Thomas T. Bates noted again the boat's peculiar "list to port" as it snorted down the bay that morning of July 7, 1862.
The sun was emerging from the forests on the peninsula to the east. A faint north wind, laden with the spicy odor of pine, tempered the air. It was, as he would write decades later, "a perfect Traverse day."
The 20-year-old Bates took a deep breath and looked toward shore. A forest of pines and hardwoods edged up to the bay. Captain Baldwin stood talking on the deck to his father, Merritt Bates, and turned toward him.
"Well, my boy, what do you think of your new home?"
"Where is it?" he asked, puzzled.
To the right stood a bank of woods and to the left a range of forest. An island was at his back and the tree-covered landscape to his front. He looked again and finally saw a "notch" in the woods at the base of the bay that looked "as if a snag-toothed giant had humorously bitten a piece out of the shoreline and disliked the flavor."
"There it is," his father said, watching him closely. "That is Traverse City."
"I don't see any city," Thomas responded, struggling to conceal his disappointment. He saw only a "sawdust" village that he later would describe as a "sandy waste, covered with blackened pine stubs and huckleberry bushes."
It didn't look a thing like Albany, N.Y., where he grew up. And it bore little resemblance to Memphis, Tenn., where he worked in a banking house until the start of the Civil War.
But Thomas T. Bates would spend the rest of his life here. He would see this stump of a town grow into a city. He would play an important part in that transformation.
Within 15 years, Bates would become publisher-editor of the Grand Traverse Herald, founded by his uncle, Morgan Bates, his father's twin brother. He would help bring the railroad here in 1872. He would help oversee the construction of the Northern Michigan Asylum and the city's economic development in the late 1800s and early 1900s. City father Perry Hannah would become a friend and mentor.
Thomas Tomlinson Bates also would steer the Grand Traverse Herald's journey from pioneer weekly to early 20th century daily newspaper.
He and his family's newspaper came of age during an important era in American journalism, when newspapers shifted from political partisanship to political independence, when literacy grew and readers became more diverse.
He was at the helm when the Herald launched a daily in the mid-1890s when lumbering had peaked. He was a community leader, probably groomed by his uncle and Hannah, the undisputed father of Traverse City.
Bates' first job here was in his uncle's print shop and newspaper. In 1864, he joined Hannah, Lay & Co. as general cashier and resigned two years later to open a real estate office with DeWitt C. Leach, a former congressman and Mackinac Indian agent. He also worked as general manager of the Herald after Leach bought it in late 1867. In 1871, he bought Leach's share of the real estate office, and in 1876 purchased the paper from him.
In 1871, he served as secretary of the Traverse City Rail Road Co. board that raised funds to build a 26-mile track from Walton Junction to lure the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad to the city.
Bates was on the board of the Northern Michigan Asylum from its early days and eventually took Perry Hannah's place on its building commission. He was president for several years of the Traverse City Business Men's Association, which diligently worked to bring new and diversified businesses to the region. He served on the city's earliest library boards. His wife, Martha E.C. Bates, was a leader in building the city's library system, as had been Morgan Bates' wife, Clymene.
M.E.C. Bates created the Herald's home and children's pages and worked at the Herald as an associate editor. She also wrote for magazines and other newspapers. The Michigan Women's Press Association was organized out of an 1890 convention she set up for newspaper women in Traverse City.
Thomas Bates was a member of the Republican Party's state central committee for a decade and a delegate to the 1892 national convention.
He took over the Herald in 1876, the nation's centennial year and the year another son of Michigan, George Armstrong Custer, met his end at the Little Big Horn. The state of Michigan itself was 39 years old. Thomas Bates, the son of a fervent abolitionist Methodist minister and nephew of a recent state lieutenant governor, was 35.
His years as publisher-proprietor can be divided into three eras:
-- 1876-1885: Traverse City's transition and growth from sawmill town to incorporated village that set the stage for the phenomenal growth spurt it would undergo before the turn of the century. This period includes the construction of the Northern Michigan Asylum.
-- 1886-1899: The boom years, when the village changed from a town of wooden structures into a brick "Queen City of the North." These years would see the launch of a daily in 1893 followed by the Herald's daily, the Morning Herald, in 1897.
-- 1900-1912: The coming of the automobile age, the demise of the lumber era and the beginning of a period of economic decline.
Thomas Bates died on Dec. 18, 1912, just five days after he turned 71. A Record-Eagle editorial called his death "a great loss to Traverse City and the entire Grand Traverse Region." It described him as kind, patient, firm, even-tempered, and a great organizer whose hands "shaped a majority of the plans that finally worked out the successful building of a city which has always been and always will be the pride of its citizens."
His death underlined an end of the pioneer era and the move into modern times. Perry Hannah and son Julius had died a few years earlier, as had many of the town's early leaders and residents. Others stepped up with new and enthusiastic ideas, but a tough transition lay ahead for the city, its newspaper, and northern Michigan.
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