It’s final grading week and I spent last night up until the early hours grading exams and I’ll probably be doing it again tonight, so here’s a late and low-key update. This is from a driveway apron on the east side of Regent Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. I’ve been able to see the date for a while, but recently the name has also suddenly become more visible. It’s hard to see in this photo, but the last several letters are SSETT indicating it is, unfortunately, just a regular old C. Gossett stamp, similar to very many others on this block.
I’ve never been able to learn anything in my research about C. Gossett or find a single reference to them, despite how many sidewalks they laid in around here in the 1960s.
Now, at the end of a several day run of Hickory Street stamps, I have gotten to my reason for walking that block. Not the stamp itself – E.F. Sheets stamps are common enough and I’ve covered them before in the blog – but the house it’s in front of. To explain why the house is significant, I have to back up a bit.
One of my major finds in the early days of the blog was a 1908 stamp from J.F. Sowa on Prospect Street. As I noted at the time, I was unable to find anything out about Sowa because of the confounding existence of another J.F. Sowa who had authored a notable book in computer science. It turns out there was another reason. I asked my mom if she could use her Ancestry.com membership to make a quick check for a J.F. Sowa in Lansing in the early 1900s. Mom went above and beyond and worked really hard on it, sending me frustrated updates from time to time. Then, at last, in an email titled “BINGO!!!” she reported finding him in the 1910 census: John Fred Sowa, born in 1862 in Prussia, immigrated in 1896, currently living on Hickory Street with his wife Minnie (formally Anna Wilhelmina, according to other sources). Here’s what made the search harder for both of us. Between the 1910 and 1920 census, he changed his surname’s spelling to Sova. This would have been more phonetic (in English) for the Polish and German pronunciation of Sowa. (I also wonder if he might have been the John Sovey mentioned in the famous article about the Bum Walks.)
Speaking of bum walks: sadly, and ironically, the sidewalk in front of Sowa’s house is in bad shape due to having subsided.
I then went to the city’s tax records look at the house it said he lived in, to see if it was still standing. Upon looking at the record, without exaggeration, I squealed with excitement. Someone with the last name Sova still owns the house! I don’t mean to sound like I am prying into the family’s business, but I am truly delighted that his family still has the house, and I wonder if they have any idea that a sidewalk in another neighborhood is still marked with their ancestor’s name. (Based on the names involved and other cursory research, I believe the current owner is a grandson of J.F.) While digging around, Mom communicated with another Ancestry user in Germany who is doing a family tree for Sowa’s wife’s family, and that person mentioned that Sowa showed up in the previous census at a different address on Hickory. He wondered if the street had been renumbered. I have another explanation. The house was only built in 1908, so wherever Sowa was living in 1900 could not have been this house. It seems that Sowa just liked Hickory Street, and evidently the Sovas still do. He must also have been doing well for himself since he seems to have moved into a brand new house.
J.F. Sowa’s house: staid but handsome in its way.
Ever since I found this out I’ve been meaning to make a pilgrimage to see the Sowa/Sova house, but it is just a bit far away for me to walk on my usual routes, so I kept putting it off. I finally stopped there, by car, on my way home from work. I was hoping so much that there would be an old Sowa stamp on this block, better yet in front of the house itself, but I didn’t find one. So I snapped a picture of the oldest stamp in front of the house, which sadly is only this one, from 1963. The house, by the way, is on the south side of Hickory between Euclid and Pennsylvania. It’s on a double lot and seems to have both a garage and a shed; I wonder how old the shed is and whether it might have been used in Sowa’s business.
Sowa/Sova died in 1934 at the age of 74, according to his stone in the Mount Hope Cemetery. It puts his birth year as 1859, which is slightly off the year given in the 1910 census, but I am pretty sure it is the same person.
Not much to say about this one; just continuing to plug away at eventually cataloguing the entirety of Regent Street. This presumed pair of C. Gossett stamps (I know it looks like “O” but elsewhere I have seen clear enough ones to know it’s “C”) is on the west side of the street.
