I know a 1920s Department of Public Works stamp is pretty old hat for the blog by now. This one is pretty badly preserved, too, recognizable more by shape than anything else. But it’s interesting for its location. It’s on Marcus Street at the southeast corner of Hayford and Marcus, which puts it directly across the street from another DPW stamp from 1926. What’s notable is that despite being from the same year and in close proximity, they are two different styles of stamp, this one being the earliest known version (apparently used from the 1910s to early 1940s) and the other one being the second style (apparently used from the mid-1920s through the 1940s).
Looking east on Marcus Street. The house here faces Hayford.
Lately you haven’t been able to keep me away from Urbandale, not that anyone has tried. This stamp is on the south side of Marcus Street just west of South Hayford Avenue. It’s the earliest use I’ve seen of the second style of Department of Public Works stamps, the one I used to call the “1940s style” until I discovered one from 1927. There was a long overlap in use between the first and second style of DPW stamps. I have stamps between 1917 and 1942 for the first style, and the second style I can now push back to 1926, so they had a good fifteen plus years of overlapping use.
At one point this sidewalk bordered a 1937 house at 504 South Hayford Avenue, which fell into the city’s hands due to a tax foreclosure in 2011 and was presumably demolished around then. CADL’s local history collection has an old assessor photo of the house, which was tiny. I am fascinated by this mysterious house. According to 1950s real estate cards digitized by CADL, it had a one-car garage and a double lot, yet it contained only two rooms: a 10 x 12 living room and an 8 x 10 kitchen. Zero bedrooms, it states specifically. All right, so there was really just one all-purpose room plus a kitchen. But, but, but… where was the bathroom? The real estate card leaves blank the area where it would usually say how many bathrooms there were and with what fixtures. Surely this house must have had a bathroom, but if the real estate agents refused to regard it as its own room, what am I to picture? And why did someone build a garage for a house this tiny instead of using the materials to make more house? Why stick the smallest house in Lansing onto a double lot? So many unanswered questions, and I can’t use the city’s property records online to check into any of this because the records get wiped out when a house is demolished.
Looking southwest into the former yard of 504 from Marcus. The stamp is visible.
What’s here now is, of course, a community garden, specifically a raspberry patch. The same fence that once guarded the tiny house (as can be seen in the 2007 Google Street View) serves the raspberries now.
Looking into the raspberry patch from the Hayford (front) side.
I did some more Urbandale rambling today, as I wanted to return to a stamp I had made note of, but found illegible, in the past. It’s on the east side of South Hayford Avenue between Elizabeth and Harton. Initially I didn’t find it any more legible today, but when I looked at it mediated through my camera suddenly I thought I made something out. It seems that sometimes having less information lets my brain find letters in the noise. It appeared to read “Kegle.” Could that be a name?
In front of the vacant lot south of 605.
Yes it could, and it was. Kegle Construction Company Inc. advertised in the February 8, 1981, Lansing State Journal: “Kegle Construction Company has been serving the highway industry in Michigan since 1957.” The ad promises “Concrete Roads, Streets, and Parking Lots” and gives the address 3508 Wood Street (today home to Sanches Construction). The business was founded by Howard S. “Red” Kegle (who had previously run Kegle Dairy Company) and continued by his son, James F. Kegle. According to the May 21, 1978, Lansing State Journal, James was elected president of the Michigan Concrete Paving Association, meaning this stamp has a real pedigree. Sadly, according to an obituary posted at Find A Grave (titled “James F. Kegle, Road Builder, Weightlifter”), James died in 1984 at the unripe age of 44. Weightlifting was his hobby and he won many awards in competitions.
Looking south on Hayford. On the left is a vacant lot (really, probably a few vacant lots) that is (what else?) an urban farm. The stamp is on the nearest pictured full block.
I haven’t been able to determine a date for Kegle going out of business, so I don’t know if the company survived James’s death. Unfortunately the stamp is undated.
A typical Urbandale view. The stamp is on the block of sidewalk in the center of this photo, though not visible here.
This stamp is on the west side of South Magnolia Avenue between Marcus and Horton. (It’s just north of where Elizabeth Street would be, if it didn’t disappear for a couple of blocks.) My husband actually found this one first and told me about it, but I forgot where he said it was, and then ended up running across it on my own.
What happened here? Yes, the date was accidentally reversed, but how? This forces me to admit that I have no idea what these stamps actually look like such that it’s possible to reverse them. I always picture something that looks like a branding iron, but then how could this happen?
Looking around a bit, I find this site selling name stamps for contractors. Here’s another example from a different company. The stamps pictured have holes so that a new year stamp can be inserted. That makes sense, but I still don’t see how the date can end up mirrored. The raised numbers are only on one side of the stamp as far as I can tell. Upside-down is a more obvious way this could go wrong.
Looking south on South Magnolia. This is in Urbandale, so of course what’s up ahead is an urban farm.
I had one of those lucky moments today in which I walked past a previously illegible stamp at a different time of day and it revealed itself to me. It suddenly became apparent that this stamp, previously catalogued as illegible, is in fact from L. Ketchum. Like the other L. Ketchum I’ve found, it looks to be from the 1960s, and if I’m reading it right, 1961.
