Lansing, the capitol of Michigan since 1847, was first given its city charter in 1859, which is where its written history began. The book, A History of the City of Lansing, by M. Dash and written in 1870, just one year after Mary DeLamarter came to Michigan, gives a brief overview of the city and lets one imagine what she may have encountered on a visual level when she first moved there. After 1859, the city began to grow quite rapidly and in those eleven years streets appeared, railroads began to be built (two railroads by 1870 and more on the way), twelve brick churches were erected, and a pound was established of which the opening was,

"the most interesting proceedings relative to the establishment of the city government. On the day when the proclamation declared that it would be opened, all persons were admonished to shut up their live stock, with the exception of cows, who on account of their peaceful disposition, were to be allowed the range of the streets of the city, but all hogs or horses found loose upon the streets were to be incarcerated in the pound, the person bringing such animals being liberally rewarded . . . . each hog represented five cents and each horse was worth fifty cents . . . By noon the street leading to the pound was thronged with hogs, horses, boys [who took off from school for the day], and irate owners of livestock, who generally arrived just in time to see their animals enter the enclosure called the pound, and the boys dodge around the corner in search of more stray livestock."

In just a very few years, Lansing had become a main central city in Michigan and was much more industrialized than the countryside with wild land and country roads that it had previously been. This serves as a template for what much of middle America was experiencing in DeLamarter's time. This major growth is also shown in the list of STATISTICS that were published at the end of Dash's book. These were years full of growth and hard work, movement and emotion, which is indicated in much of DeLamarter's work.