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Hickory St., V.D. Minnis, undated

I call this “undated” because I can’t make out a trace of a date marking, but it’s just as likely that it once had a date and it’s gotten worn away, as with other Minnis stamps. Anyway, this stamp reads (barely) “V.D. Minnis MFG Lansing” and is probably from sometime around the teens, since the Saga of the Bum Walks (1914) mentions V.D. Minnis as a city-approved (or disapproved in the case of Alderman Young) sidewalk contractor.

This stamp is on the north side of Hickory Street between Jones and Holmes.

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S. Pennsylvania Ave., Minnis & Ewer, August 1910

Yes, it looks like several Minnis & Ewer stamps I’ve done before, but this one is new, I promise. It’s on the east side of South Pennsylvania Avenue between Prospect and Kalamazoo. There are a lot of Minnis and Ewer stamps with the same date (8-10) in this vicinity.

The northern stamp of the pair.

Actually, there are a pair of them, roughly on either end of a residential lot. At the moment they are copiously decorated with mulberries that have fallen from a tree that shadows the sidewalk.

Facing south from the northern stamp.
The southern stamp.

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Jerome St. (and Ferguson), V.D. Minnis, illegible date

On the southeast corner of Jerome and Ferguson Streets is a pair of V.D. Minnis stamps, around the corner from each other. I used to think all V.D. Minnis stamps were undated, until I found one dated ’07. Still, I took that one to be an odd exception, and the numerous undated ones to be a rule. I am reconsidering that in light of my close inspection of these stamps.

The stamp on Jerome Street. It doesn’t look so bum to me.
OK, so there’s a bit broken off the upper left corner. It’s probably at least 110 years old, I’d say it’s lasted pretty well. (Facing west on Jerome Street toward Ferguson.)

I noticed that both of them have a horizontal line underneath, which corresponds with the hyphen in the 1907 stamp (presumably separating the month and year, though the month had been obliterated from that one). I got down and under the yellow light of a street lamp I looked at it up close, and felt with my fingers. There are depressions on either side of the line, suggesting a worn-away month and year. After a bit more looking and feeling I suddenly thought (though it may be spurred by wishful thinking) that I could make out a very faint year: ’07. I am almost positive the first digit is a zero. It is in front of a 1904 house, so this might be from the first sidewalk that was laid when the subdivision was developed.

The stamp on Ferguson. OK, this one has more issues. Still, I hope I look this good when I’m 114.
A closer look at the Ferguson stamp.

I have a new theory about V.D. Minnis stamps, which is that they aren’t undated. The dates have just worn away in almost all cases. This might seem strange, except that the 1907 stamp on Regent Street shows a date that is shallower and cruder than the name, possibly due to being drawn in by hand.

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The Saga of the “Bum Walks”

I discovered this article a week or so ago, after my husband showed me the Schneeberger & Koort stamp he found, and I immediately bubbled over with absurd delight. Most likely, I will never again find an article about sidewalks that will cause me to giggle and wring my hands excitedly every time I re-read it, as this one has done. I knew this one was too good to leave to the OCR version I turned up at Newspapers.com, but the university where I work has the State Journal on microfilm, so I took the unusual step of frivolously using my library privileges to get a PDF of it delivered to my account. It only adds to my delight that some student worker at my university library had to crank through microfilm finding this for me.

The article is an August 11, 1914, State Journal account of a Lansing city council dust-up. One reason it is such a gem is that it references names that have previously appeared here in the blog: not just the newly-discovered Schneeberger & Koort, but my familiar old favorite V.D. Minnis. The drama also involves John Sovey, described as “a former cement contractor.” I find John Sovey’s name suspiciously similar to that of J.F. (John Fred) Sowa. I know that Sowa’s family later changed its surname to Sova, probably because it was already pronoucned that way and they wanted it to be phonetic in English. The Sowa stamp I know of is dated 1908 which would make the dates plausible for Sowa to be a “former cement contractor” by 1914. I wonder if John Sovey is the same person as John Sowa/Sova.

I could have sworn that I had referenced brick sellers Young Brothers and Daley in the blog before, but a search shows me to be mistaken. I know I did some research on them, perhaps with the intention of photographing a stamp in front of their business at some point. They are still around and in the same location near the railroad tracks in downtown Lansing.

The city council dispute described in the report involves, in the Journal reporter’s words, “a wordy tilt between Aldermen Young and McKinley over the sidewalk construction contract.” The sparring apparently started with Alderman McKinley bringing out photographs of broken sidewalks, following up on a charge he laid the previous week that “both Young Brothers and Daley and Alderman McKale had laid a lot of ‘bum’ walk in the city” (emphasis and delight all mine). Alderman Young is described as having an interest in Young Brothers Realty, which I assume is somehow connected to Young Brothers and Daley. McKale accuses Young Brothers Realty of being the cause of 87 broken sections of sidewalk in just two blocks of a subdivision they developed. These bum sidewalks were built by Schneeberger and Koort, so Alderman Young tries to shift the blame to the contractors.

Young then tries for a turnabout. The story gets a little confusing here, but if I am understanding Young correctly, McKinley has previously stated that sidewalk-fan-favorite V.D. Minnis is the only capable sidewalk contractor, yet the city has allowed Minnis to subcontract his city-contracted sidewalk work to less reputable contractors at a profit of two cents per foot. Say it ain’t so, Verner!

The entire article is a delight from beginning to end, including some wonderful verbatim banter between the aldermen. I can’t do justice to all of it in summary, so I am just going to reproduce it below under the sincere belief that it is no longer under copyright protection. I’ll end by giving a well-deserved spotlight to one more quotation, then please, go read the rest of the article.

“You violated the ordinance, undoubtedly, and failed to put your name upon the walks,” replied Alderman McKinley. “Your name is not upon the walk in the photograph.”

Alderman McKale did not deny the charge.

For shame!

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Shepard St., V.D. Minnis, undated

This worn V.D. Minnis stamp is on the west side of Shepard Street between Stanley Court and Kalamazoo. Unfortunately, like almost all V.D. Minnis stamps (here is a notable exception) it is undated.

The stamp is close to centered in the slab, unusually.
The same stamp, a little closer for detail.
Looking south on Shepard; this is just a house or two south of Stanley Court.

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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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V.D. Minnis, Prospect St., undated

This V.D. Minnis stamp is on the north side of Prospect Street between Holmes and Jones. Unfortunately, as with Minnis and Ewer, stamps from Minnis are undated. I’m curious whether Minnis started out solo and then joined Ewer, or whether the two started out together and then split. Their stamps look quite old, as I noted in my previous entry on Minnis and Ewer, and now I have further reason to believe that they must be.

That further reason is the entry I have found for Verner D. Minnis at Find A Grave. Some helpful person has done a bit of genealogy on the Minnis family and has a photograph of Verner’s grave at Mount Hope Cemetery, unless there was some other Verner D. Minnis in Lansing during this time period. If the Verner of the gravestone had any children, they don’t know of them. Sadly, he died in 1919 at the age of 41 or 42, of “pneumonia and toxemia” if I am deciphering the somewhat blurry death certificate correctly.

Find A Grave invites visitors to leave memories of departed people there. Do you think I should share my scant knowledge of his sidewalk business? Let me know in the comments. (Comments are enabled! You do have to click on the specific post from the front page to see them, which is perhaps not ideal.)