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.
Here is a pair of L & L stamps, on the west side of North Holmes Street between Jerome and Vine, in front of a parking lot. They are side by side, one facing the sidewalk and one facing the street, on what probably used to be a driveway. There is a fence in front of it now.
This stamp is right on the southwest corner of East Saginaw Highway and Marshall Street, on the curb cut. I could equally have designated it as a Marshall Street stamp, but since it is in front of a building that faces Saginaw, the Army National Guard office, I let that break the tie.
Audia Concrete Construction (as their Facebook page calls them) or Audia Construction (as their Web site has it) is based in Milford. I know Milford best as the closest town to Kensington Park, the site of my most-loved elementary school field trip. The wild birds there would come and perch in your hand if you held out seed. Last I was there in the 2000s, they still did, and I imagine they still do. Anyway, more to the point, it’s in Oakland County, which means Audia came a long way to do this job.
According to their Web site, Audia specializes in “concrete construction, excavation, underground utilities and site contract work” and was established in 1996.
On the west side of North Magnolia Avenue between Vine and Fernwood, there are two houses that share a driveway, and on that driveway are three undated Hosford Brothers Inc. stamps (one on each of the three big blocks making it up). Shared driveways are fairly common in my neighborhood, and from reading the various neighborhood social media groups, I have learned that they are an unending source of neighbor disputes. This one looks to have been repaved pretty recently, making me wonder about the logistics of shared driveway projects.
Hosford Brothers Concrete Inc. is located on Saginaw Highway in East Lansing, at least per their postal address. That actually places them closer to Haslett or Bath. Their Web site is broken but they seem to still be in business, based on recent online reviews. Their Facebook page says they have been in business since 1994.
I found this one in a driveway on the east side of North Clemens Avenue between Fernwood and Saginaw. I took it to read “Ed Crackins,” but looking at the photo at home, I was bugged by the fact that it really looks much more like “Drackins.” When I zoom in on it, the dubious letter resembles the “D” of “ED” more than the “C” of “-RACKINS.” The trouble is that “Drackins” is a less likely name and I can’t find a reference to an Ed Drackins or any other Drackins in Michigan.
I can find three classified ads (in 1959, 1967, and 1971) from Ed Crackins for basement floors and driveways, so that inclines me back to my initial judgment. There is a little bit of uncertainty because I am relying on Newspapers.com’s OCR scans and they often contain errors, especially in the fine print of the classifieds. (After all this time I am still too stingy to pay them for an actual subscription that would allow me to view the original pages.)
Updated 6/5/21: I now realize the name is Ed Brackins.