THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR Bulletin of The Sebewa Center Association,
August, 1981, Volume 17, Number 1.  Submitted with written permission of current Editor Grayden D. Slowins:

SURNAME LENON

MY EXPERIENCES IN THE SUNFIELD ELEVATOR by Theo Lenon

As I try to put these ideas and thoughts together after a lifetime in Sunfield in business here it seems as if my mind is so full of events and interactions with people and business that everything else is crowded out.  I cannot divorce myself from the events and if it sounds a little like I’m bragging, take the advice of a sign I saw recently that said, “All right, let him go, just so he doesn’t lie about me.”

How did I get into this town and into the elevator business?  It is the little things that pop up in your life that change the whole course of events.  One Sunday late in the winter I came over to my father’s place out south of town.  I was lying on the floor back of the stove as kids used to do it.  That was the best place in the house.  I picked up the Sunfield Sentinel for which I have ever been grateful, for it told that Smith Bros. had bought out George Triphagen’s elevator down here.  The thought flashed across my mind, “Maybe I could get a job up there.”

I had just lived through a very hard winter on the income of three or four cows.  Mrs. Lenon had been sick all winter and we had a little boy about a year and a half old.  Had I admitted it, I was as flat broke as you could possibly be.  I said to my father, after reading that, “I’ve a notion to go over and see if I could get a job working in the elevator”.  I would go over to see George Smith at Woodbury, one of the Smith brothers.  Dad said, “Why don’t you do it?”  So the next morning I went to see George.

George said to me after we had talked a little bit, “I’m coming down Saturday of this week to Caucus”.  I met him in the street between the bank and the drugstore.  He had been over and talked with Griff Weippert at the bank.  Griff had told him that he thought I was a pretty good sort of a fellow.  I hired out to him right then for three months, April 1 to July 1 at $18 a week.  That was the start of it.

We opened the elevator April 1, 1922.  The day was a son-of-a-gun.  We moved into town with horses and wagons into the house across from where Dr. Berg lives now.  There had been an ice storm with broken tree branches and tangled telephone wires---a most miserable day.

Bright and early I walked down to the elevator to meet the man I was to work for.  The elevator was not opened up yet.  I walked back over to the pool room, waiting for the man who was to be my boss.  Soon a man came walking down across there, carrying a grip in his hand.  I thought that this must be the man.  I followed along but the man kept walking past the elevator and started scaling lumber from a big pile down that way.  After a while the eight o’clock train came in.  Getting off the train was Leo Hynes, George Smith, David Smith Sr. and Elwin Dell.

They spotted in a carload of cement at the elevator.  My first job was helping the unloading of those 94# bags of cement.  We got it unloaded by eleven o’clock and they got on the eleven o’clock train and went back to Woodbury.  The man appointed manager was Ezra Dell, an old hand in the elevator business.

The railroad had come through Sunfield in 1888 and about 1895 a man by the name of Frank Nims had built the elevator and had John Palmer working for him.  John Palmer was one of the slowest men who ever walked.  He was a large man with a heart as big as an elephant and everybody took advantage of him.  Palmer worked for Mins for several years.  Nims wanted to sell out and he did so to a co-op of people around town with John Palmer as manager.  It lasted about a year and a half before they went broke.  The co-op sold the elevator to George Triphagen.

John Palmer promptly ruined Triphagen.  Triphagen was a big pussy man and an awful windy talker---I guess I followed him that way.  Palmer opened a sort of an elevator in a kind of a warehouse building at the west end of Main Street.  He would stop every load of grain coming into town and overbid the market.  Then he often gave a check with no money in the bank.  Soon after Smith Bros. bought the elevator, Palmer’s building burned down.  John Palmer’s son had the record of enlisting in the army in WWI at the age of twelve.  He had lied about his age when he enlisted at Grand Rapids.  About the time he was scheduled to go oversees, Palmer got the boy released.  There was a great deal of publicity about it.

My first customer at the elevator was Stub Walsh.  He bought a sack of flour and paid cash.  The second customer was Lon Walker.  He bought a sack of timothy seed and had it charged.  One afternoon Ezra Dell went to Lansing on business and left me in charge of the elevator.  I sat on the porch all afternoon, answered the phone once and sold 10 cents worth of bug poison for potato bugs.  That is about as low as you can go in business.

I want to comment about the Smith Brothers, David Smith and George Smith.  I always had a tremendous amount of respect for David Smith.  He was the kindliest man and the best man with his employees that ever lived.  He had one bad habit.  I got wise to that right away.  If I went home at noon and was feeling kind of dozy from maybe running around too much the night before, I’d tell the boys I would lay in for a nap of about an hour but if Mr. Smith called up they were to tell him that I had said I was going out in the country.  I did not want him to be worrying about my health.  Mr. Smith would say, “Now, Theo, don’t work so hard”.

He had a great philosophy and it is as true as can be.  When I would have any troubles I would call Dave Sr. and I would explain to him what my problem was.  He always had the same answer.  A lot of people would give you a long, windy solution.  He would always say, “Well, Theo, I think you had just do the best you can with it”.  That has proved to be the best solution to most problems.

Dave Smith gave me my start in the elevator business.  After the depression the Velte part of Smith Bros. Velte stock became for sale.  Mr. Smith said, “I felt that you should have some stock in the company”.  I told him I did not have any money to buy it.  The Velte shares were offered at $6 a share.  He said, “I’d like to have you get a hundred shares.  We’ll go down to the bank and leave the hundred shares right there and I’ll sign your note for $600 and you can work and pay it off as you can”.  That was what I did over a year or two.  That was looking after my interests.  That was the type of fellow he was.

George Smith was another character.  He was almost entirely dependent on his brother, David.  I remember one thing that he told me that stood by me a long time.  A few days after we had opened the Sunfield elevator, George came walking in one morning while I was weighing some grain in the hopper scale that is still in the elevator.  He asked how the scale worked and I showed him.  He said, “Theo, if there is ever any question of the weight, always give the farmer the benefit of the doubt.”

When Smith Bros. bought the elevator from George Triphagen they paid $8 thousand.  It had a capacity of about 4,000 bushels.  For the $8 thousand there was no coal yard, no feed mill, no lumber yard---just the bare elevator.  It was operated by a horse driven sweep for power.  It now has an 850,000 bushel capacity and that is increasing.  Not a building that was there when I started working is left there now.

We got in a load or two of beans there in the spring and we decided we would hand pick them out.  From the town we got four women to pick beans.  I remember Maggie Lyons, Beckie Meyers, Minnie Franks and her daughter, Lillian.  In the fall we bought quite a lot of beans and put on a full force of 16 women picking beans.  Triphagen had installed a big gasoline engine.  Every time we started up to take in three or four bags of grain we had to climb up on the big flywheels and bring it back against compression and then touch off the igniter and away it would go with a racket that let everybody in town know that we were working.

When the depression came along, women were crying for jobs.  I told Mr. Smith that we had a big bean crop and a large labor supply---a lot of women want to pick beans.  (Bean picking was sorting out the dirt and other foreign particles as they passed in front of the operator on a canvas belt).  I suggested that we start two shifts from 8 to 4 and from 4 to midnight.  The women made from $1.50 to $2.00 a day.  They were tickled to get that for it meant a lot to them then.

After the C. K. & S. Railroad discontinued we moved the Coats Grove elevator to Sunfield.  A man from Lansing did the moving.  We installed a modern feed mill in that elevator.  I had been general manager of the company for a period after David Smith’s death.  When Larry Smith came back from his Army service he was ready to get into the elevator business.  He became the manager of the elevator in Lake Odessa.  The company wanted Hugo Hammerslag and I to either buy the business or sell our interest to them.  I suggested that we divide the company.  Hugo was a first class negotiator.  He made a deal in which Smith Bros. would continue in Lake Odessa and he and I would organize a new company to operate as the Sunfield Farmers Elevator Co.  That was in the early 1940’s.  Prior to that the firm had purchased the lumberyard and we had the oil distribution concession.  I could see that coal was giving way to oil.  Hugo, my son, Richard and I owned the common stock of the new company.  We had seven preferred stockholders.  They were Roy Pumfrey, Harold Bishop, Kyle Stambaugh, Walter Brown, Alton Gunn and John Bosworth.

We operated eighteen or twenty years as the Sunfield Farmers Elevator Co.  Meantime we built several more storage silos and installed the dryer.  The morning after election day when Eisenhower was elected president, our elevator that had been moved from Coats Grove burned.  That was 1952.  Then we built a new elevator to replace it with a modern feed mill.  It was about that time that we split the company.  We had a congenial arrangement with Smith Bros. and things went fine between us.

I found out a long time ago that as farming goes, so goes the grain elevator business.  Larry Smith and I frequently discussed the business over breakfast coffee.  He suggested that someday the business should again go under one management.  Once he asked me what would be a satisfactory figure for the purchase of the Sunfield Farmers Elevator business.  I thought for a while, pulled out a napkin and gave him a figure.  I said I thought I could persuade Mr. Hammerslag and Richard to sell at that price.  Larry asked for two or three days to think it over.  In a few days, he said “we are going to take it”.

I have been asked many times to explain that move.  We wer not in any financial stress at that time though we were not making any big money either.  I was 65 years old and I was scared that I might become incapacitated with a stroke or heart attack and in the settlement, some of my friends who have trusted me over a long period of years might have gotten hurt.  I think I lost my nerve and that was the reason I sold back to Smith Bros.

