Centennial celebration
City gears up for celebrating 100 years in 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has put a bit of a damper on events, but there is hope Royal Oak this year will have a chance to publicly salute its first 100 years as a city.
“We do have some things in the works,” said Judy Davids, the city’s community engagement specialist, “but it’s really difficult because of the pandemic to plan when it will be safe for us to have events.
Expectations are to have an in-person event in the fall. Davids said work is starting to put historical publications together, along with other efforts that will include schools and the city library.
Though Royal Oak is known now to outsiders mostly for its downtown, events and popular housing market, the town took its first steps as a city when the area was largely rural.
Residents voted to incorporate the community as a city in 1921 when it consisted of farmland and small businesses that grew up along the railroad line.
Local historians will tell you the biggest factor in Royal Oak’s development was Henry Ford.
Ford first offered $5 a day to workers at his Highland Park auto factory in 1914. The pay rate hike wasn’t pure philanthropy — Ford had an astronomical turnover rate of workers to solve — but it got attention nationwide.
“Detroit was a boomtown,” said Bob Muller, president of the Royal Oak Historical Society. “People came from all over. Farmers sold farms that were divided up into housing lots.”
There were only about 6,000 people in Royal Oak in 1920. By the end of the decade there 23,000, according to U.S. Census figures. The city’s population peaked in 1970 at roughly 86,000 and today stands at 60,000.
The size of the city kept pace with the growth in the 1920s. Royal Oak’s boundaries expanded to make it nearly double in size in 1922 before nearly doubling again the next year.
Davids has created a page
on the city’s website called Royal Oak 100 with historical information and access to the library’s digital access to issues of the Royal Oak Tribune going back to the late 1800s.
Royal Oak voters elected their first city commissioners and Mayor George Dondero in the same Nov. 8, 1921 election that made the village a city. An attorney, Dondero went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“We’re also collecting peo-. ple’s personal storiesTand we have a collection of thenand-now photos from different places in the city,” Davids said.
Real estate promoters marketed homes in Royal
Oak as the 1920s boom started, selling the community as an alternative to the big city of Detroit. Muller said families could move into a new house, keep chickens in the backyard and have lots of clean air and spaces for children to play.
“In 1921 we were a very bustling city,” said Muriel Versagi, curator at the Royal Oak Historical Society Museum. “Many new businesses were coming to town and there were meat markets, grocery stores, hardware stores and some clothing stores. You could buy everything you needed or have it made in town.”
Buildings were going for businesses and schools. Civic involvement grew up with the houses and other buildings and nonprofit service clubs such as the Royal Oak Woman’s Club had strong memberships, Versagi said.
“In the 1924-7 period we got the Washington Square building, a Montgomery Wards … phone numbers back then in Royal Oak were two digits and you had to call an operator on Fourth Street (near Troy) to make a call.”
The multi- story AT& T building, formerly a Bell Telephone facility, still stands there to this day.
“Men wore straw boater hats and wool suits in the summertime, if you can believe it,” Versagi said.
Royal Oak as it exists probably never would have happened without the auto industry.
“If Henry Ford hadn’t have done what he did, (Royal Oak) today might have looked more like a small town, like Holly in northern Oakland County,” said Muller. “A tiny town with a bunch of farms around it.”