This is a contractor I haven’t covered before. The pair of stamps is on the east side of Rumsey Avenue between Jerome and Vine.
Shenandoah Construction is based in Mason. According to Angieslist, they were founded in 1990 and “emphasize concrete flatwork in the summers.” I am unsure whether they are still in business. They have a Facebook page, but the most recent posts were two years ago and their Web site is defunct.
I took a walk through the Urbandale neighborhood this evening. The subdivision was developed in the teens on the site of a former race track. It’s a careworn district, harmed over the years by redlining and frequent flooding. Many derelict properties ended up being demolished, resulting in it being repopulated with a lot of urban farms, but at dusk and under snow it just looked desolate. I didn’t find many leftover Christmas lights.
I did find this very worn 1925 stamp on the west side of South Fairview Avenue between Elizabeth and Harton. (Harton, by the way, is a real oddity: a dirt road, in the city!) I was excited to make out the 1925 date, then a little dismayed to work out (with the help of some different flashlight angles while kneeling down and confusing any watching neighbors) that it is another one of those mysterious E. Schullberger stamps. At least, that’s been my best guess as to how to read the name in the past, and this one isn’t any easier to read than the ones I’ve found before, more’s the pity. Update 5/9/21: I now believe this to be E. Schneeberger.
This pair of E.R. Premoe stamps is on the east side of Rumsey Avenue between Michigan and Jerome. Unfortunately I can’t quite make out the last number of the date. It is probably 1980s and I think it could be 1983. I’ll have to try it again in better light and see if that helps.
Luckily for me, someone who (unlike me) actually has a subscription to Newspapers.com has been assembling clippings of the Premo(e) family. (It appears that the family is split on how to spell it.) E.R. Premoe, according to his obituary, was Earl R. “Lefty” Premoe. He was from Lansing, and died in 1989. It says that he ran the E.R. Premoe Construction company 25 years. According to OpenCorporates, it was incorporated in 1965. That seems a little inconsistent with his obituary saying he ran it 25 years, but it’s possible that it existed in some form for a while before its incorporation. Most likely they just wanted to round off the figure. In 1986, the E.R. Premoe company received an award from the General Contractors of America for having lost no work days due to accident or injury.
This is a favorite neighborhood for me to walk in because the residents had, and still have, a lot of Christmas lights up. Before that, there were a lot of Halloween decorations. I’m going to miss seeing lights on people’s houses at night, but I think people are going to continue being slow to take them down, so I have a while left.
I had a more interesting one planned for tonight but I happened across a small, shivering dog running around Hunter Park. I spent a little while trying to gain his trust, but while he would come right up to me, he would get defensive if I tried to grab his collar. Eventually I gave up, but after leaving the park I ran across the dog again, with a guy trying to use a hamburger to entice him. The fellow Samaritan had the same results as me: the dog would come up to him but if he tried to grab him he would get snapped at. As we stood there talking about it suddenly a car pulled up and asked if we had seen a small dog. We both pointed up the street and the car took off in pursuit, so at that point I was relieved and figured I could now exit the scene. This excitement caused me to forget to take the photo I meant to and I ended up having to just grab what I could since I didn’t have time to extend my walk.
Anyway, here’s the stamp. It’s on the east side of the 400 block of Regent Street (about midway between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth). It’s a C. Gossett stamp. Those are pretty common, as I’ve mentioned, and they are usually from the 1960s as far as I’ve seen. I am not entirely sure of the year on this one. It looks like 1968, but could be 1966 or even 1960.
Now for a little bit of irrelevant reminiscing. The house this is in front of (the steps of which can be seen in the photo above) is one I have actually spent time in, many years ago. When I was first living in town two fellow grad students (a married couple) lived there, and my husband-a-the-time and I were friendly with them. I still think of the house (it’s actually a duplex) as “[Couple’s names’] house” even though they moved out in the 2000s and I long ago lost contact with them. For years, the very numerous tulips and daffodils planted by my old friends would come up each spring and I would think of them. I think a few might still pop up in the front yard.
I found this stamp on the east side of the dead-end block of Shepard Street south of Elizabeth.
Unfortunately, finding anything out about someone with such a common arrangement of names is challenging. I keep getting hits for a Fred Smith, Jr., of Dimondale who was apparently a locally legendary horseshoe player in the 1960s. Also, Dimondale apparently calls itself the Horseshoe (as in the game) Capital of the World. This is the first I’ve heard of it. I don’t think that Fred Smith has anything to do with this, though; based on obituaries I found of both him and his father, neither appear to have been in the concrete or construction business.