Back when I started working for Mr. Smith and at best for around $23 a week as the second man in charge, I found that some men from this area were going to Grand Rapids working on the railroad, making up to $175 a month.  Every time they were back in town they would stop in and tell me what they were doing and the money they were making.  Finally I went to Grand Rapids and applied for a railroad job.  They said “Come back in May and we can probably put you on as a brakeman.  I told Ezra Dell about it.  He said “I wouldn’t do that! In just a few months now I am going to quite and I am going to recommend you for the manager’s job.”  Ezra had offered to quit the previous year but Mr. Smith had persuaded him to stay another year so that I would have more elevator experience before the job was offered to me.  I decided I would rather be the boss of Sunfield’s Elevator than to be a brakeman on the railroad.

In 1945 or ’50 there was an elevator for sale in Fowlerville and I went down to look over the situation.  The grapevine spread it around that I was going to quit and buy an elevator.  At that time business was not good and farmers were not making any money.  David Smith drove to Sunfield to see me to discuss the rumor he had heard.  He was fond of me and at the thought of my leaving, some tears ran down his cheeks.  I said “Dave, I’ll stay as long as you do”.  He lived some tens years after that and was 86 when he died.  Had I gone to Fowlerville that would have been a mistake.

The first beans we bought were from Cramer Bros. from one of the farms that Ken Smith now owns.  I remember those beautiful beans in the latter part of August.  The beans sold for $5 per cwt and farmers thought they were in heaven with that price.  We used to load 400 bags of beans to a carload.  Now they load a thousand.  After the depression we had poor land in this area as compared to what we have today.  Farmers worked the land when it was too wet and with poor machinery.  Very little fertilizer was used.  In one year we took in 35,000 bushels of wheat.  That would be half a day’s run now.  One year we took in 3,500 bushels in one day.  Mr. Smith called me and asked where we got all that wheat.  20 bushels of wheat and 50 bushels of shelled corn to the acre was about par for the course then.  One year we sold more wheat back to the farmers (government wheat) for feed than we had taken in at harvest.  I have bought wheat in my time for as little as 35 cents a bushel and for as much as $6.50.  Oats have sold for 10 cents a bushel and beans for 90 cents a hundred.  Wool has been as low as 8 cents a pound.

I remember when wool was so cheap that Loren Thorp decided he would not shear his sheep at 8 cents.  He let the flock go through the season and the next year he had double the weight of wool and the price had gone to 15 cents, so he won on that one.  Our bean business increased from 15,000 bushels to 365,000 bushels in a period of 20-25 years.  Better farming methods made possible the higher production.  In the old days we didn’t even buy corn.  That market has moved up to half a million bushels.  In those early days we sold one carload of fertilizer in the spring and our competitors sold a carload.  In the fall we sold 75 tons or 5 carloads.  The farmers did not sow fertilizer in the spring.  That compares to the thousands of tons of fertilizer that are used in this area now.

If I had not made mistakes I might be well to do today.  The elevator business was poor and I wanted to get into something where my competitors were not chewing at me all the time.  So I opened the pig hatchery out south of town.  John Lich Sr. warned me not to do that.  He said “You can’t make that work”.  I wouldn’t listen.  My competitors had said that was the best idea ever and asked why they had not thought about it first.  Later I wished they had.  We operated for a while and seemed to be going all right but all at once I noticed we were losing money.  Hogs were cheap and feed was high.  Our books showed that we were losing $500 a week.  That is enough to tie a knot in a small business.  We held a board meeting and Mr. Hammerslag asked what I proposed to do about such losses.  I said we should sell the hogs and take our losses.  Hugo offered a motion to do just that and never mentioned it again.  If I had listened to John Lich it would not have been so bad.

Another time after we had put the new bean plant down there I got it in my head that I wanted to handle red kidney beans.  So we started to buy red kidneys.  Of all the troubles you could get into, we had them.  It was a wet fall, the farmers threshed the beans wet and the dirt stuck to the beans and we couldn’t get the dirt off.  Every time we tried to do anything with them they split.  From my best estimate we lost $30,000 in two years from that deal.  Before I got into that, Eldon Post, who was a smart operator at Charlotte, had said when we were talking about red kidneys, “It will not work.  You can’t handle those colored beans in your plant.  You have to have a separate plant with special handling”.  He had tried it and quit.  But I thought I knew it all.

A grain elevator man can influence the community he lives in.  I worked out some ideas over a period of time and it pleases me to say that some of those ideas made the farmers more money than the company ever made.

Larry Smith started out in the fertilizer business in a big way at Woodbury and pushed the use of anhydrous ammonia.  That program made the farmers a lot more money than he ever made for himself.  I’m sure he made a profit out of the amount of money added to the farmers’ revenue was a lot more.  That is what I mean by the right type of elevator management in the community doing a tremendous amount for the farmers.  Back years ago the wheat raised around here was the poorest stuff, mixed varieties and some of it half chess, quack grass seed and cockle.  Now nobody sees any cockle.  I stumbled on the idea that we could bring in certified wheat seed and improve the crop.  Farmers were reluctant to buy the high priced seed wheat and would plant whatever was available.  I found that I could import certified seed from Canada at a price that would allow me to trade the certified seed with the farmer.  The first year I sold 3,200 bushels of treated certified seed.  I had a little speech I made to farmers about using this better seed.  At the time my daughter was working in the office and learned the pitch.  When she was home in the evening, working around the kitchen she would recite the speech.  I can see her doing that yet.  The next year we sold 11,000 bushels of certified seed.  Instead of raising 20 bushels per acre, wheat yields have gone up to 50, 60 or 70 per acre.

Another time the price of wheat went up to $1.72 and nobody thought it would go down.  We made a deal with the bank where if the farmer wanted to hold his wheat for a better price the bank would loan a dollar and a half and the farmer could bring his receipt and get that money.  A lot of them did it.  The price of wheat started down and the farmers were paying interest and storage.  Several of them sold out at 85 cents a bushel.  I found out a long time ago that greed causes a lot of losses.

I would like to speak a good word for the people who worked for me all down through the years.  All of them were good people.

Mr. Hammerslag and I had an argument that I would not speculate on the Board of Trade with any of the company money and anything along that line would be done on our own.  Sometimes two or three of us would go in together for a little market speculation.  I think it always turned out the same---we lost money.  I was in on the wheat market and I was making money really fast and the price was going up.  Finally I took my profits and got out.  But the think is addictive.  After a bit I got it in my head I’d like to buy about 20 thousand bushels of wheat and carry it along for a year and I can tell you what happened.  It went down a dollar a bushel and I was out $20,000.  I vowed I would never try it again.

As I see it the next big crisis in this country is going to be over water.  Millions of acres in the West have been broken up and put into crops where nature never intended they should be.  Water is being consumed as if it were going out of style and that is faster than it can be replenished.  When the crunch comes, Michigan, with the Great Lakes, should be in an advantageous position.

Over the years I have developed some ideas about doing business, things that have stood me in good stead.  It has always seemed to me that the more one does for others, the more ones own income is likely to be.  Maybe that is the biblical reference of casting your bread upon the waters.

We are constantly surrounded with opportunities but we must have the vision to recognize the opportunity and the courage to accept them.  Know what you are doing all the time and you will not make many mistakes.  Too often we add two and two and come up with the answer of three or five.

In working for the other fellow I have found that it pays to do a little more than is expected.  Recognition will follow.  I have told young people that when applying for a job that they should be well barbered.  With a haircut and a shave you are half dressed up.  I have never taken a customer to the bar.  If you do that you will have lost control.

Never lie to a customer or shade the truth.  It is all right to windjammer around and have fun with customers but when the chips are down and you are doing business, make your word good even when it may cost plenty.

About 25 or 30 years ago I decided I wanted to go out and see the world.  I never took a trip in my life but what I felt it furthered my education.  I felt that a good trip was as good as a year in college.  I never pick up a newspaper but what I see a picture or read about places where I have been.  The hatred of the peoples for each other in the Near East is not matched anywhere in the world.

We had an auditor from Grand Rapids who had traveled a lot and every time he came in to do some work for us, he would tell me about trips he had taken.  Also I talked a lot with Eldon Post, who was a widely traveled man and through these men I got the fever.  It is something like deer hunting.  When you get back you say you will not do it again.  But then you talk about it after a while you get the fever and you find it is addictive.                 The End

SURNAME JOYNT

MEET YOUR NEIGHBOR---JOHN JOYNT

That was the headline of a feature story of the RED ROCK NEWS of Sedona, Arizona in late April.

People of Sebewa might raise an eyebrow of question at that until they remember that Wesley Joynt was named after his father and began using that name when he left this community.

At age 75 this year, he surprised his neighbors in Sedona by taking a 5,000 mile motor bike ride to Florida to visit his sister and husband, Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Gierman in Bradenton.  The previous September he had made a similar trip to Oregon.

Wes, as we knew him, came to Sebewa with his parents, brothers and sisters around 1912 from Hope, a tiny town near Midland.  They lived on the “Cloverdale Farm” as John had proudly lettered it on his round roofed barn, the old “Greiner Place” on Bippley Road near Sunfield Road.  That move added four pupils to Mrs. Jennie Weippert’s school enrollment at District #4, Sebewa Center.

After Sunfield High School Wes did a stint at General Motors Technical School and then worked at Oldsmobile.  In 1935 after a boyhood of lung difficulties he had a “massive lung hemorrhage” and as soon as he was able, left for the more favorable Arizona climate.

At Tucson he says “I just stumbled into the building business”.  He built a house he said he was too poor to own, so he sold it and built another and soon found himself in the construction business.