This one’s almost illegible, but I assume it the partner of the other.
Looking south on Regent. The stamps are somewhere in this stretch…
This sharp and tidy Knight & Wilkinson stamp is on the east side of North Magnolia Avenue between Michigan and Vine. There are several on this block.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find anything out about Knight & Wilkinson. In the process of not finding anything, I did turn up a very amusing page in the Lansing State Journal promoting the upcoming 1936 city Soap Box Derby. (It just happened to include a kid named Wilkinson.) It’s aimed at kids and includes a hilarious “how do you do, fellow kids” mix of formal diction and trying-too-hard slang. Regarding a film that entrants would receive a ticket to (“Warner Brothers’ latest smash-hit EARTHWORM TRACTOR”) it says, “Then, too, your jovial friend and another favorite of boys and girls, GUY KIBBEE has a big part… Boy! This will sure be one swell treat!”
Looking north on Magnolia.
So, I have nothing to tell you about Knight & Wilkinson, but I can illustrate the kinds of time-eating digressions I end up in while trying to do research for my entries.
I pass this one a lot and it makes me smile. Why? Well, I just like the fact that they apparently weren’t happy with the first print of their name, and did it a second time. I like really neat stamps but there’s also a kind of charm in mistakes and sloppiness.
Here’s a very worn one on the west side of Regent Street midway between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. The date is definitely 1963, in a big, stylish typeface. It’s always a bit strange when the date is bigger than the name.
As for the name, I believe I can make out “J Wilson.” The name is too common for me to learn much by trying to search the Lansing State Journal, so the contractor will have to remain a mystery for the foreseeable future.
This very worn and craggy stamp is on the east side of Regent Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth (500 block). I read it as L. Miller, 1963. It looks handwritten, and could almost be taken as graffiti, but I lean away from that interpretation because the the placement and name/date format is standard for contractor stamps.
I can find evidence of a contractor and builder named Lloyd Miller in some mid-1950s Lansing State Journal classifieds pages. Miller was based in East Lansing. There also seems to have been a Lloyd Miller real estate agency during the same time period, so it seems like ol’ Lloyd would build you a house or sell you one. My guess is that this is Lloyd Miller’s mark.
Looking north on Regent, with the stamp at the very bottom here.
I walked to the zoo today with my husband, a route that took us over I-496 (the Olds Freeway) via South Clemens Avenue. Clemens “turns into” Aurelius Road on the south side of 496. So most people would say, but technically, it stays itself, just in another place. There is a South Clemens on the other side of 496, detached from the South Clemens that becomes Aurelius. A lot of north-of-496 people probably don’t even realize that. There are what I jokingly call “alternative universe” or “other” versions of several of my familiar neighborhood streets. “The Other Regent,” “The Other Leslie,” and so on.
I had to take this one from further away than usual to get the stamp and the edge of the pavement in at the same time. I usually do it that way to give a sense of where the stamp is located in the slab. This one was usually far from the edge.
Anyway, on the last block of Clemens as it starts to turn into the approach to the overpass, as far south as one can go and still be on the east side (as 496 is the conventional southern edge of the neighborhood), I found this stamp from an unfamiliar contractor. It is on the west side, in the 600 block.
Here’s a closer look at the stamp itself. It’s a rather boring one, but clear.
My attempts to find much of anything out about Michigan Concrete Floors have resulted in a flood of irrelevant search results, for obvious reasons. I did find the existence of a business that incorporated from 1982 to 1987 called Michigan Concrete Floors, Inc., that was based in Eaton Rapids. I’m inclined to think this is probably the same company, although the name is generic enough I can’t be confident. Another Michigan Concrete Floors, Inc., based in Sterling Heights, incorporated and dissolved several times in the 1990s (eventually becoming Imperial Concrete Floors). They don’t share an address or any other details that I can see, so I would guess the Sterling Heights and Eaton Rapids companies were unrelated. There are still more questions than answers for this one and I’m afraid I’ll have to leave it there for now.
Looking south on Clemens as it begins to rise toward the overpass. The stamp is actually behind me.
