Located on the former property of Eber White, an early settler who helped fugitive slaves escape to Canada, this neighborhood, with its mix of homes of different eras, provides a case study in Ann Arbor’s westward expansion. All of it is within a few blocks of Eberwhite Woods, one of the city’s most beautiful, secluded natural areas.
The U-M gave the oak-hickory woods, which have never been clear cut, to the Ann Arbor Public Schools in the late 1940s after using the area for decades as a forestry field laboratory. The school and its grounds were carved out of the southeastern corner of the woods in 1950. At that time, the school was on the western edge of town, adjoining a neighborhood of broad, hilly, tree-lined streets and homes built between the two world wars.
In the 1960s subdivisions wrapped around the south and west edges of the woods. The city not only put an open storm drain through the woods to take storm water from these new subdivisions, but assessed the school district for the drain. Rather than pay a charge, the schools considered giving up the woods, but a neighborhood outcry stifled that idea. Since then, the woods have been sacrosanct, safe from development and nurtured by a school-based stewardship group. They have walking trails, a profusion of spring wildflowers, and three ponds, one of which is a natural amphitheater and is the site of cacophonous annual early-spring concerts by frenzied spring peepers and a few other varieties of frogs.
The woods and school grounds—along with an adjacent open field, owned by Zion Lutheran Church, that is the site of one of the city’s community gardens—provide a neighborhood commons with no vehicular throughways, making the area safe for free-range children.
North of Liberty, the Virginia Park area has many two-family duplexes and Cape Cods. Behind the strip of fast-food joints along West Stadium is a mixed neighborhood of small homes and apartments. South of Pauline, 1950s- and 1960s-era neighborhoods stretch toward West Stadium, where apartment and condominium complexes rise along the neighborhood’s southern boundary. Eberwhite is perhaps the most cohesive elementary area in the city. Unlike most, it has no disconnected outlying regions. Eberwhite graduates all go to nearby Slauson Middle School and to Pioneer High, both of which are within walking distance of most of the neighborhood.