During World War II he built three prison camps.  Brothers William and Gerald joined him for a while before leaving for other business interests.  In 1937 he bought a run down cattle ranch but kept to his primary interest in motors.  He owned and flew an airplane, ran a stock car race track in Tucson, helped sponsor the Tucson soap box derby for three years.

A few years ago he and his wife, Isabel, owned a sailboat they planned to use for a trip from California to the West Indes.  Untimely beaching of the boat foiled those plans and a European trip was substituted.  In Europe they bought a VW Camper and leisurely visited most of the western European countries from Portugal to Lappland, traveling about 50,000 miles.

After returning to Sedona, Wes reentered construction and with his brother-in-law, Gary Graham, built 25 apartments.  For 5 ½ years he was manager for Pima Savings in Sedona.  Things seem not to stand still when John Wesley Joynt has a hand in them.

Over the years he has made occasional visits back to Sebewa.  William Joynt has died.  Gerald Joynt lives in Birmingham, Michigan and Muriel and Elmer Gierman spend nine months of the year at their home in Bradenton, Florida and three months at St. Louis, Michigan near the home of their daughter, Mrs. Richard Green.

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR - Bulletin of The Sebewa Center Association;
Volume 17, October 1981, Number 2. Submitted with written permission of current editor, Grayden D. Slowins

BUSINESS AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE IN WOODBURY IN THE MIDDLE TWENTIES By ViVerne Pierce - According to stories told me as a youngster by my parents and grandparents, Woodbury at about the time of 1900 to 1910 must have been a bustling thriving community, due mostly to the fact that two railroads met there. The business places consisted of an elevator, one or two sawmills, two cider mills, stockyards, barbershop and poolroom, two or three saloons, one of which usually burned down every two to three months for "insurance purposes", Grandpa Wells used to say. As I was born in 1919, I don't remember a lot of these places but I will endeavor to tell what was there in the twenties---places actually in business and buildings that were vacant.

First, there was the elevator owned by Smith Bros. & Velte. A lumber yard and coal yard in conjunction made this a very busy place. But the part I remember best was the “bean room”. This was where the ladies in town picked up their pin money or better known then as ‘bean money”. They sat at a long canvas belt on which white navy beans were run. They had to pick out cull beans, stones and other trash and were paid by the pound for what they removed. This room was located on the second floor of the elevator with a potbellied stove in it. Each lady had her own chair with her own cushion for comfort. The most uncomfortable part of the job was the restroom accommodation located downstairs, about 50 yards from the door. It was the traditional three-holer and always was well supplied with Sears Roebuck catalogs. It wasn’t heated, so in winter when most of the beans were being picked, Mr. Smith did not have to worry about the ladies not putting in a good day’s work. The bean room was the noisiest place in the elevator, what with 15 or 20 women all talking at once. This was the place where dresses were made and remade, hats decorated and redecorated, family problems aired and re-aired and, yes, babies born and reborn---but they got the beans picked.

The stockyards were a most interesting place for a boy. Allen Behler used to ship cattle from Woodbury, cattle he had purchased from farmers in the surrounding area. I remember Andy Dirr used to ship from there also and Ralph, “Rube”, Jordan shipped a few loads in later years. Most of the hogs around the area were taken to Jake Miller’s slaughterhouse where he did custom butchering or would buy the animals from the farmer and then feed and fatten them for butchering later. When a person took a hog to Jake Miller he got everything back but the squeal. His wife, Lillie, would render the lard, make headcheese, clean and wash the intestines to be stuffed with sausage, smoke hams and do anything else that could be done to utilize every pound of the animal.

John Gerlinger had a woodworking shop located in an old schoolhouse (Gerlinger School) that he had moved to town. He powered the big wood lathe with an old stationary gasoline engine. He would make whippletrees, eveners, wagon tongues and ladders for people in and around Woodbury. He made me my first fall bat and it was my treasured possession for many years even though it was not used very much. It was so long and so heavy that even Pete Rose would have had trouble swinging it.

Across the street, I can just remember a vacant building that had housed Miller’s livery stable. This was run by Jake and Eli Miller and my Grandma Katie Pierce’s folks. They lived overhead and kept the horses and buggies down below. This building was torn down and Forrest DeCamp built his garage there. The garage was built of cement blocks and Forrest made every block by hand. He purchased a form to make the blocks and every night after he had already put in a day’s work at his old garage, he would hand mix gravel and cement and press out cement blocks. It took him quite a while to complete it, but the building stands where Tom Livermore now has his machine shop.

The other old livery barn was owned by my father and grandfather and from here they operated a poultry and egg business. It was reported at one time to have been the largest poultry business in Western Michigan. I remember many times in the spring when they could not buy enough chickens here in Michigan to supply their dressed poultry orders in the cities, they were forced to send trucks into southern Ohio and even Kentucky to bring back poultry. Oftentimes it was necessary to hire between 50 and 60 men and women at holiday time and work around the clock to process their orders.

Then there was the old blacksmith shop, which was run by a man named John Easley. (This was later purchased by my father and he built a gas station and grocery store on the site in 1938). The shop was located behind our home and, naturally, I spent a lot of time there. I marveled at how such a small man could manhandle those big draft horses when sizing and nailing shoes to their hooves. Another thrill for me was to see red hot steel pulled from the forge and with a few well placed blows from his hammer with a shower of red hot sparks, form a wagon wheel or countless other things the farmers of the area needed.

Over on the northeast corner of Kalamazoo and Walnut Streets stood an old two storied wood frame building that housed Forrest DeCamp’s first garage. Earlier it had been a grocery store owned by the Van Houten family. On the northwest corner was Orley Middaugh’s pool room and barbershop. Needless to say, my folks didn’t let me hang around there as a child---except to have my hair cut---but I do remember the magnificent back bar and mirrors, made of fine grained oak and varnished with glasslike finish, and of Orley spinning me around in the barber chair a few times when he had finished my haircut.

On the southwest corner of the same two streets stood the old hotel, a very impressive 2 ½ story cement block building with slate shingles. It was never used for a hotel in my lifetime but one section was used once a month when the Ladies Aid Society put on their family style dinners. Boy! What a meal they served! Then after dinner they had a quilting bee. Harlan Sweitzer (father of Mrs. Lester Lake) used to rent some of the building to itinerant Mexican families that came up from Texas and Mexico to work in the beet fields. The Mexican children couldn’t speak much English and I couldn’t speak any Spanish, but somehow, we made our thoughts known and spent many happy hours playing together. It was in this hotel building that Cobby and I perfected our basketball prowess. We nailed a peach hamper to the wall in the dining room and though the ceiling wasn’t too high, we would shoot baskets hour on end. In its heyday it was a very busy place, what with all the drummers (salesmen) using it as a central location and branching out to other small towns to sell their wares and then getting on the Pere Marquette or the C. K. & S. and move to another location.

Mr. Sweitzer also owned the old implement store, a two story wood frame building just south of the hotel. It was vacant when I was a young boy and naturally I thoroughly explored it. Irol Wells and Kenneth Geisel would hide in the upstairs part of the building. When I began looking for them, they would lean out the upstairs windows and shoot their BB guns onto the sidewalk so that the BB’s would ricochet up onto my legs. It stung worse than a bee sting. They were quick to hide from me again because my temper made up for my lack of size.

On the corner was Horn’s store, which had formerly been occupied by Dr. Loughlin (Gaylord Loughlin’s father). It was the usual small town general store with groceries, drygoods, hardware, etc. But the think I remember best was the horseshoe pitching courts at the side of the store. Cobby and I had the opportunity to practice days on end and when the men in town could congregate at the store for an evening of competition, Cobby and I would invariably beat them all, until my father told me that it was enough that I pitch in the daytime, since most of the men did not care to be beaten by a couple of kids all the time.

The last place of business I will describe was the W. R. Wells General Store and as he was my grandfather, it naturally was the most impressive. Even in these modern days it would have been considered a large business place. It was actually the same as four stores with a common roof, with living quarters upstairs over the two end buildings. The section to the east housed the hardware store, the two middle sections the Post Office, groceries and drygoods and the west section the farm implements and supplies. I remember the crackers that came by the barrel and the coffee that was ground in the big two-wheel coffee grinder and a huge round potbellied stove right in the middle of the store. The two middle sections were so large we kids would ride our bicycles and tricycles around in it on winter days. My cousin, Kenneth Geisel, would ride around behind the candy counter, slide open the door, then my uncle, Irol Wells, would come next and grab a handful of candy and then I would follow and slide the door shut. We would meet over behind the drygoods counter to share the spoils. We thought we were getting away with something but I now think that Grandpa knew what was going on.

He also operated a grocery wagon out of the store. It was loaded every morning before making its rounds through the country, calling on people door-to-door. Many people yet today remember my uncle, George Geisel giving them, as kids, a stick of gum or a piece of licorice candy after filling an order for their parents. This grocery wagon was stored in another old wood barn-type building next to the store. My Grandpa never had to paint this building, since it was so covered by circus posters, tobacco advertisements and the like that there was no wood showing. How we kids used to look at those circus posters of lions, tigers, elephants, trapeze artists and daredevils and could hardly wait until Grandpa would pack us off to see the show.

His store was opened every morning at 7 and Grandpa seldom went home before 10 or 11 in the evening, depending on when the last of the town men had finished their nightly ritual talks that encompassed politics, taxes, farming, girls and other subjects.