This stamp is on the west side of North Clemens Avenue between Jerome and Vine and it’s notable for being the first dated BdWL stamp I have come across. Now I have an idea of the time period in which BdWL, whoever that is, was operating.
As noted in the past, I have no information about BdWL, including what the initials stand for. It occurs to me that one reason to use a lower-case d would be if the initials were a name, and “d” was “de” or “du.” [Something] de Waal [Something], for instance.
I found this a bit curious, curious enough to feature it, though your mileage may vary. I have noted before that Able Concrete has used a few different stamps that I have found. What’s odd here is that this cluster of new-looking cement (on the west side of Lathrop St. between Marcus and Elizabeth) has Able stamps of two different varieties despite being the same year. There is one on the sidewalk, then a different one on the driveway and the driveway apron.
I suppose it’s possible that they were done at different times in the same year and they switched stamps between them, but it sure looks like a cluster that was probably all done at once. It’s as though they wanted to use a fancier stamp for the driveway than for the sidewalk.
Another interesting choice is that the driveway apron stamp faces the street rather than the sidewalk. Other driveway apron stamps I have looked at have faced the other way.
Here is a BBRPCI (BBR Progressive Concrete, Inc.) stamp from 1986. It’s in front of Liberty Christian Church, which is on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Magnolia and Hayford. The stamp is nothing special but I was a little curious about the church.
The city’s property database claims the various buildings that make up the church were all built in 2011. This is plainly not true, and I’m not sure why it says that. Fortunately, I discovered that the church is up for sale and the real estate listing states that it was built in 1927 for the Olivet Baptist Church. It also contains some obnoxious hype about neighborhood gentrification along with suggestions about converting it into a nightclub or apartments or something. Gross. Anyway, 1927 certainly matches the central core of the church’s architecture but other elements look midcentury to me.
I don’t know when Olivet Baptist moved out. They were still there at least as late as 1983, as I can find them referenced in a Lansing State Journal church directory then. Liberty has been there as long as I can remember and based on Google street view, at least by 2007. I would like to do more research into this, but I lack the emotional energy for more research tonight, so I will leave that for another time.
Another C. Wilkinson (and I’m now more confident that it is C rather than G), this time on Horton Street between Jerome and the dead end. I grabbed this one just as another example of a double stamp. There are two stamps (both with name and date) on either end of the slab, facing opposite directions. I have come to realize this probably is a way of conforming to the practice of marking the beginning and end of a newly constructed section of sidewalk when there is only a single slab being replaced.
Happy Twelfth Night! I passed a favorite lit tree on Elvin Court while taking my walk this time and saw the sad sight of two people working to take the lights down. Alas, the season is nearing its end, but I hope some people remain slow to take things down.
Here’s another contractor I haven’t seen before, P. Beasley. I found this one while walking up and down Elvin Court to look at people’s Christmas lights, since there are several houses still decorated there. It’s on the east side of the street, between Jerome and the dead end. (That’s all of Elvin there is. It starts at Jerome and stops abruptly where the old Armory’s grounds begin.)
I did not find anything about P. Beasley, but I have a possible lead. I found several references to W.H. Beasley and Son, general contractors, in the Lansing State Journal between 1948 and 1951. They were connected with several civic projects, including building Midway Elementary School in Holt. Could P. Beasley be the “Son” of Beasley and Son?
Another piece of evidence suggests so. Find A Grave shows that there is a William Hosa Beasley buried in Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens in DeWitt. The symbol on his gravestone, and the fact that he is buried in the Masonic Garden section of the cemetery, shows that he was a Freemason, which would be quite fitting for a builder, if this is our man. This W.H. Beasley died in 1951, matching the fact that I do not see any references to Beasley and Son after that date. Perhaps P. Beasley was indeed the “Son” and carried on the business in his own name after the death of his father.
That’s a tidy enough story, but there is a major problem. Whoever has entered the family history into Find A Grave has W.H. Beasley as having one son named William W. So I am inclined to say that this W.H. Beasley is indeed the contractor I read about, but I doubt that P. Beasley was his son. Find A Grave’s information could be wrong, of course, but usually these are entered by people doing family genealogy and so it is likely based on census information or another semi-reliable source.
So alas, while I have learned a bit about W.H. Beasley, I have possibly learned nothing about this specific stamp. My research so often goes that way.