This is a rather plain East Jordan Iron Works manhole cover, at a property on the west side of South Clemens Avenue between Prospect and Michigan. What’s odd about it, and piqued my interest, is that it’s situated within someone’s front walk. In fact, the walk seems to widen there to accommodate it.
This is nearby the sidewalk stamp featured in the previous blog entry, and was taken on the same walk near my work in Mount Pleasant. It’s on the west side of Watson Road between Preston and Crescent. It got my attention especially because my grandfather had a long and distinguished career with Michigan Consolidated Gas Company in Ann Arbor and Detroit.
As with the Bell System cover, this one bears a name no longer in use. MichCon, as it was commonly known, merged with DTE Energy (or as I knew it when I was young, Detroit Edison) in 2001, and in 2013 its name changed to DTE Gas.
This manhole cover is in the sidewalk (if you can call that asphalt mess a sidewalk) that accompanies North Aurelius Road as it climbs over the railroad tracks. It’s on the west side of the street, roughly between Walsh and Perkins.
All over Michigan, when you see a manhole cover or a sewer grate, the odds are good that it will display the name of the East Jordan Iron Works. They were founded in 1883 as the Round and Malpass Foundry and made cast iron parts for the lumber industry, ships, machinery, agricultural equipment, and railroads. East Jordan is in the northwest of Michigan, so the connection with the lumber industry is unsurprising. In 1885 their name changed to the East Jordan Iron Works. Since 2012, they call themselves just plain “EJ,” which I find a little disappointing. Their corporate headquarters are still in East Jordan, but they are now a multinational company, having acquired a lot of other foundries over the years. In 2017 they built a new foundry after almost 135 years in their original location, which is amazing. Happily for the town, I’m sure, they built the new one just 14 miles away from the original.
EJ has a detailed company history and timeline on its Web site. I wish all companies did this.
Very shortly after I started this blog, I was wondering how long I would need to consistently catalog sidewalk markings before I had earned the right to go off topic and start talking about something else I like: manhole covers. The answer is, evidently, about 14 months, because here it is, the first manhole cover of this blog. This beauty is on Hayford Avenue just south of the southwest corner of East Michigan Avenue and Hayford. The sidewalk here got redone recently due to a large new development, but the cover remained.
My recollection is that it is actually pretty common to see Bell System covers around Lansing. I assume they must date from prior to the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. Our local Bell was Michigan Bell. Its “Baby Bell” identity was Ameritech. Ameritech ended up becoming my ISP around 2000 when they brought DSL to my Lansing neighborhood. As a result, I acquired an Ameritech.net email address which has never gone away. It stayed through a couple of buyouts (as my ISP became SBC Global and then AT&T). Eventually I switched ISPs but the email address remains. It is now controlled by Yahoo, and I cannot fathom why someone is still paying for the domain, but it still works. I still give it out as my main email and it forwards to my “real” but less public email address. When I tell people my address now, I have to spell it. Often they don’t know what I’m saying and write something else down. It’s no longer a name people recognize around here. But I hang onto the address as a point of pride (how many people have had an email address two decades?) and will be sad when they eventually notice it still exists and delete it without warning. Apparently the forwarding shouldn’t even still work.