I have wondered over the years whether I had an advantage over children raised in the city, being raised in a small town where all daily actions were concentrated in a smaller area and lives went at a slower pace, giving me a chance to really see my small part of the world. I think so, and I’m glad and proud to have been born and raised in Woodbury. It’s my hometown.”

SEBEWA CENTER SCHOOL RECORD - 1847-1855; SOME NEW LIGHT SHED ON LOCAL SCHOOL HISTORY - Recently Ron Currigan, who owns and lives in the house built for Elem and Sadie Tran on Shilton Road, made a discovery of the first record book of School District No. 4, Sebewa Center. Ron was relocating some windows in the house when he found the book in the wall where he was working. We can only speculate that the Trans brought the book with them when they moved into the house about 1917, tucked it away and forgot about it.  Perhaps that treatment of the book was what saved it from the trash pile. Other early school records of pupil lists, grades and attendance were known to have met the bonfire when Lydia Watkins decided the "boys dinner pail cupboard" had to be cleaned.

Ron has shared the book with us and the contents of the early proceedings are presented in the following pages. Sebewa's earliest settlers located in the south-east part of the township. The Terrills, Ingalls, Browns and Showermans started teaching their children in their homes soon after getting established in their Sebewa locations about 1839. In 1843 they built the first schoolhouse in the township on the banks of the Sebewa Creek on Keefer Hwy. in section 25. That, as other buildings of the time, was of logs and was destined for a short life.

In 1847 the boundaries of District No. 4 were drawn and a schoolhouse was built on a quarter acre of land just south of the half mile mark on Sunfield Road between Musgrove and Bippley in section 22. Number four would indicate that three other school districts had been formed previously. Those became known as the High, Goddard and West Sebewa respectively.

Many years ago Heman Brown, who attended the first District No. 4 school, gave this description of the building in a "'Member When" in the PORTLAND REVIEW: "This schoolhouse, built on the Hugh Showerman farm, deserves more than a passing glance, as it was there the first ideas of knowledge began to shoot, in the new Center School in Sebewa. The house was 16' x 24', was built of logs and had a large fireplace in the west end and a door on the north near the west end.

"In 1857, Luryette Brown, sixteen years old, taught her first school in the Benjamin Probasco Coopershop. (the senior Ben then lived at the Center where LaVern Carr now lives.) The old log house became dilapidated and soon a good (frame) house was built on the Probasco corners. (NE corner of section 22)." The contract for building that schoolhouse was published in the December 1968 volume 4, #3 Sebewa Recollector. Miss Luryette Brown later became Mr. Probasco's second wife.
Here following are the first records of the long lost book.

At the 1847 meeting Walter Harmon, Jacob Showerman and Eleazer Brown were chosen as School District No. 4 officers.
Sebewa--Sept. 25, 1848

At the annual School meeting of School District No. 4 in the Township of Sebewa, County of Ionia and State of Michigan.
Voted that Eleazer Brown be Moderator for the ensuing year.
Voted that Walter Harmon should be Director for the ensuing year.
Voted that John Waddell should be Assessor for the ensuing year.
Voted to raise five dollars by tax for repairs on the School House.
Voted that one cord of wood be delivered for each scholar that attends school.
Voted that the wood be delivered by the first day of December.
Voted that we have four months School. School to commence the first day of November.
Voted that the resident tax be retained in the District.
Voted that the meeting be adjourned one year from this day, Sebewa Sept. 25, 1848.
Sebewa, Sept. 30, 1848. I do hereby accept the office of moderator in School District. - Eleazer Brown
Sebewa, Sept. 30, 1848. I do hereby accept the office of Assessor in School District. - John Wadell
Sebewa, October 5, 1848. I do hereby accept the office of Director in School District. - Walter Harmon

It is agreed between Walter Harmon, Director of School District No. 4 in the township of Sebewa and Willard L. Barr, a School Teacher of the township of Danby That the said Willard Barr is to teach the primary school of Said District for the term of two months and a half, commencing on the 12 Day of December, 1849 for the sum of Ten Dollars per month and for such services properly performed, the said Walter Harmon is to pay the said Willard Barr the Amount of his wages as ascertained by this memorandum on or before the first of June next, in witness whereof the said parties have hereto set their names this 12 day of December A. D., 1849. ~ Walter Harmon, Director (and) Willard L. Barr, Teacher.

Sebawa, Sept., 30, 1850
At the annual School meeting of School District No. 4 in Said Township it was agreed on notion John F. Olry was chosen clerk of this meeting in place of Walter Harmon, absent.
On motion it was voted that John Estep is Moderator for the ensuing year.
On motion it was voted that Eleazer Brown is Director for the ensuing year.
On motion it was voted that John F. Olry is Assessor for the ensuing year.
On motion it was voted that one dollar is to be raised by tax in this district on each scholar between the ages of four and eighteen years.
On motion it was voted that a tax of Ten Dollars is to be raised for buying one stove for the School House.
To Walter Harmon, a taxable inhabitant of School District No. 4 of the Township of Sebewa, Sir:
You will hereby notice that we, Benj. D. Weld and Wm. Packard, School Inspectors of Said Township of Sebewa have formed a School District in said Township, numbered it and bounded it as follows to wit:
Commencing eighty rods east of the North West corner of section 13, thence west to the North quarter stake of Section 16, thence South to the south quarter stake of section 28, thence east to the south quarter stake of section 26, thence north to the south quarter stake of section 14, thence east three fourths of a mile, thence north to the place of beginning.
The first meeting of said District will be held at the school house in said District on the 27th of Sept., 1847 at four o'clock P.M. and you will in pursuance of the laws notify every qualified voter of said district, either personally or by leaving a written notice at his place of residence of the time and place of said meeting, then and there to transact such business as the Law requires.
Given under our hands this 18th Day of Sept., A.D. 1847. ~ Wm. Packard and Benj. D. Weld, School Inspectors
All notified personally and by writing on the 20 and 21 days of Sept. 1847.
- Walter Harmon, Taxable inhabitant

The School Lease of School Dist. No. 4 in the Township of Sebewa, County of Ionia, State of Michigan:
Know all men by these presents that Jacob Showerman of the Town, County and State aforesaid of the first part for the consideration of Twenty-Five Cents do hereby lease unto Walter Harmon, Eleazer Brown and Jacob Showerman, the school district board of School District No. 4 in the Town, County and State aforesaid, party of the second part and their successors and assignees the following parcel of lands:
Namely commencing at the east quarter stake of the South East quarter of Section 22 Thence west 5 rods, thence south eight rods, thence east five rods, thence North to the place of beginning, with all the priviliges and appurtenances to have and hold the same for and during the term of twenty years from this 12 day of March, A.D. 1846 and the said party of the second part for themselves and agree to pay the said party of the first part for the said premises the annual rent of twenty-five cents.
In testimony whereof we the said parties have hereunto set their hands and seals this 25 day of March A. D., 1846.
District board of School Dist. No 4, Sebewa. Signed and sealed in the presence of Luciius E. Showerman, Jerome L. Harmon, Jacob Showerman, Walter Harmon, Eleazer Brown
Received of Walter Harmon, Eleazer Brown and John Waddell the School District Board of District No. 4, Ten Dollars in orders on the Treasurer, being in full for building schoolhouse and lease of one quarter of an acre of land for said School House - Sebewa, December 23, 1848. - Jacob Showerman
On motion it was voted that one third of the public money is to be kept for the summer school.
On motion it was voted that a Female teacher shall be hired for the year.
On motion it was voted that it shall be four months school in this winter.
On motion it was voted one half of cord of wood should be furnished by each scholar.
On motion it was voted that school shall begin on the first Monday of November next.
On motion it was voted that this meeting is adjourned for one year to this place
Sebewa, Sept. 30, 1850 - John F. Olry, Clerk and Eleazer Brown, Director.

Sebewa Sept. 29, 1851
The taxable inhabitants of School District No. 4 have met to elect officers and transact other business.
Voted that John Estep be Moderator for the ensuing year.
Voted that Eleazer Brown be Director for the ensuing year.
Voted that John Waddell Jr. be Assessor for the ensuing year.
Voted to raise one Dollar by tax on each scholar between the ages of four and eighteen years of age for school purposes.
Voted to raise five dollars by tax for repairs on the school house and other purposes.
Voted to have three months school taught by a man teacher.
Voted that five dollars be applied to the summer school.
Voted to furnish 3/4 of cord of wood for each scholar, corded at the school house.
Voted to raise one dollar for book, pail, cup and broom.
Voted to adjourn this meeting to one year from this day at this place. - Eleazer Brown, Director; John Estep, Moderator.

I do hereby accept the office of Moderator to fill vacancy occasioned by John Eastep removal from the District.
Sebewa, February 7th A. D. 1852 - J. F. Olry
The undersigned members of the district board, District No. 4 in the township of Sebewa do hereby appoint Lucius Showerman director of said district to fill the vacancy created by the death of Eleazer Brown, the late incumbent.
- J. F. Olry, Moderator (and) John Wadell, Assessor

At a meeting on Sept. 27, 1852 Major Brown was chosen as Director.
At a meeting on Sept. 26, 1853 Charles W. Ingalls was chosen as Director.
At a meeting on Sept. 25, 1854 Ephraim Probasco was chosen as Director.

July 11, 1855. At a special meeting of the qualified voters of School District No. 4 of the township of Sebewa held at the schoolhouse of said district No. 4 on the 11th day of July, 1855 pursuant to public notice, the Moderator presiding and Ephraim Probasco as Clerk.
Resolved that the School house site be changed and located near the south east corner of section sixteen, leaving it with the school board to choose and purchase land site above named being a two thirds vote of ten ayes to four noes.
Resolved that this meeting be adjourned unti the 5th, fifth day, of August next at 2 o'clock P.M. - Ephraim Probasco, Director; John Waddell, Jr.

