, Charles Fellows.

Some folks might have groused about the "green" candidate muddying the issue.

It happened in 1876, the year The Flint Journal was founded.

What was Flint like at the time? The year before, a visiting New Yorker's description of the city ran in the Wolverine Citizen, one of Flint's three weekly newspapers.

The Hon. Charles Hughes, a former congressman, of Sandy Hill, N.Y., described Flint as a lumber and farming town with a brisk trade in wild game and furs. Sawmills here cut 75 million board feet of pine lumber a year, Hughes reported. He made no mention of the carriage industry that later gave Flint its Vehicle City nickname.

The city directory of 1876 called lumber Flint's main product, listing 10 sawmills. Downtown was home to furniture stores, groceries, millineries (hat makers), harness makers, general stores and nine hotels.

On the national scene, in the deadlocked presidential election of 1876, an electoral commission met in 1877 and decided to give the decision to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who lost the popular balloting to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden by more than 250,000 votes. (Peter Cooper of the Greenback Party didn't get any electoral votes.)

The Journal's downtown office at E. First Street and Brush Alley in 1908.

The first issue of The Flint Journal probably was April 5, 1876. No copies of the earliest newspaper are known, but the date of the first edition can be estimated by counting backward from the issue numbers on surviving copies, and by the date of an article in the Wolverine Citizen about the appearance of a new competitor.

One of the paper's first big national stories happened June 25, 1876, when a U.S. Army general from Michigan, George Armstrong Custer, and about 225 troops from the 7th Cavalry met a large force of Indians at Little Big Horn and were wiped out in what came to be known as Custer's Last Stand.

In Flint itself, in addition to lumber mills, were foundries, at least nine blacksmiths, two broom-makers, two big flouring mills, a paper mill, furniture makers, breweries, a tannery, woolen mills, brick yards and other industries.

Hughes’ description notwithstanding, Flint"s logging industry was waning in 1876, slowly being replaced by the carriage business.

W.A. Paterson and Randall's Carriage Manufactory were leaders. The city's biggest carriage makers, Flint Wagon Works and Durant-Dort, would not be founded until 1884 and 1886, respectively.

The city streets those carriages rolled along were paved — with wooden blocks.

Early Journal advertisers included M. Davison Clothing, Burroughs Lumber, Genesee Iron Works, Carlton & Bro. stationers and Smith, Bridgman & Co.

Many of the city's earliest commercial businesses downtown were long gone, destroyed in big fires in 1852 and again in 1855, when 32 businesses burned.

The Republican ticket of Hayes-Wheeler won the White House without the popular vote in 1876.

By 1876, the city fire department had two steam-operated pumps and two hand fire engines, plus hook and ladder apparatus and buckets.

Dominating high ground west of downtown was the Michigan Institution for Education of the Deaf and Dumb and Blind, now Michigan Schools for the Deaf and Blind. The county fairgrounds was in the city, along what is now Ann Arbor Street at a bend in Thread Creek.

Flint's population was between 6,000 and 8,000. The 1872 election saw 1,476 Flint voters at the polls, and the schools had 1,676 students that year.

Primary transportation between cities was by rail, but a daily stagecoach connected Flint and Flushing.

Other 1876 milestones:

• Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. (The first one showed up in Flint about 1880.)

• Colorado became a state.

• The National Baseball League was founded.

• A world exhibition celebrating the centennial of American independence was held in Philadelphia.

• Serbia declared war on Turkey, and Montenegro followed suit.

Staff writer James M. Miller started at The Journal in 1983. He can be reached at (810) 766-6318 or jmiller@flintjournal.com.