This illegible stamp is on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Clemens and Fairview, just west of the alley. It doesn’t resemble any stamp that I recognize, but I can’t make out more than couple of letters. It looks to start with a K or B.
I went in closer than usual for the photo to try to make details more apparent, in case anyone else has something jump out at them.
The date is also illegible. I can say with fair confidence that one digit is a “6”, but I can’t be sure whether it’s the last digit or the penultimate one, so I can’t even narrow down a decade.
Looking east on Elizabeth Street. That’s an alley just ahead.
Update 4/28/21: Walking past it in different light, it suddenly jumped out at me that it is an L. Ketchum stamp. The date is almost certainly 1960s, like the other one I’ve found, and I think it’s 1961.
When I first started this blog, I thought it was a big deal to find a 1920s stamp. That didn’t last long. I quickly discovered stamps in the teens and not too long later, a few in the aughts. But I can’t quite get past my initial belief that every 1920s stamp had to be photographed as rare, so even now that I’ve learned how plentiful they are, I will always stop for a 20s.
This faded Department of Public Works stamp is on Marcus Street, on the southeast corner of Marcus and South Clemens Avenue. DPW stamps are the most common 1920s stamps that I’ve found.
Looking south on Clemens; the stamp is on the left, on Marcus.
I ran across this “SC Env” stamp on the east side of South Fairview Avenue between Marcus and Elizabeth. It’s only the second one of these I’ve found, both the same year, yet two completely different styles of stamp. I’m glad I saw it, because it finally motivates me to post an update that I had meant to do a couple of months ago. I discovered who “S.C. Env.” is, just a short while after posting the first stamp I found from them.
Entrepreneur John Kendrick Sears, 41, of Lansing, was killed in a motorcycle accident in Mexico. Sears was shaped by his family’s business, College Bike Shop. In 2006, he founded his own demolition company, SC Environmental Services. Sears also owned properties in Old Town and Reo Town.
The Lansing State Journal has a longer article about Sears. It describes SC Environmental Services as a demolition and environmental remediation company. This adds up: both the stamps I have found are in front of vacant lots. People who knew Sears describe him as striving to find better ways to recycle and reuse materials from demolition, and as having a love for architecture.
This is the latest DPS (Department of Public Service) stamp I have found, and the only DPW/DPS/etc. stamp I have found from the 1960s. It’s on a stretch of sidewalk in front of Urbandale Farm, on the east side of South Hayford Avenue between Horton and the dead end. Hayford has lost the last stretch of sidewalk on the west side of the street to the Urbandale demolition project, but most of the east side’s sidewalk is still intact since there are three houses still hanging on to the south of Urbandale Farm.
The southern stamp of a pair. The last digit looks altered, as though a “4” were written overtop something else.The northern stamp makes the decade impossible to read, but the “4” is more prominent.
Urbandale Farm was the first big urban farm project in Lansing. It sits on a site that once held the Hayford Street Pumping Station. Yes, Hayford Street. When I first ran into references to Hayford Street in the Lansing City Code, I thought it was a careless error. But this photo of the old pumping station, clearly marked “Hayford Street Pumping Station,” tells me otherwise. The photo, dated 1985, comes from the Caterino Real Estate Image Collection at the Capital Area District Library. David Caterino, from the 1960s through the 1980s, used to drive around and take photos of notable structures, often because he had reason to think they were about to be demolished. Indeed, there is a photo of its demolition on page B1 of the Lansing State Journal, May 20, 1986. The caption reads,
LANDMARK FALLS
Lansing’s Hayford Street Pumping Station, built in 1932, fell to a wrecking company crane Monday. It is to be replaced by a new station on Mifflin Street on Lansing’s east side.
Mifflin Street, you say? If that isn’t an error, then Mifflin has also ascended from being a mere Street to a lofty Avenue sometime after May 1986. At the moment, all the streets from Clemens east to Mifflin (which includes Hayford) are Avenues. I need to get old official maps to figure out whether some of the others are also former Streets and when they changed.
The fence around the Urbandale Farm. It dates from the pump station days, since it can be seen in another Caterino photo.
The Hayford station was apparently desperately overdue for replacement at the time. It all too often broke down, causing around 40 nearby houses to flood with sewage. It’s just a shame that the new one (a baleful box on a hill at the south end of Mifflin) doesn’t have the sense of style and propriety that the 1930s edifice did.
Looking north on Hayford, with Urbandale Farm on the right.
I took another walk around Urbandale this evening and made a point of walking on the tracks of removed sidewalks. (I discovered that the 700 block of Francis has the longest ex-sidewalk I’ve found yet.) But that’s not the point of this entry. No, this one is to show a name I haven’t covered yet, Don Otis. It’s on the west side of South Fairview Avenue between Elizabeth and Harton.
I wish I could tell you more about Don Otis, but all I know is that he advertised cement work in the Lansing State Journal between 1951 and 1973.
Here’s a closer look at the date in case you want to second guess me on it.
The house this one is in front of was built in 1968, the same year as this stamp. (At least, I think so, though the last digit is a little indistinct and I’m willing to entertain the idea that it’s a 1966.) That’s an unusually “new” house for the neighborhood.