The August 5 meeting was adjourned to August 11, 1855 and at that meeting the specifications for the new building were put into the minutes.
It was not until June 1856 that a meeting was held changing the site of the new building to the northeast corner of section 22. Some years later the building was moved across the road to the southeast corner of Section 16."

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin of The Sebewa Association;
Volume 17, December 1981, Number 3. Submitted with written permission of Grayden D. Slowins, Editor:

NAMES OF WWII VETERANS APPEARING ON THE SERVICE BOARD HONOR ROLL, GAR HALL AT SUNFIELD, MI:

In the aftermath of WWII the people of Sunfield erected a service board adjacent to the G. A. R. Hall with a list of names of people who had served in the late war effort. The names were from the Sunfield area and supplied by volunteers. Necessarily the list was incomplete. Recently two names have disappeared and nobody seems to have a record of those names. For the record we list the remaining names.

Richard Krebs, Neil Sutherland, Fred A. Van Antwerp, Earl Holton, Joseph Chemachi, Royal Ritter, Stanley Chemachi, Clair McWhorter, Merwood Reahm, Carl Young, Gerald Brooke, Morrice Sutherland, Wayne Bosworth, Vern Porter, Max Wickham, Maurice Hoover, Dale W. Ackerson, Vance McWhorter, Donald Sipperley, Donald Reese, John H. Stemler, Ray Elliott, Otto W. Barnum, Robert Bishop, Jack S. Smith, Frank Rathbun, Jr., Wendell B. Brown, Robert Sayer, Walter Brown, Lawrence Dean, Burton Daniels, Kenneth Seybold, Eugene McDairmid, Virgil Edgel, Charles Bosworth, Robert Schneckenburger, Loren B. Reed, Robert L. Canfield, Paul R. Lumbert, Carol F. Benedict, Norton Benschoter, Curwood Fleetham, Robert J. Haynor, Maurice Forshey, John H. Sayer, Verle Daniels, Everett McDairmid, Jerry Schray, Richard Lenon, Vernon Hines, Robert Creitz, George W. Lake, George Fleetham, Thomas Cramer, Kenneth Stemler, Philip Park, Lloyd Figg, Elmer H. Creighton, Lawrence Holton, Wesley Meyers, Forest Estep, Jr., Loren Gerlinger, William Bosworth, Charles DeLand, Harold Campbell, Maynard F. Linhart, Crawford Fleetham, Perry J. Welch, Jr., John Peabody, Lyle Shaffer, Arnold Sipperley, Larry Mapes, Oren F. Barnum, Keith Stinchcomb, Arthur Dilley, Clifton Smith, Rolla West, Harold Meyers, Sherman Pranger, Gerald Porter, Fred Marsi, Kenneth Figg, Richard B. Wright, Byron VanBuren, Gerald Knapp, Robert E. Smith, John Nelson, Franklin E. Dean, Chalres Mast, Ervin Lubitz, Carlton Estep, Barnard E. Duffey, Richard Estep, John J. Cain, James Cheal, Bryce Trowbridge, Loyal Dean, Edward Black, Robert Sutherland, Glendon Hynes, Paul Fisher, Gordon Schray, Maurice Joppie, Robert DeLand, Dennis Petrie, Ralph R. Powell, Sidney J. Ball, Walter Joppie, Duane Dean, Harold Ball, Cecil Hynes, Robert E. Forshey, John R. Munoz, Howard Sandborn, Howard Meyers, David Blackmer, Ward C. Malcuit, Kenneth Pranger, Virgil Daniels, Eric A. Rice, Keith Hough, Leo E. Malcuit, Richard Fender, Jack Beebe, Robert Wilson, Russell Frantz, Joseph Sleight, Charles E. Lumbert, Gerald Richard, Lynn O. Lowe, Robert Marsh, Arthur Cramer, Jr., Gus Joppie, William Barkley, Harold F. Green, John Wellman, Clifford VanBuren, Lynn W. Jackson, Elmer VanAntwerp, Lawrence L. Porter, Martha Vangansbeke, Russell Peabody, Don Benschoter, Jr., Lawrence Lowe, Dr. S. P. Huyck, Leo Jones Wies, Paul E. Wilcox, Kendall Dow, Bernard Black, Russell Franks, Bernard Dodge, Jack Wilcox, Richard Black, Harold Figg, Melvin King, Donald Marsh, Nathan Peabody, Robert L. Anderson, Max McWhorter, Jr., Eldon Holton, Jack Fleetham, Billy McDairmid, Richard C. Hamlin, Ray Pranger, Lyle C. Van Mere, Charles Barnum

SURNAMES YEOMANS AND HENDERSON

HENDERSONS - Among Ionia's first settlers in 1833 in the Dexter Colony from Herkimer, New York was Erastus Yeomans and family. Erastus prospered and acquired the title of Judge. He was in a position to hire help in his farming operations.

In 1857 Archie Henderson was an immigrant from Scotland and became one of Judge Yeoman's employees. Mr. Yeomans was so well pleased with Archie Henderson's work that he said to him, "I wish I had another good man like you".

Archie was quick to reply, "I'll write my brother, James, and he will come". James was living at Jedburgh, Scotland near the English border with his family. He accepted this opportunity for a chance to emigrate to the "New World" and came to Ionia in the employ of Mr. Yeomans.

The Yeomans family owned considerable land in the south part of the country as other speculators did. Eventually James Henderson bought a Yeomans' forty located on the northwest corner of Henderson Road and M 66. Later he bought other land nearby. James' daughter, Mary, and son, Archie, spent their long years at the family home just south of Henderson Road on M 66.

Son John married Kate Seybold, sister of John Seybold and they established their household in a log house a half mile west of M 66 on the south side of Henderson Road. Later he bought the farm just south of Archie's where Charles Steward had built the large Italianate house that has long been known as the Henderson home. The lumber for that house whose style was so popular in the late 1800's was white pine hauled from Ionia by horse.

Of John and Kate's six children Mildred Hall and Florence Eckhardt still live in that house and Marian of Lake Odessa and Olive of Battle Creek frequently visit them. The elder Hendersons saw to it that all six of their children completed high school at Lake Odessa at a time when going to high school was not yet considered a necessity for rural children.

At the Bippley rural school they walked with the Rogers girls, Eva Augst (Austin) and the Bippley children. There Florence Yeager, Helen Cheetham, Clyde Battdorf, Minnie Sindlinger, Lydia Sindlinger and Emily Brown were teachers. Lydia Sindlinger was very strict. Once the Bippley School baseball team went to Sebewa Center and played a game. The boys never wanted the girls to play ball so they got a ball club of their own and painted it red. Then they had a girls' team. Once they attended a field meet sponsored by County Superintendent Harvey Lowery and Mr. Angell at Sebewa Center.

At high school Mildred had to stay in town during the week--first with a family by the name of Simmons. The oldest Simmons boy was home from work in a bank in Grand Rapids. Everybody knew that he had tuberculosis. Mrs. Henderson wisely knew that Mildred shouldn't be subject to that exposure and that was when she went to stay at the Frank Reiser home. When Florence was ready for high school James Henderson got the girls a driving horse and buggy and the children drove daily and stayed in town only when the weather was severe.

George Downs was the Superintendent of Schools. LeRoy Steward was principal. A Mr. McCullough was a superintendent later and Clarence Mote was principal. This was before the high school building burned and was replaced by the 1923 building. There were twenty students in the 1915 graduating class.

The driving horse was named "Teddy". Sometimes he would get spooked by the sight of an automobile and turn right around in the road. They drove south to Bippley Road. The next mile south was swampy so they drove straight west to Odessa Center and then south into town. The horse was kept in a barn near the Reisers'. A few oats supplied Teddy at noon. The Rogers girls drove a horse named Bessie. Sometimes they would race to see who could make the trip first.

After high school the girls earned life certificates for teaching by spending two years at the Teachers College at Mt. Pleasant. Mildred taught at Carr, Johnson, Jennings, Clarksville and Halladay schools. Florence taught at Odessa Center, Limerick and Bippley. Olive taught at Lawton and Mason and Marian taught three years at Vicksburg.

Mildred remembers Em Martin driving the stage coach between Woodbury and Ionia. It was not what she thought it should be but rather just a buggy with three seats. Before Rural Free Delivery in 1900 the mail came to West Sebewa and residents around there would go there to pick up their own. John Henderson kept horses, cows, sheep, pigs and chickens. He never raised beef cattle. Eggs and butter brought the trading money for groceries at Jason Peacock's store in Lake Odessa in the location where the bank is now. When John Henderson was no longer able to work the farm, Mildred's husband, Irwin Hall, took over the farm work.

In 1977 Mildred, Florence, Marian and Olive made a trip to England. After seeing some of the British sights they took a bus across the border to Jedborough in Scotland. There they found the farm where their grandfather had lived and worked. No relatives were to be found. End.

HISTORICAL RECORD OF ORANGE CHARGE; LEVALLEY UNITED METHODIST CHURCH

After reading the record of the organization and early operation of School Distirict #4, Sebewa in the last issue of THE RECOLLECTOR, William Weisgerber thought that the early history of Orange Charge might also be of interest to our readers. This record is now in the repository of the LeValley United Methodist Church. It gives a glimpse of rural life of 100 years ago. Except for Hashier’s Hollow, most of the locations mentioned are still easily recognized. This account is the first indication I’ve ever seen that Sebewa Corners Methodists were ever connected with Orange Charge. For most of its early history Sebewa Corners Church was part of Danby Charge with the Compton Church. Our thanks go to William Weisberger for making this record available.

