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Custer Ave., W.H. McKrill, 1907(!)

Earlier today I told my husband that I was starting to doubt I would ever find a new “oldest” stamp. At least, I said, not as long as I keep walking in the same neighborhoods on the east side. I was beginning to think all the really interesting stamps had been mined out. That was 3 pm, this was 6:30 pm.

That’s 8-07, or August 1907.

This is on the west side of Custer Avenue between Michigan and Jerome, and may be the oldest dated stamp I’ve found. The fact that the earliest stamps usually include a month makes it possible for me to say that this is older than a previous record-holder, the October 1907 J.P. Sleight stamp on Jerome Street. I can’t know whether it is older or younger than the 1907 V.D. Minnis stamp on Regent Street because the date on that one is lost to time.

Still, while I’d have loved to see an undisputed new champion, this was my most exciting find in weeks, and it’s been right under my nose, on a street I frequently walk on. Apparently I have been in the habit of walking on the other side. I actually thought it was a V.D. Minnis stamp when I was coming toward it, since the style is quite similar.

Looking south on Custer Avenue. The stamp is on the nearest slab (only half visible, my fingers were cold and I didn’t have the patience to retake it).

At first I wasn’t able to find much about W.H. McKrill besides that he provided a testimonial for the Aladdin Company, a Bay City manufacturer of kit homes, in an advertisement in the March 1921 issue of Illustrated World magazine. Then I made a guess that W.H. might be a William, and that got me a very useful hit. The February 24, 1955, Lansing State Journal included a human interest piece: “Oldsters Vie for Honor: ‘Bill’ McKrill Beats Lewis J. Bugbee: Has Lived in Lansing 344 Days Longer.” Evidently, William McKrill turned up in the LSJ offices to complain because they had profiled Lewis J. Bugbee with the claim that he was “believed to be Lansing’s oldest son” when McKrill was older.

According to the article, William McKrill worked in the Bement factory until it closed about 1907, and then “later… entered the construction business and helped to build the first pavement on Michigan Avenue. For this he was paid $1.35 for a 10-hour day.” This initially made me think that he must be the very same W.H. McKrill, but then I became less certain. Would he really have gone straight from working at Bement to running his own paving business (and getting such an important job as paving Michigan Avenue) the same year? I wondered if William was instead a relative of W.H. and worked in the latter’s business. William’s father’s name did not begin with W, but it could have been some other relative. But I have found some evidence that W.H.’s wife was named Ida, which would indeed make W.H. the same person as the “Bill” in the above article. I know because of their grave in Mount Hope Cemetery. (William died the same year the article was published.)

One last tidbit about William, and I do know this is the same William based on the reference to his address (which I saw listed as the address of Ida in her obituary). According to the January 17, 1931, Lansing State Journal, he was arrested after having been found intoxicated while serving as a school traffic guard at the intersection of Bingham and Michigan. He must have been in a visibly bad state because the police were called by a nearby service station attendant who advised them that the crossing guard was in “no condition to take care of school traffic.” No doubt that crossing guard post served students going to Bingham Street School (the original one, not the 1950s replacement that used to be my polling place before being demolished in 2013).

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Regent St., V.D. Minnis, 1907

Trying to avoid another pedestrian, I walked on the other side of Regent Street from my usual (west instead of east), and was rewarded with this. Just as I recently found a Minnis & Ewer stamp with a date of 1911 after being disappointed that all the ones I had found thus far were undated, tonight I have finally found a dated V.D. Minnis stamp. And what a date.

It’s faint but I’m confident in it: that is “- 07” beneath the company name. Most likely there had been a month in front of that, but that’s lost along with a chunk of the concrete. Too bad, as that might have allowed me to say whether this was my oldest stamp yet. The slab is in very poor condition, even worse than this photo makes clear as I only included the area around the stamp. The rest of the concrete is just as bad, fractured in several places and succumbing to weeds and dirt. Next time there is a big sidewalk replacement project, if not sooner, this will be gone. But for now it remains in the 200 block of the west side of Regent Street, between Kalamazoo and Michigan.

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Jerome St., J.P. Sleight, 1907

I almost passed this one by. I wasn’t looking too closely because I had already taken my photo for tonight’s walk. But as I passed it something made me stop and take a second look. And there on the south side of Jerome between Holmes and Ferguson…

I hadn’t imagined I would find one from the first decade of the 20th century. So who is J.P. “Sleicht?” Well, first of all, it seems that the C is really a G. I can find that J.P. Sleight was a coal business, “wholesale and retail,” according to a quaint advertising letter from 1921. Quite possibly they supplied the coal that once came in through the coal chute of my own house. They were located at 614 E. Saginaw St., an address which does not exist today. That would have put them just east of Larch Street; there are condos in that vicinity now. According to a 1918 Annual Report of the Michigan Department of Labor, they employed ten men and one woman. And oddly, J.P. Sleight seems also to have been a dairy cattle breeder; I find him referenced in dairy farmer publications and the Holstein-Friesian Herd Book of 1911.

Unfortunately, unlike yesterday’s 1918 slab, this one is in bad shape. I’m happy to see it and still hold out hope of going earlier yet. It does help that I can shave off months, since in the oldest days they seem to be more likely to specify a month as well as a year.

Update 8/18/20: I perused the Holstein-Friesian Herd Book a little more and noticed a couple of delightful things. One is that Sleight seemed to like to call his high-bred cows “Lady So-and-So,” such as “Lady Ophelia of Carnelian.” Another is that he owned a cow called Olive Sprig Colantha Daughter, listed as the offspring of (naturally) Olive Sprig Colantha. This stands out to me because Traverse Colantha Walker, often referred to simply as Colantha, is a very famous champion dairy cow, famous enough that I have heard of her. She resided at the farm that was part of the Northern Michigan Asylum, a Kirkbride plan mental hospital in Traverse City. I assume that Olive Sprig Colantha was a relative, possibly even a progenitor (as Traverse Colantha Walker was born in 1916).

Some years back I was part of an “art ambush” (rapid drawing challenge) and the theme given was fairs. I attempted to draw a carousel figure representing Traverse Colantha Walker, in the style of a Bayol carousel cow. It’s rough and unfinished but here it is.