What do we have here, on the west side of North Magnolia Avenue between Vine and Fernwood? It’s kind of a mess. The date is upside down, and then the name is stamped twice, presumably because the first one didn’t come out as well as they hoped.
Barnhart, I think you need to have a word with your sons.
This “second style” Department of Public Works stamp is on North Francis Avenue just south of the southeast corner of Francis and Fernwood. The stamp is unusually far off center, and is getting cozy with a large evergreen tree.
The house by this sidewalk faces the 2500 block of Vine Street and was built in 1986. Few of the houses on the east side are that new, so I was curious if another house had preceded it here. I tried looking for a real estate card in the Belon Real Estate Collection at CADL. There are plenty of cards up through 1530 Vine, then there are only two more, one in the 2200 block and one in the 2400 block. This leads me to theorize that this part of Vine was still largely undeveloped in the 1960s (when the cards date from). Still, there must have been a sidewalk here at least back to 1925.
This stamp – alas, largely illegible – is on the west side of South Magnolia Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.
The name appears to be [something] Cox, but I don’t have any leads on that contractor. The date looks like 1950, but looks a bit like 1980 too.
I walked a 5K today (the Mayor’s River Walk) and so I didn’t take my usual neighborhood walk. Realizing I didn’t have a stamp for the blog, I suddenly decided to pull into the next neighborhood street I came to as I drove home from Potter Park on Pennsylvania. The next one turned out to be Walsh Street, so this stamp is from the north side of Walsh between Pennsylvania and Parker. I’m not sure if the date on this one is 1966 or 1968 but I mildly favor 1968.
It’s a contractor I haven’t seen before. I took my usual approach for finding contractors when it’s in the “Initial(s) and Last Name” format that often comes up in older stamps: I checked Find a Grave for people buried in a cemetery in or near Lansing with a matching name and a plausible birth and death date. In this case I found Alton M. Brayton (1908-1986) buried in Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens in DeWitt.
Armed with a full name, I searched again and found the June 13, 1974, Clinton County News (bless Clinton County for having scans of many old issues online). On page 11A, a brief piece titled “Sign Ovid Street Contract” accompanies a photograph:
It was contract signing time in Ovid Monday as village officials, engineers and contractors inked the
Clinton County News, June 13, 1974, p. 11A
line for $230,000 street building project. Signing the contracts are [from left] Earl Canfield, village
clerk; Carl McIntosh of Capitol Consultants; Alton Brayton, contractor and Dale Crossland, village clerk.
The photo is very muddy because the paper has been scanned in black-and-white, but you can get at least a little bit of an idea what Brayton looked like.
This oddity is on the west side of North Magnolia Avenue between Vine and Fernwood. I can’t call it “undated” because I am assuming it originally did have a date, along with the rest of the Barnhart & Sons stamp.
I am supposing that this indicates the original sidewalk block was cut off, perhaps while the newer-looking walk north of it was laid. Why they would have done this, though, I have no good idea.
Here is a stamp from the once-mysterious but now familiar Ed Brackins. It’s so worn that if it had been the first one I had seen I probably wouldn’t have been able to read it. It’s on the west side of South Foster Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.
This mysterious stamp is on the east side of Horton Street between Jerome and the northern dead end. I can’t see anywhere that a name would have been stamped; it appears to be just a date. There is no paired stamp to explain it, either. The stamp is small and easy to overlook, almost hiding in the weeds.
This stamp is actually on the grounds of Eastern High School, on a curb cut in front of the school. There are lots of similar ones on the walks around the school as well as on the public sidewalks on Marshall Street and East Saginaw Street. They must date to when the school was built.
The building was constructed to house Pattengill Middle School, which became a “biotechnical” magnet school called Pattengill Academy when it moved there in 2007. It had previously been located on Jerome Street next to Eastern High School, but like so much of that neighborhood it ended up in the hands of Sparrow and was demolished to build a parking lot. Its original name when it opened in 1921 was East Junior High, but the following year it was renamed Pattengill Junior High.
Pattengill closed in 2013. Meanwhile, the original (1928) Eastern High School got sold to (guess who?) Sparrow, so in 2019, Eastern High School was moved into the former Pattengill building.
On the southeast corner of Jerome and Ferguson Streets is a pair of V.D. Minnis stamps, around the corner from each other. I used to think all V.D. Minnis stamps were undated, until I found one dated ’07. Still, I took that one to be an odd exception, and the numerous undated ones to be a rule. I am reconsidering that in light of my close inspection of these stamps.
I noticed that both of them have a horizontal line underneath, which corresponds with the hyphen in the 1907 stamp (presumably separating the month and year, though the month had been obliterated from that one). I got down and under the yellow light of a street lamp I looked at it up close, and felt with my fingers. There are depressions on either side of the line, suggesting a worn-away month and year. After a bit more looking and feeling I suddenly thought (though it may be spurred by wishful thinking) that I could make out a very faint year: ’07. I am almost positive the first digit is a zero. It is in front of a 1904 house, so this might be from the first sidewalk that was laid when the subdivision was developed.
I have a new theory about V.D. Minnis stamps, which is that they aren’t undated. The dates have just worn away in almost all cases. This might seem strange, except that the 1907 stamp on Regent Street shows a date that is shallower and cruder than the name, possibly due to being drawn in by hand.
Remember the mystery of Ed Crackins-or-Drackins? I passed a clear stamp tonight, on the west side of Ferguson Street just north of Vine, that solves it. The name is Brackins. I’m sorry this is so dark, but there wasn’t a near enough street lamp, and attempts to capture it with a flash washed it out entirely.
“Brackins” is a more plausible reading of the previous stamp I found than “Crackins,” since the letter isn’t round enough on the left side to be a C. The classifieds I turned up advertising for Ed Crackins were probably OCR glitches, because I can find similar ones spanning the same time period (the 1950s through early 1970s), and more importantly using the same phone number, for Ed Brackins.
On October 29, 1958, the [Lansing] State Journal ran a piece titled “Career Events Set.” The Iota Phi Lambda business women’s sorority and the NAACP were sponsoring a program titled “Careers – Unlimited” at the Friendship Baptist church at 925 West Main Street. (That address appears to have been obliterated by I-496.) The article goes on to list all the professionals who would be providing information at the career fair, and one of them is cement contractor Ed Brackins.
The dates involved suggest that this could be Edward E. Brackins, Sr., 1912-1983, buried in Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens in DeWitt (according to Find a Grave). That is just a guess, however, since I can’t find his obituary.
