Lansing Audio Tours

Before Detroit became synonymous with the automobile, Ransom Eli Olds was building curved-dash runabouts in Lansing. His Oldsmobile factory produced more than 5,000 cars in 1904, making it the first true mass-production automobile facility in the world. The R.E. Olds Transportation Museum on Museum Drive tells this story without the mythologizing that often clings to automotive history, and includes an extraordinary collection of Lansing-built vehicles from 1897 through the final Oldsmobile's production in 2004.

Lansing became Michigan's capital in 1847 under circumstances that were largely accidental: the state legislature chose the remote inland town partly as a joke, partly to spite competing cities, and partly because nobody could agree on anything else.

The result is one of the more handsome capitol buildings in the Midwest, completed in 1879 with a dome that echoes the US Capitol, standing at the center of a modest but dignified state government district.