“Orange Charge was partially formed in 1866 by a vote of the QUARTERLY CONFERENCE of the then Berlin Charge. During the following two years there was added to the charge the Tuttle Class from Ionia Charge and a class was formed consisting of six appointments with five classes numbered as follows: #1 Orange, #2 Berlin Center, #3 Benedict Schoolhouse, #4 Tuttle Class, #5 Sebewa (Sebewa Corners). During the year 1866-67 revivals were held with good results at classes 1, 2, 3 and 4. The record from which the above is copied does not state who the pastor was.

Rev. A. C. Hovey, 1867-68. We were appointed to Orange circuit in the fall of 1867 and found no parsonage suitable to live in. We immediately took means to build a comfortable house. The contract for the new parsonage was let by the building committee October 15, 1867. The building was completed June 1, 1868. The house and lot were valued at $1,200, the best parsonage property in the district. The present membership is 175. Spiritually the Charge is at a low ebb owing to a large falling off of probationers from the prosperity spoken of by my predecessor as written above and other difficulties culminating this year from difficulties of the past. No probationers were received as per record and the pastor’s name does not appear. These two years seem to be an entire blank.

Rev. B. H. Whitman. In September 1870 Rev. B. H. Whitman was appointed to Orange Circuit. He says we found a good people, a good parsonage with some hens and chickens and other things to welcome us for our comfort. But there was no well. We immediately secured a good well pump and raised means and paid for the same. We held special meetings at the Yellow Schoolhouse with considerable success, the Lord helping us and also at Tuttle’s without any apparent success except that the Church was greatly revived. The year closed with 156 members in full connection.

Rev. B. H. Whitman, September 1871 was returned for a second year. This year several small debts contracted the year before were provided for and paid. Special meetings were held at Berlin Center with little success. In May 1872 a new class was organized at the Riker Schoolhouse and called the Central Orange Class and which we would recommend, he says, to a successor as the most likely place to succeed in revival effort. The year closed very pleasantly to pastor and people.

Rev. T. J. Spencer. For the year 1873-74 there appears no record of history but by references to the record, the copyist, Rev. O. E. Wightman, finds that T. J. Spencer was pastor during this year and that there were received on probation as follows: Berlin Center 15, Orange 16 but a very imperfect record as to how or when Rev. J. A. Phillips. For the years 1874-75 J. A. Phillips, pastor found the charge much in need of churches in which to worship, there being but one, a small one, the gift of Nelson N. Tuttle at Tuttle’s Corners. The parsonage property was in need of repairs but could get no help to repair it as the circuit was opposed to expending more on it, as the location did not suit the majority. Had to lay out $78 of our own money to make parsonage comfortable for winter. Commenced to work up an interest to get it moved. Also to build a church by uniting the Riker and Old Orange Classes. Accordingly a meeting was called and a unanimous vote taken to build. Also arrangements were made to unite the Tuttle and Benedict Classes and build a church. Special meetings were held at the Tuttle Church with good results, 18 or 20 persons being converted. The year closed pleasantly with God’s blessing.

For the year 1875-76, J. A. Phillips, pastor. By unanimous request of the official board and the action of the Bishop, Rev. J. A. Phillips was returned to Orange Charge for the second year. The old parsonage was sold and a new one erected at the LeValley’s Corners. The church at Hall’s Corners (Grand River Ave. and Sunfield Hwy.) was finished and dedicated. A debt of $1,050 was provided for by notes drawing 10% interest. The church at LeValley’s was commenced in May 1876, the walls and roof completed and partly painted at a cost of $2,200. Hall’s Church cost $2,550. Thank God for His preserving and sustaining care.

For the year 1876, Rev. A. J. Wheeler, pastor. For these two years no record is given. During this time, however, 36 were received on probation of which 21 were received into full connection.

In the year of 1879-90 Rev. D. M. Ward, pastor by appointment. I moved with my family to Orange Charge in September 1879. Found a kind, warm hearted people, a good parsonage and two comfortable churches. These all were built during the pastorate of Rev. J. A. Phillips, who died soon after Conference after his third year as pastor on this charge. I found the church in good condition temporally but dull spiritually. During the year my health failed and I had to give up and seek rest under the direction of my physician and with consent of the church and my presiding elder I moved my family to my father’s home in Farmington, Michigan. While there my wife and children had diphtheria. We buried both our precious girls and came back in April, childless. My health some improved and with the Lord’s blessing I have been able to do the regular work of the charge. During the year some improvements were made on the parsonage property in the way of well, pumps and a good bell put in the LeValley Church, altogether costing $160.

Year of 1880-81. Rev. J. H. Thomas, pastor, came to this church in September 1880 and began a canvas of my charge. The LeValley Church had a year of prosperity. Congregations have been large and regular. The Sunday School has been a decided success. The Hall Church has made no progress. Congregations have been sometimes large and sometimes small. The Sunday School is thin, indeed. The means of grace are neglected. Energy and religion are greatly needed in the church. Berlin Center is more hopeful but greatly needs a house of worship. Gorham (North end of Sunfield Hwy.) Class has made some progress with indications of general prosperity. The year closes with indications of general prosperity.

Rev. J. H. Thomas for the year of 1881-82 was returned. November 25, my health has failed and I find it necessary to resign my work at the close of this first quarter. The year has opened very pleasantly and this is to me a great trial and I commit myself to the care of the good and living God.

Rev. J. F. Wallace. In January 1882 Rev. J. F. Wallace, supply. As others have recorded I found a good charge, good churches, a good parsonage and a good people. Special meetings were held at the LeValley Church and at Gorham’s Schoolhouse with some success. The work has been interrupted much by diphtheria and smallpox. I close my work and go to conference and trust God will revive his work in this charge during the coming year.

During the following three years Rev. J. F. Orwick was pastor and did a grand work. Glorious revivals and large additions all over the charge but no historical record has been made.

Record for the year 1885-86. Rev. O. E. Wightman came to this charge in September 1885, found a warm hearted people ready to welcome us to our field of labor. The charge consists of LeValley and Hall churches, Berlin Center and Gorham appointments where there is preaching on Sabbath days and Sebewa Appointment where I am to preach every alternate Wednesday evening, which appointment, however, is kept up somewhat independent of the Charge. I found the membership as follows: LeValley 100, probationers 5; Hall Church 56, probationers 18; Berlin Center 21, probationers 4; Gorham 18. Total membership in full 195, probationers 27. Grand total 222. The spiritual condition of the charge is fine though not up to what it ought to be for the work of soul saving. The church property is in good condition. Parsonage is very comfortable and good. I find Berlin Center greatly in need of a church building in which to worship. In the spring of 1886 we began the erection of a church at Berlin Center, which up to conference time had progressed nicely, being enclosed and partly finished. During the year, revival work was held at Gorham and Berlin with fair results. Eight were received at Gorham and 13 at Berlin on probation.

For the year 1886-87 O. E. Wightman, pastor. The year opened pleasantly. The Berlin church was crowded to completion and dedicated January 2, 1887 free from debt. The appointment remained the same as last year save that Sebewa was discontinued immediately after the dedication of Berlin. Revival work was commenced at the LeValley Church which continued four weeks and resulted in much good to the church while some converted to Christ. Also a series of meetings were held at Berlin with moderate success. During this year repairs to the amount of $50 were made on the parsonage and barn while the churchyard was greatly improved in the line of new conveniences for hitching teams. Congregations were good all through the year while peace and harmony prevailed.

Rev. O. E. Wightman was followed by Rev. F. A. VanDeWalker who remained two years and did good work.

Rev. Brother VanDeWalker was followed by Rev. Albert Smith, who remained a little over one year. Rev. Smith was a good worker and was successful in his labor. Rev. J. Dietrich filled out Rev. Smith’s term. Brother Smith transferred to Grand Rapids.

Rev. John Dobson followed Rev. Dietrich and remained three years. During his stay the church property was greatly improved and a good interest manifested in the charge.

Rev. W. J. Wilson. I was appointed to Orange Charge September 17, 1894 by the Rev. W. F. Malithu at the conference held in Jackson, Michigan. This is my second regular appointment. My first was at Edmore where I remained five years. I found the charge in a fairly prosperous condition.”

SURNAME: YORK

SCHOOLING AT SEBEWA CENTER By Zack York

“The other day I ran across that old poem of John Greenleaf Whittier’s which begins “Still sits the schoolhouse by the road, a ragged begger sleeping”. As I read the rest of his nostalgic and sentimental poem it brought back to me memories of my early school days in a country one-room school. Many times during my sixty odd years spent off and on in a classroom as a scholar, teacher and administrator, I have been grateful that I was born and lived my childhood years on a farm. (“When I was young, people in my neighborhood often referred to the pupils as “scholars” when they spoke of them in the context of academia).

I didn’t know it then, but those were years of transition and change. The machine age was upon us and the world was growing smaller. I have been proud to remind my sophisticated friends and educated colleagues that I am a farm boy and glad to have milked cows by hand, slopped the hogs and taken part in all the things that one does with a team of horses on a small farm.

