The Founder

The law firm that became Miller Canfield was founded in Detroit in 1852, when ships' masts studded the city's riverfront and the Erie Canal rivaled the railroads. In that year a young lawyer named Sidney Davy Miller, fresh from the University of Michigan and Harvard Law, opened an office at 168 Jefferson Avenue. He was talented and well-connected, a hard worker with a dry sense of humor and a powerful civic conscience.

Gifted with these traits, Miller also owed his rise to prominence and the staying power of his firm to the character of Detroit and Michigan in the mid-1800s. The city was then bursting with immigrants, mostly working men and their families-dockworkers, shipbuilders, sawyers and clerks, who needed a place to save a portion of their earnings against the vagaries of old age. Yet the state had been swept clean of banks in the fiscal crisis of the 1830s and '40s, and those that reopened catered only to business. In 1849, the state had authorized an institution devoted strictly to individual savings, without the power to issue notes or make loans. It was named the Detroit Savings Fund Institute, and Sidney Miller became its first attorney. The organization would change its name to the Detroit Savings Bank, The Detroit Bank, Detroit Bank & Trust, and finally, in the distant future, Comerica. This was to be the most significant professional association of Miller's career, and the foundation upon which the firm of Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone was built.

Miller's practice, rooted in the bank, spread rapidly. He soon represented Eber Ward, the first steelmaker in the U.S. to use the revolutionary Bessemer process; Dr. Samuel Duffield, who founded the pharmaceutical firm that would become Parke, Davis & Co., by 1880 the world's largest drugmaker; and clients throughout Michigan, the Midwest and beyond, to Philadelphia, New York, even Paris. At the same time, Miller was highly active in the wider life of his city, serving on many public commissions and in many private charities.

In 1883, Miller was named the third president of the Detroit Savings Bank. In six years he nearly doubled its assets, and when the Panic of 1893 touched off a four-year nationwide depression, including the failure of some 500 American banks, Miller was among the Detroit banking leaders who cooperated to ensure that not a single bank in the city went under. When he died in 1904 at the age of 73, the Detroit Free Press called him "a man of the people, conscious of his moral and ethical obligations to his brother citizen and these he discharged to the letter." 

A Gentlemen's Firm: 1904-1945 »