A gold cup that once belonged to a judge from the 1850s will be publicly displayed at the Michigan Supreme Court in Lansing.
The cup was recently presented to Chief Justice Stephen Markman by the Michigan Supreme Court Historical Society. It belonged to Samuel Douglass, who was a Supreme Court justice from 1852 until he lost an election in 1857. At that time, Michigan had been a state only for 20 years.
The Historical Society purchased the cup from an Ann Arbor man who bought it at an estate sale.
The cup was a gift to Douglass from the Detroit Bar Association. A Latin inscription says, "As gold is worth more than silver so is virtue worth more than gold."
