Tuomy Hills

One farm, one family, six plats

The Tuomys came to Washtenaw County from County Kerry, Ireland, in 1838, when Timothy and Johanna Tuomy bought one of the county's first farms in Scio Township, west of town. Their son Cornelius L. Tuomy, born on that homestead in 1843, bought the Spaulding farm of more than two hundred acres in Ann Arbor Township with his brother Patrick in April 1874, ran it as a dairy farm and bred prize race horses on it. The farmhouse, which the family called Tuomy Place, still stands at 2117 Washtenaw Avenue: its oldest rooms were built about 1854 by George and Jane Bell, the Italianate front was added about 1864 by Frederick and Almina Spalding, and the road named for the family runs along its west boundary.

Cornelius L. died in 1912, and the next generation turned the farm into a neighborhood. Cornelius W. (Bill) Tuomy, a World War I veteran and several-term county drain commissioner between 1930 and 1944, spent more than fifty years in real estate and insurance with his sister Kathryn in the firm Tuomy and Tuomy. Their office was first at 122 North Fourth Avenue and later in a small building behind the family's gas station at Washtenaw and Stadium. Kathryn G. Tuomy, a 1912 University of Michigan graduate and a founder of the Ann Arbor Business and Professional Women's Club, ran the office alone for some years; the family papers at the Bentley Historical Library describe it as the oldest real estate office in Ann Arbor. Their younger brother, Thomas Kearney Tuomy, a local athlete, died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 at 28. The Bentley credits Bill and Kathryn directly with developing the Tuomy Hills area on the former farm.

The plat map is the family tree drawn on the ground: the father's name on C.L. Tuomy Washtenaw Hills, one of the four survivors on each of Julia A., Cornelius W., Kathryn G. and Thomas K. Tuomy, and Tuomy Woods farthest from the avenue. Kathryn died in 1965 and Bill, the last of the family, in March 1966 at 69. Their bequests set up an athletic scholarship in Tom's name and a women's scholarship in Kathryn's, with the remainder to St. Francis of Assisi parish, which already stood on eight acres the Tuomys had sold the church in 1945. Bill's will gave Tuomy Place to the city for a historic purpose; it was deeded to the University of Michigan in 1968, became the headquarters of the Historical Society of Michigan in 1982, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, and the Society later sold it.

The gas station at the corner

The Tuomy Hills Service Station at 2460 Washtenaw Avenue is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. When Stadium Boulevard was first cut through in 1928, the Tuomys decided the new crossing at Washtenaw needed a gas station and hired Ann Arbor architects Lynn W. Fry and Paul Kasurin to design one. The result is a Tudor Revival building that reads as an English gatekeeper's cottage, with masonry walls sixteen inches thick, eight of brick faced with eight of stone. Standard Oil leased it and exhibited a replica at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago, and the family papers hold photographs of it from around 1930 and again from the early 1960s. It was added to the National Register on March 24, 2000. Very few neighborhoods can point to a gas station as their front door; this one can, and the building has outlived the farm and the family.

It also shows how long the neighbors have cared about this corner. The Ann Arbor Hills Association, founded in 1924 to protect property values and enforce covenants across what it described as a prime residential area between Washtenaw Avenue and the Huron Hills golf course, kept a file on Tuomy Hills Gas Station property improvements in 1987 and 1988 — in the same decade it was fighting the Huron Parkway and the sale of Bader School.

The homes

Tuomy Hills was not built in one campaign, and the houses show it. The wider Ann Arbor Hills ground, of which these plats are the southwestern corner, filled in over several decades beginning largely in the 1920s and 1930s, with traditional Georgians, Tudors and Colonials joined after the war by architect-designed modern houses. The Tuomy and Tuomy papers record the firm's business buildings from about 1940 to 1960, construction from about 1955 to 1964 and houses through 1964 — a fair sketch of when the family's remaining lots went to market.