Life on the farm revolved around the family, the church and the school. I began my formal schooling in the Sebewa Center School, District #4. My first teacher was Lydia Watkins. (She was of the OLD school and very strict). Next came Mamie Williams. (She taught only one year and then married Homer Downing). The next year, because Wilma Hunt (Coe) wasn’t old enough to qualify as a teacher when school started, Kate Howland (Strong) taught for a month. She had taught in town (Sunfield) and brought with her a recognizable urban sophistication, awesome to country kids. Miss Hunt read to us for “opening exercises” and when we misbehaved she had only to threaten not to read to us to bring us “to time”. My last teacher was Mary McCormack. She was easygoing, a reader of the LADIES HOME JOURNAL while the eighth grade conducted the classes and was my introduction to the “child centered”, “open classroom” without a “strong guiding hand”.

Although the belfry is now gone with the tornado of 1967 along with the boys and girls toilets; although the building has had a few changes such as the lowered ceiling and the windows bricked up on the east side in efforts to be a “standard school”; and although the old jacketed stove was replaced by a forced air oil burning furnace and inside toilets have replaced the privies---in spite of all these noticeable changes, the main building of warm yellow and pink bricks remains and the two doors in the south open into the same narrow, dark hall with the center door opening in turn into the one room where I went to school. The room is bare of regimented rows of desks and there is no recitation seat screwed to the floor on the platform at the far end of the room.

I have only to pause to hear the “ping” of the classroom bell and the teacher’s voice commanding, “Turn, rise, pass.” I can see me do just that---turn in my seat with the tilt-top desk; rise and go to the rear of the room; turn right and proceed down the west side aisle to the front of the room; turn right again and march to the recitation seat; turn front and upon command “Be seated” do just that. Upon completion of the recitation period, Teacher said “rise, turn, pass” and we returned to our seats by the outside aisle on the other side of the room to the back of the room and subsequently to our seats.

As most pupils, I can’t remember being taught anything. (I think I knew how to read when I started school); rather I learned by osmosis from listening to the older kids when they were in recitation. The only books we had to read, other than our textbooks, were a motley collection of old books in the “library”---a bookcase with two doors and five shelves of dog eared volumes, the most interesting and exciting of which to me were: Black Beauty, Greek Myths and Legends, and The Rover Boys.

Discipline was the order of the day and in my early years, fear of the teacher was a strong motivating force. I was scared of Lydia Watkins. Big kids told tales of the teacher using a rubber hose, a switch, even a ruler to impress upon the scholars that sass and unruly behavior would not be tolerated. I loved school and I don’t remember many traumatic experiences involving corporal punishment. I do remember hearing Iril Shilton, our neighbor, say that his dad, Old Andrew Shilton, told his kids that if they “got a lickin’ at school, they’d get another when they got home”. I remember thinking that was pretty unjust. Having suffered once at the hands of the teacher, why should one get another thrashing at home?

Recess was not “supervised play”. We just played: pom pom pull away, prisoner’s base (gool-goul-goal?) and circle games like bull in the ring, London Bridge, run sheep run, red light and even duck on the rock. We did play ball, of course, usually work-up. If you were little, you played out on the woodshed side of the schoolhouse where the elm tree was the only stationary base. The big kids used the diamond on the west side of the schoolhouse. We had no playground equipment; balls and bats came from home.

One of the memories that I have of these athletic events was field day sponsored by J. Calvin Linebaugh, County School Superintendent. The schools of the township met in all sorts of athletic competition at our Center school on a nice spring day. There were sack races, relay races, running jumps, broad jumps, the high jump---I can’t remember much else about the field day except that I dreaded it; for I was a little fat boy and not particularly athletic. (I marvel now that I never was nicknamed “Fatty” or “Tubby”. My brother, John, sometimes called me “Swift” but nicknames never caught on and I was always called Zack.)

Sometimes we would play ball at the Johnson School in the spring or early fall. The school board gave us permission to take the afternoon off and although we had already walked a mile or more to school, we didn’t complain when we walked two more miles to the Johnson School; played nine innings of baseball; walked back to the Center and then another mile home. No doting mothers chauffered us about for our extracurricular activities. In the winter we played fox and geese and spent hours sliding on our sleds that we brought from home. Belly flopping down the building grade was the mode. One time we planted a maple tree in the schoolyard on Arbor Day. It wasn’t tied in with any of our school subjects; teacher didn’t call it a field day or a field trip and I know that we scholars didn’t worry much about it being a learning experience.

Another kind of event I remember with mixed feelings was the spelldown. We’d have them occasionally on Friday afternoons. I was pretty good in spelling so I didn’t suffer undue humiliation. But as I look back I think that spelling bees were cruel. I know that slower children must have suffered even at the hands of a sympathetic teacher who gave them easy words to spell. They must have resented that sort of consideration. The suffering felt in failure, not measuring up, or being ostracized was not unknown to many of us, I’m sure. There was often the awful feeling of being the last one picked when choosing up sides for games; there was often the unfortunate kid whose frantic waving of the index finger was ignored by the teacher and consequently he peed his pants; there was always some one singled out by the big boys to pester and plague. I personally experienced some of these unhappy times but for the most part we had lots of fun at school.

It was customary for the school kids to put on the Christmas Program. After preliminary practices in the schoolroom we would go across the road to have a first and last practice at the church. We always held the “Christmas Exercises” at the Church. Nothing could equal the excitement and anticipation of that event. The whole neighborhood came to see the “Christmas Exercises”. The church was always packed. Either the teacher had us stay in the annex, supervised by one of the trusted eighth graders until it was time for our number to be performed or we sat in the front pews of the church, giddy with the anticipation of awaiting our turn. Every one took part in an exercise, a recitation or a song with all eight grades participating. The local preacher usually gave an opening prayer. Just before the arrival of Santa Clause a White Christmas offering was taken up for the Children’s Orphanage at Farmington. The separation of church and school was not as important or as clearly drawn as today.

The Sunday School always saw to it that every child in school and even the little preschoolers, brothers and sisters, got a present. It was always the same---a little box, like a satchel, with a cloth tape handle, filled with popcorn, peanuts in the shell and hard candy. The last number of the program, of course, was the appearance of Santa Claus, who came “Ho, ho, ho”ing down the center aisle from the back of the church. We’d always try to guess who was Santa Claus and it was a real triumph when no one knew who was the masked Saint in that pillow-stuffed red camoric suit trimmed with white muslin “fur”.

I think it was Miss Hunt (Wilma Coe) who used to let us older kids be monitors. We were allowed to leave our seats and answer little kids questions---hard words in reading; how to spell a word; or listen to memorization of the multiplication table or poems for language class. I think it was being a monitor that made me decide to be a teacher. I thought it would be great fun to answer questions and grade papers; I didn’t know then that I was to begin my teaching career in this very schoolroom; but that is another tale.

Before that was to come about there was a whole new life ahead---the awesome experience of high school. We were to leave the secure and familiar world of Sebewa in exchange for a one-room school in Kent county to finish our eighth grade. We moved to Bowne Center where we lived for two years with my mother’s Aunt Blanche Thompson. My sister, Helen, and I finished the eighth grade at Bowne Center school and attended the first year and a half at the high school in Alto. Then midway in our sophomore year it was back to Sebewa to drive nine miles with the Gierman kids to town school at Lake Odessa. Just to think of that unknown was to strike terror to the heart of this little fat farm boy who was now fifteen and weighed 196 pounds.”

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin of The Sebewa Association;
Volume 17, February 1982, Number 4. Submitted with written permission of Grayden D. Slowins, Editor:

A SCHOOL REPORT FROM THE SEBEWA CENTER SCHOOL OF 100 YEARS AGO
March 8, 1882:

PUPIL, DEPORTMENT, SCHOLARSHIP
Maggie Gunn,100%, 96%
Ella Gunn, 100%, 98%
Rosetta Gunn, 100%, 95%
Josephine Deatsman, 100%, 96%
Jane Deatsman, 100%, 95%
Alva Deatsman, 100%, 95%
Mattie Britton, 85%, 87%
Katie Britton, 80%, 85%
Willie Puffer, 100%, 98%
Frank Showerman, 80%, 97%
Ella Showerman, 100%, 95%
Jay Showerman, 85%, 96%
Henry McClelland, 85%, 90%
Welton McClelland, 95%, 96%
Willis McClelland, 92%, 95%
Ai Green, 100%, 90%
Eva Probasco, 100%, 95%
Jay Bretz, 90%, 95%
Webster Hastings, 100%, 100%
S. F. Deatsman, Teacher

SAWMILLER GLEN RAIRIGH – By Grayden Slowins
I wanted to get my walnut lumber planed and people I asked about it said to contact Glen Rairigh. His mill is located just off M-50 on the old gravel Clinton Trail (now called Sandborn Road) about 1 ½ miles southeast of Woodbury. When I went there to get the work done he threw in the story of sawmilling, Glen Rairigh style.

He first set up his portable mill and steam engine on the Jacob Sayer farm in 1913. Here he sawed out lumber for Jake’s “new” front barn and tool shed. He said Clarence was just a kid and still at home. However, I buried Clarence five years ago at age 87, so he was 25 then---six years older than Glen.

Clarence and Glen were second cousins. Clarence had told me this and his grandmother Gunn’s tombstone tells it too. Glen’s father may have been involved in the mill in those early years also, because his younger brother, Meryl, followed the mill crew and attended Sebewa Center School for a time. Glen is now 86.

In 1914 he set up the mill just south and across the road from the West Sebewa store where he sawed for Uncle John Lehman and others. In 1915 he set up for Charles Ralston in the pasture just west of the brick house that is now our home. Mrs. Charles Ralston was Hattie Olry and our west 30 acres belonged to Charlie and Hattie from about 1906 to 1942.

