Here is a nice East Jordan Iron Works water utility cover from the north side of Grand River Avenue just west of the mall. I wondered if the tree by the river was from the seal of Meridian Township, but no, it appears that their seal depicts a log cabin and a tipi.
I saw this utility cover depicting the seal of the city of Mount Pleasant on a recent walk there. As usual, it’s from the East Jordan Iron Works.
I failed to note the exact location, but it is somewhere on South Stockman Road near Sunset.
This is a rather plain East Jordan Iron Works manhole cover, at a property on the west side of South Clemens Avenue between Prospect and Michigan. What’s odd about it, and piqued my interest, is that it’s situated within someone’s front walk. In fact, the walk seems to widen there to accommodate it.
I walked the Silver Bells in the City 5K the morning after Silver Bells (Lansing’s annual holiday night parade) and afterward on the way back to my car I snapped this photo of a nice sewer grate – actually a storm drain, since Lansing did a huge project to separate their sanitary sewer from the stormwater drains around the time I moved to Lansing. I remember being unreasonably annoyed by it at the time, since it resulted in my closest bus stop being closed for a long time, and for a portion of that the second closest bus stop too, when I did most of my daily travel by bus. Also during that time the closest USPS mailbox to my house disappeared and was never put back when the construction was over. But, of course, I look back on it now and realize that my long walks were a small price to pay for the great environmental benefits of the sewer separation. I just wonder how people less able bodied than I, or with less free time to spend on walks, dealt with the loss of bus service.
I like the detailed fish (a trout, maybe) that serves to remind one of the harm done by dumping poison into the drain. There is also a small one at the bottom of the grate. This is the work of the East Jordan Iron Works, which you can read more about in a previous entry.
This drain is on the south side of West Michigan Avenue, at the southwest corner of Michigan and South Washington Square. I remember when this was just an intersection, but now it’s a traffic circle, and they put these giant ornaments (supplied by Bronner’s, the famed Christmas store in Frankenmuth) in the middle of it each year before Silver Bells.
This manhole cover is in the sidewalk (if you can call that asphalt mess a sidewalk) that accompanies North Aurelius Road as it climbs over the railroad tracks. It’s on the west side of the street, roughly between Walsh and Perkins.
All over Michigan, when you see a manhole cover or a sewer grate, the odds are good that it will display the name of the East Jordan Iron Works. They were founded in 1883 as the Round and Malpass Foundry and made cast iron parts for the lumber industry, ships, machinery, agricultural equipment, and railroads. East Jordan is in the northwest of Michigan, so the connection with the lumber industry is unsurprising. In 1885 their name changed to the East Jordan Iron Works. Since 2012, they call themselves just plain “EJ,” which I find a little disappointing. Their corporate headquarters are still in East Jordan, but they are now a multinational company, having acquired a lot of other foundries over the years. In 2017 they built a new foundry after almost 135 years in their original location, which is amazing. Happily for the town, I’m sure, they built the new one just 14 miles away from the original.
EJ has a detailed company history and timeline on its Web site. I wish all companies did this.
