I found another J.F. Sowa stamp! I could hardly believe it, because it turned up in an area that I walk to all the time, on the west side of Bingham Street between Prospect and Kalamazoo. This is near the old fire station, which is one of my frequent destinations. As amazing as it seems to me, I must not have walked this side of the block south of Prospect before. I most often walk to the fire station by going west along Prospect Street, then head back home by either doubling back on Prospect or by going up Bingham to Eureka and turning around there. On this occasion, as there was a pretty sunset when I set out, I decided to take Kalamazoo west, which offers a better view of the sky. That resulted in my finding this stamp that has been hiding under my nose. When I got home I had to check my spreadsheet three times to be sure I had not catalogued this one before.
This one is exciting not just because of the early date, but because J.F. Sowa is one of the early contractors about whom I have been able to find the most information. He also is possibly referenced in the famous Saga of the Bum Walks. This stamp dates just two months after the only other one I have found (which is on Prospect near Jones), but it’s slightly different: the “C” marked between the name and date is not present on the earlier stamp.
Sad to say, it’s not in the best shape, though I’m happy it seems to have been repaired instead of replaced relatively recently.
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.
I had an exciting find tonight: another stamp from the aughts. I’m not sure how I haven’t noticed it before, since it’s quite a clear one and I often walk this street; I can only guess that it means I usually walk on the other side. It is on the north side of Prospect Street between Jones and Holmes (just east of Jones).
Trying to find out anything at all about the J.F. Sowa responsible for this stamp has been foiled by the fact that a person with the same leading initials and last name is an important personage in computer science. If I try for “J.F. Sowa” and “Lansing,” I get a lot of articles that include citations to Sowa alongside citations to other authors who happened to publish with Michigan State University Press. Adding “concrete” or “cement” to the name does not help, for reasons I will leave as an exercise to the reader. If I exclude the word “conceptual” in order to filter out results that refer to Sowa’s most cited book, Conceptual Structures, it does cut the results down to a handful, but none of what’s left is useful.
The J.F. Sowa stamp in context, looking west on Prospect Street.
The slab is in rough shape, covered in spidery cracks. Still, it’s impressive for it to have survived 112 years, and I think it is in the best condition of the pre-1910 stamps I have found. It looks to have received a neat patch at some point, which appeals to the part of me that enjoys darning socks.
Update 10/25/21: I learned a bit about J.F. Sowa with help from my mom, and wrote an update.
