This hopelessly worn stamp is on a driveway apron on the south side of Prospect Street between Virginia and Holmes. The only part that can be made out is the date, which I am inclined to say is 1952, especially since that’s the year the house was built. I had hoped that I would be able to make something of the contractor name by tweaking the photo, but no luck. The style of the date marking is unfamiliar – it’s larger than most – so I wonder if it is a contractor I haven’t covered in the blog yet. Sadly, I’ll never know.
I am pretty sure this is a Lansing DPS stamp. It’s on Prospect Street between Jones and Holmes, next to the former Unity Church at 230 South Holmes. I like to try to find out what was at a given site at the time a stamp was made, but I haven’t ended up with a clear picture of that. Right now, what’s there is the remnant of the church, which had a devastating fire in 2019. According to the Lansing State Journal (November 13, 2019), the congregation was to vote on whether to rebuild the church at that location or move. Staying would have required applying for a zoning variance, because the church had been grandfathered into an otherwise residential-zoned area and doing substantial renovation would result in losing this status. Evidently they decided to move. According to city records, they sold it to someone calling themselves “Homes on Holmes LLC” in April 2021. I don’t know what they’re planning to do with it, but they have filed for a “Commercial Change of Use Group.” Church leaders made a YouTube video saying goodbye to the building, showing the interior to be completely gutted.
Pardon the poor visibility. I was on one of my nighttime walks.
According to the Journal article, “The property […] has been home to a church since the early 20th century,” which falls short of asserting that this building has been there that long. It reads as midcentury to me, but I’m not an expert. The city’s online property records are no help, since they claim it was built in 2011, which it plainly was not. It was owned until 2006 by the Metaphysical Church of Christ, previously known as the Spiritual Episcopal Church. The earliest reference I can find to the address in the State Journal is in the April 27, 1968, church listings: “FIRST SPIRITUAL EPISCOPAL 230 S. Holmes St. Morning service, 10:30. Dedication of new church home.” This could mean the church itself was new or it was merely a new home for the congregation. So I have been unable to determine anything definitively.
The former church and its sign at the corner. The sidewalk block with this stamp is the nearest full block.
This is an encore appearance by this hard-to-read C.D. Chamberlain stamp alongside the former Pagoda restaurant on the southwest corner of Regent and Michigan. I wanted to show how a previously illegible stamp can suddenly reveal itself under the right conditions. This one taunted me for a long time, until one day I had a eureka moment. This is the most legible I’ve ever see it, though, thanks to the perfect combination of snow-melt water and silt collecting in the shallow impressions.
This gives me an idea for my next big project, now that I’ve mined just about the entire east side for interesting stamps. I should go back and check the ones I originally tagged as illegible to see if anything has changed, ideally after a bit of wet weather has come through.
I have walked past this stampso many times, and periodically I start thinking I can almost read it, especially at night under the streetlight. What threw me is that the first two letters looked like “CD” but the entire stamp looked like one word, rather than initials and a surname. I could also tell that the last four letters were -LAIN and I kept thinking it was some variation of McClain or McLain, but those leads were not fruitful.
Tonight I walked past it and suddenly thought if I stopped and stared, this time I would get it. And what do you know? I did. My brain suddenly organized the shadows into “CD CHAMBERLAIN” – though the spacing is so close it still looks like one long word.
Can you see it now? Suddenly I could!
The stamp is on the west side of the 100 block of Regent Street, south of East Michigan Avenue, alongside the former Pagoda Restaurant. There are two of them, but this one is the more legible.
The first thing I did was go to Find A Grave and check for a C.D. Chamberlain. I found Claude D. Chamberlain, 1914-1998, which seemed promising. Turning to the (Lansing) State Journal, I found lots and lots and lots of references to Mrs. Claude D. Chamberlain in the Society pages in the 1950s and 60s. Mrs. Chamberlain was very active with several organizations, including the American Association of University Women, the St. Lawrence Hospital Auxiliary, and the Lansing Fine Arts Council. I also found her obituary; her name was Jean, and she died in late 2015 at the age of 98. Her name (as “Mrs. Claude”) appeared in the State Journal so much that it interfered with my trying to find anything out about Claude. I was unable to find his obituary, or anything about his life. Eventually I found a single reference to him that justifies identifying him as probably the C.D. Chamberlain of this stamp. On March 31, 1957, the name “Claude D. Chamberlain” appears in a list of “Blue Ribbon Builders” associated with some upcoming open houses.
