Samuel James Mulholland: A Sad Life

Sam J. Mulholland III

Samuel Mulholland III was born in 1853 into a large Irish family farming in Superior Township, Washtenaw County, Michigan. Little is known of his early life or when he became an alcoholic. 

Sam was the oldest son of the ten children of Sam Mulholland jr and his wife Eliza, with five older sisters. Sam lived with his father until about 1883, when he moved to the farm in Section 17, Superior Township, which he inherited upon his father's death in 1888. 

At 37, he remained a bachelor until his family arranged a marriage in 1890 with a much younger German woman, Carrie Knödler, already touched by scandal with a child born out of wedlock. 

Perhaps his family hoped with a wife and family, Sam would become more stable and responsible, but that was not to be. Over time, he lost the farm, and eventually lost his wife and children to a bitter divorce after multiple arrests for public drunkenness and intoxicated rages aimed at his family. In the divorce, he lost custody of the children and a restraining order was issued preventing him from returning to their home. Sam continued in his dissolute ways throughout his life, periodically working odd day jobs and most years managing to pay board somewhere until he was thrown out and had to find another place to live.

Samuel portrait

Despite the divorce, Sam's children maintained contact with their father as time softened memories of the bad early years. In Sam's later years, he went from family house to family house, perhaps even spending time at the Chapin Street house for short periods where Carrie and her unmarried daughters lived in Ann Arbor. Stan Hoffman (Minnie's son and Sam's grandson) was visiting the Mulholland women on Chapin when he was young and tells of meeting a man the family brought home from West Park (a large park across the street that continues to this day to be a hangout for the homeless). The aunties took in the old man and "fixed him up" but didn't explain to the very young Stan who it was – he later figured out it was his grandfather. 

In his last years, Sam spent winters with his son Everett Mulholland and family in Flint, returning summers to Ann Arbor to hang out on the benches in front of the court building downtown with other old men during the warm weather and staying in a rental room nearby. Stan remembers his parents driving into Ann Arbor one Sunday to visit Chapin Street when his mother said "there's the old man" as they passed the men sitting on the courthouse bench. Fred Hoffman stopped the car a block away; Minnie Mulholland Hoffman walked back to talk to her father after which they continued on to see Grandma Mulholland.

While there are no descriptions of Sam,
he was likely a very tall man. This was taken
about 1890 when he married Carrie Knodler

When Minnie's son Erwin Hoffman died in 1930, just a month before Sam himself did, all the Ann Arbor relatives drove down to Detroit for the funeral held at Fred and Minnie's home, including both Carrie and Sam Mulholland although they had long since been divorced. Carrie and her daughters stayed in one room and Sam along with the men in another. Mae Mulholland reports that in the funeral procession from Detroit to the cemetery in Ann Arbor, Oscar Behnke (daughter Anne Mulholland's husband), who drove up in a brown Ford and was transporting Sam, dropped out of the line of cars to stop at a gas station – a simply unheard of break in protocol. Seems that Sam couldn't survive the trip without numerous bathroom breaks, a fact that left Oscar out of sorts. 

In his last year, Sam stayed with his brother William B. Mulholland in his house on Washington St. Sam died of pneumonia in November 1930 at the grand age of 77 despite his intemperate ways, and is buried near Carrie in the Mulholland plot at Bethlehem Cemetery, Ann Arbor. Son Everett purchased the cemetery space after the death of his infant son with space set aside for his parents and sisters. 

In the quiet, pleasant landscape of Bethlehem Cemetery, surrounded by the graves of his wife, children and grandchildren, Sam may have found the peace that evaded him in life.

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Samuel J. Mulholland III is my great-grandfather.