The plats were drawn to the land rather than to a grid, so lot shapes and sizes vary from one pocket to the next, and a house along Washtenaw faces a different reality from a house a block back. The streets have no sidewalks — the Ann Arbor Hills Association opposed adding them as recently as 1986 — and houses sit back behind long drives under a dense canopy, which is why a block off the arterial feels farther from it than the map suggests.

Two houses on the same street can be forty years apart behind the walls. A 1920s house here carries original wiring, galvanized supply pipe, lead paint, asbestos and clay or Orangeburg sewer laterals; a 1960s house carries aluminum branch wiring and systems on their second or third replacement cycle. Neither is a reason to walk away; both are reasons to know the decade before you know the price.

Not Ann Arbor Hills proper, not Ives Woods

Three names get used for the ground around this corner, and only one is right for a given house. Across Washtenaw to the southwest is Ives Woods, the larger-lot slope northeast of Burns Park around Hermitage Road, platted in 1923 around a soap manufacturer's estate; beyond it is the Burns Park grid with its service alleys and fifteen-acre park. Both sit south of Washtenaw and west of East Stadium Boulevard, and neither is Tuomy Hills.

North of Washtenaw, Tuomy Hills is part of the collective Ann Arbor Hills — the plat lists for that area include Tuomy Woods and Tuomy Washtenaw Hills — but it is the part on the arterial, at the busiest intersection on this side of town, not the part on the ravines toward Geddes and the Arboretum. Traffic, bus service and the gas station are on this end; the half-acre wooded lots and the architect-designed houses are the draw on the other. Price at the plat level, on the correct side of Washtenaw, and treat the collective name as a starting point rather than an answer.

Schools

Tuomy Hills is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools, and assignment is set by address. The school lines on this side of town do not follow the neighborhood names, so look up the specific address in the district's street directory before naming a school. Tappan Middle School sits at 2251 East Stadium Boulevard south of the corner, and Burns Park Elementary is across the avenue on Wells Street beside its park.

Getting around

Washtenaw Avenue is the neighborhood's front door and its main trade-off. It runs east to US-23 and Arborland and west into Central Campus and downtown, and the city's bus routes stop along it at Devonshire, Brockman, Tuomy Road and Stadium. East Stadium Boulevard runs south from the corner past Tappan Middle School and Burns Park toward Michigan Stadium and I-94, and Central Campus and Michigan Medicine are a few minutes away.

The cost of that position is the road itself. Washtenaw and Stadium both carry heavy traffic, and on football Saturdays the corner fills. A house a block north on a plat street lives very differently from a house with Washtenaw frontage, and the difference belongs in the price. Walk it at rush hour and on a Saturday before you commit.

Buying or selling in Tuomy Hills

Start with the plat and the side of the avenue. A sale in Ives Woods is a different product from a sale on Tuomy Road, and a wooded half-acre toward Geddes is different again, even though a portal may tag all three as Ann Arbor Hills or Burns Park. When I run comparables here I hold to the north side of Washtenaw, match the decade of construction and separate arterial frontage from the interior streets. Turnover here is low, so the honest comparable set is small and spans a longer window than a buyer would like.

For buyers, read the title work. The Ann Arbor Hills Association enforced recorded restrictions on its members for decades, monitored building and property changes through a Building Committee from 1948, and took members to court over uses it considered improper; whether a given Tuomy Hills lot sits under any of those covenants is a document question to answer before an offer, not after. Then match the house to its decade and pull the permit history on any addition.

For sellers, the story is the asset. Name the plat and the family: the farm of 1874, the real estate firm that sold these lots, the gas station on the National Register at the corner. Document what has been renewed and when, and lead with the location that made the Tuomys' land valuable in the first place — campus and the hospitals minutes away, the Arboretum up the hill, Burns Park across the road. A listing that calls this Ann Arbor Hills reaches buyers who want ravine lots; a listing that calls it Tuomy Hills reaches the buyer who wants exactly what it is.

Not to be confused with

• Ann Arbor Hills · Ann Arbor
• Ives Woods · Ann Arbor
• Burns Park · Ann Arbor