This stamp is on the south side of Lasalle Gardens (according to the city, “Gardens” is the suffix, like “Street,” rather than part of the name proper) between Kipling and Midvale. This neighborhood on the east edge of Lansing is the Midtown subdivision, developed in the 1950s, around the same time as the nearby Frandor shopping center. It is full of neat little 1950s homes and so reminds me of the street I grew up on. The house this is in front of was built in 1955, the same year as the stamp, and so most likely the sidewalk was installed by the builders.
So who was J.A. Hicks? Well, one clue is that there was until recently a J.A. Hicks Building in East Lansing. It was a row of brick storefronts downtown, and so of course it was torn down to built a mini-Target and a big pile of lofts. Yet aside from references to the building, I could not turn up anything about J.A. Hicks, except for a few classified ads from someone by that name selling non-sidewalk-related items in the 1910s. So I tried one of my usual strategies, checking Find a Grave to see if I could determine a full name. There I found a John A. Hicks, born in 1872 and buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Lansing. That would make him old enough to be the J.A. Hicks of the classified ads. He was also in the right line of work: Polk’s Michigan State Gazetteer and Business Directory of 1921 has an entry for John A. Hicks that attaches him to a firm called the Hicks-Nichols Co., line of business given as “real est.”
A more or less easterly view on Lasalle Gardens.
But wait: there’s a problem. John A. Hicks died in 1937. Frustratingly, I have not been able to find his obituary, which would answer the question I am left with: did he have a son with the same name or initials? There was certainly some John Hicks around East Lansing in the 1950s, but he seems to have been a merchant. On December 2, 1953, the [Lansing] State Journal reported on a “new innovation in the field of merchandising In East Lansing these days,” which was “the dressing up of the back doors to shops along the city’s main street to attract customers from the city’s new municipal parking lots.” It goes on to say that “John Hicks opened up the back door of his shop when the first municipal lot was completed several years ago.” The January 24, 1956, State Journal article refers to “John Hicks, retiring president of the city’s Merchants Association.”
I tried the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection index, but there wasn’t a single entry for the keyword “Hicks” – this despite the fact that John A. Hicks’s death was considered notable enough to rate an entry in the State Journal‘s article “Chronological List of Important Events in Lansing During Past Year” on New Year’s Day 1938. Under the subheading “Important Deaths of Year” is “Nov. 10 – John A. Hicks, East Lansing business man, succumbed.”
Here is a mystery from the west side of Rumsey Avenue between Jerome and Vine, in the Eastfield neighborhood. The name is illegible but the layout looks like it might be an arch. I don’t recognize the style as matching one of the usual suspects, and it’s also placed strangely, close to vertically centered, but off on the right side of the block.
Looking north on Rumsey, with the stamp bottom right.
This stamp on the east side of South Clemens Avenue between Michigan and Prospect is small and indistinct. I suppose that’s why I have evidently overlooked it many, many times; this is a block I walk often and yet I don’t remember noticing it before.
The date seems to be 1952, but the name is a puzzle. I am pretty confident it is _ _ G L _. I also think the first letter is R, or maybe B, and the second letter looks like an E. What do you think?
Looking south on Clemens. The stamp is on the far end of the nearest full slab, facing the other way.
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.
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.
I’m standing over the stamp here, though it isn’t visible, and facing southwest toward Vine Street.
This tough-to-read stamp is on the west side of North Magnolia Avenue between Vine and Fernwood. I can be fairly confident that the last name is “West,” but what comes before that is illegible. It looks like two initials.
The only lead I have is a series of classified advertisements that ran in the Lansing State Journal in March and May of 1953: “CEMENT – And concrete work… Phone Dick Connick, 97392, or Dick West, 23050.” Searching for references to Dick West in the LSJ are stymied by the existence of a UPI correspondent by that name.
