Rolling Brook Ln., East Lansing, C.E. Schneider, 1968

Apologies for missing my usual Monday entry this week. It’s midterm grading season and I’m run ragged, which also accounts for why this post is coming at 3:30 in the morning.

Continuing with last week’s exploration of the Pinecrest neighborhood near Lake Lansing and Coolidge, I tried walking further south on the curiously dead-ended street. I discovered its name to be Rollingbrook Lane, or so I thought based on the street sign, which appears to render it as one (cramped) word. Google Maps says it is two words and so does the city’s online property database. I was hoping to find some older and possibly unusual stamps. I knew the 1980s and 2000s stamps I had been finding could not date to the development of the subdivision, since the houses had a 1960s look to them.

Once I got south of Red Leaf Lane, I found a stamp of the appropriate vintage on the west side of the street. It’s hard to read but I recognize it as a C.E. Schneider stamp. I find a lot of those from right around this same year, 1968, which is also the year of the house this is in front of. I always like when I find a stamp of the same date as the building it’s in front of, suggesting it dates to the original construction. Still, I continued walking in hope of finding a new-to-me stamp.

Prospect St., C.E. Schneider, undated

C.E. Schneider is a contractor I haven’t seen before, or at least haven’t taken notice of. This pair of stamps is on the north side of Prospect between Holmes and Virginia. Unfortunately, neither one is dated.

The eastern stamp.

The only reference I can find to C.E. Schneider as a contractor is a brief obituary for Clyde Schneider (1920-2000) which states that he was “Owner and Operator of C.E. Schneider and Sons Cement Contractor.” It also says that he had been a resident of Mount Pleasant since 1998. Schneider is buried in DeWitt according to Find A Grave, so he might have been a DeWitt native. I would guess that C.E. Schneider and Sons was a metro Lansing business. I haven’t found out anything else about the company that would allow me to narrow down when the stamp could have been from.

The western stamp.