Glen thought it was about 1916 that he set up for Dan and Roman Slowinski in Section 35, Berlin Township. He recalls they used the lumber for some of their tool sheds and other small buildings. He thought it was one of the years that he operated the Chase mill out of Grand Rapids. I believe Chase later bought out Cheesebrough at Freeport and someone still operates a mill there, though not the Blough mill.

Glen said he had worked with just about every mill man in Michigan. I asked about Ezra Good (Mother’s cousin in the Wenger line). “Oh, yes. We logged together in the North.” Glen eventually bought Allie Rader’s mill from Portland and it is part of his present mill. Everything is powered by electricity now. I think Allie Rader’s wife was a daughter of Sid Osman and the mill stood on that low field just east and across the Portland Road from Donald and Warren Roger’s place. That was the old Hyland farm. Mrs. Osman was a Hyland.

The morning when we planed was rather misty and the day before was very foggy. Glen said “Fifty-one years ago yesterday was foggy, too, and Old (then young) Doc Finnie had to lean out the window and watch the ditch to get to our house and deliver Glenwood.

I said “well, fifty years ago come January he had to fight a blinding snowstorm and drifts to get to our house.”

Glen’s son-in-law, Donald Curell, was helping with the planing. He piped up, “What day in January?” When I said it was the 20th he said, “Well, he came to our house on the 24th”.

Glen was pastor of the Portland Nazarene Church in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. I gather he commuted, because his son and daughter were never in Portland school with us. I think he continued to saw and farm.

A month ago he was in Hastings hospital and later in Provincial House. Wilfred had said he probably would not be able to run the mill. But somebody told him there was a load of logs on the skids. He got out of bed, put on his clothes and was waiting for the doctor to say he was going home. The next day he had the mill fired up, but I still had to wait ten days for my turn, including time to overhaul his corn picker. Doesn’t that sound like a grand-nephew of Theodore and Amelia Rairigh Gunn? November 5, 1981

RECORD OF MARRIAGES BY PASTORS OF LEVALLEY UNITED METHODIST CHURCH: (By “Principals”, “Birthplace”, and “Witnesses”)

Married by Parson O. E. Wightman:
10-15-1885: Warren Fogleson born (bpl) in OH, to Sarah Bates Bird, MI; witnesses John Hinds and Ella Hinds
10-17-1885: James A. Mills, bpl MI; witnesses Will Janes, Lizzie Wicks
11-4-1885: Edward Weisgerber, IN, to Sarah J. Little; witnesses Bertha Weisgerber and R. C. Wightman
11-26-1885, Florence W. Eddy, MI, to Sarah J. West; witnesses George West and Olive Thomas
1-13-1886: Culmer Wilson, Ont., to Minnie Castle, MI; witnesses Edwin Wilson and Zelphia Wilson
1-27-1886: James H. Oatley, MI, to Mary E. Franks, OH; witnesses John Franks and Clara Franks
3-9-1886: Archie Green, MI, and Ida Rader Merritt, OH; witnesses Ella Green and Albert Green
3-9-1886: Albert Green, MI, and Ella Rader; witnesses Archie Green and Ida Green
3-14-1886: Frank Patrick, MI, to Carrie Eddy, MI; witnesses Clark Galloway and Marian Patrick
4-21-1886: Charles E. Williams, MI, to Mary E. White, MI; witnesses Rillie C. Wightman and Nellie Gates
6-3-1886: Lyman J. Lyon, MI; witnesses N. M. Moon and Chauncey Moon
7-25-1886: Charles Smith, NY, and Melisa Briggs, OH; witnesses Henry Deline and Rillie C. Wightman
8-15-1886: Marius Miller, Denmark, and Clara Bates, MI; witnesses John O. Hinds and Ella Hinds
8-19-1886, Eli A. Coleman, NY, and Macy Lida, OH; witnesses Mahlon Pocooks and Burnie Townsend
9-1-1886: Martin A. Green, MI, and Lydia Stanton, MI; witnesses Mary Green and Lillie Snyder
9-12-1886: Henry A. Rogers, PA, to Alice Knapp, MI; witnesses B. H. Custer and Laura Custer
12-22-1886: Charles A. Wilson, MI, to Elizabeth Barnard, MI; witnesses Homer Adgate and Maggie Adgate
12-29-1886: John H. Crane, MI, to Jennie Perry Crandall, MI; witnesses J. S. Locke and Hannah Locke
1-5-1887: George W. West, MI, to Bertha Weisgerber, MI; witnesses Herman Schlosser and Carrie Gates
12-29-1886: Frank Sherwood, MI, to Ida A. Miner; witnesses Altheus Chamberlin and Jennie Sherwood
1-16-1887: Edwin T. Baitler, MI, to Ruth Gates, MI; witnesses Cyrus A. Baitler and June Schnobble
3-15-1887: Edward C. McQuillan, MI, to Jennie M. Peckins, MI; witnesses C. G. McQuillan and Gertrude C. Peckins
5-14-1887: Christian Waller, Germany, to Rebecca Bird Jones, OH; witnesses R. C. Wightman and Ellen Gates
5-25-1887: George E. Perry, MI, to Eva M. Goodenough, MI; witnesses O. A. Perry and Emma Perry
6-22-1887: William H. Ferguson, MI, to Allie J. Ritenburg, MI; witnesses Emery Ferguson and Drucilla Ritenburg
7-6-1887: John A. Scott, VT, and Laura Luther Petitt, NY; witnesses Rillie C. Wightman and Eva Wightman
12-11-1887: Emmett Wooden, PA, to Julia Steinburg; witnesses R. C. Wightman and Emmet Wightman
12-24-1887: Elias B. Wightman, NY, and Kittie Dunham, MI; witnesses Robert D. Lernen and Estelle Lernen
7-3-1888; Presley Franks, PA, and Mary Uri; witnesses James D. Cox and Huldah Cox
7-29-1888: John W. Young, MI, to Adelaid Whitmore; witnesses Wm. D. Bennett and Orvilla Whitmore
1-19-1888: Stephen A. Ware, MI, and Mary J. Misner, NY, witnesses W. W. Worden and Cornelia H. Worden

Married by Parson F. A. VanDeWalker:
12-25-1888: George H. Myers, MI, to Helen Gates, Canada; witnesses Henry Gates & wife
12-26-1888: James F. Smith, MI, to Rosa Kimmel, MI; witnesses Ozini Smith and Mrs. Frank Caswell
1-1-1889: Geo. W. Acker, NY, and Sarah E. Shilton, MI; witnesses Florence Shilton and Clara Shilton
1-30-1889: John Fullington, MI, and Hattie Goodenough; witnesses Mrs. F. A. VanDeWalker and Alma VanDeWalker
3-2-1889: Nelson Willitt, MI, and Stella L. Benedict, MI; witnesses Aaron Taylor & wife

Married by Parson Albert Smith:
4-22-1890: Ira Corser, NY, and Elizabeth Smith, NY; witnesses Annie E. Smith and James Marsh
7-4-1890: Ralph Crane, MI, and Elmie Sargent, MI; witnesses Annie E. Smith and Willis M. Smith
11-17-1890: John Seter, Germany, and Delia Tanner, MI; witnesses G. F. Guernsey and Phebe Guernsey
Married by Rev. John Dobson:
10-21-1891, Luis A. Perry, MI, and Emma Cadwell, MI; witnesses Charles A. Randall and Monica Randall
12-24-1891: Asahel A. Merritt, MI, and Emma Ritenburg, MI; witnesses John Wright and Druscilla Ritenburg.
2-3-1892: Ozro B. Shetterly, OH, and Lillie C. Rowe, MI; witnesses Fred VanLennen and Bertha Shetterly
2-8-1892: Chauncey Chamberlain, MI, and Olive Sherwood, MI; witnesses Iva Sherwood and Grace Hicking
2-10-1892: Edwin F. Hollbuch, MI, and Orpha Rader, OH; witnesses Albert Green and Ella Green
5-12-1892: Walter Warner, MI, and Eva Dye, MI; witnesses Mrs. J. Dobson and Ida May Benedict
10-28-1892: Dick K. Taylor, MI, and Kate Kuhtz; witnesses William Kuhtz and Violet Kuhtz
5-18-1892: Leon Bromberg, MI, and Florence Jordan, MI; witnesses Charles Price and Hattie Price
6-15-1892: Louis L. Holmes, ONT., and M. Ella Townsend, MI; witnesses Edd S. Townsend and Flora E. Adgate
11-15-1892: Albert Keefer, MI, and Eva Taft; witnesses Riley Taft and Eva L. Keefer
1-18-1893: Frank Deniston, NY, and Lillie May Stanton, MI; witnesses John H. Stanton and Minnie A. Stanton
3-1-1893: Augier Dickerson, MI, and Minnie Stanton; witnesses J. E. Dobson and Mrs. John Dobson
9-14-1893: Edwin A. Buck, OH, and Lulu A. Klotz, MI; witnesses A. B. Buck and Florence Klotz
1-1-1894: John Miller, MI, and Daisy Blow, MI; witnesses George Miller and Mary Baker
4-11-1894: Charles Chamberlain, MI, and Barbara Kuhtz, MI; witnesses George Khutz and Ada Khutz, Dick K. Taylor and Kate Taylor
1-23-1895: Lewis Rowe, MI, and Olive E. Wilson, Canada; witnesses A. J. Borton and Minnie Brickley

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin of The Sebewa Association; Volume 17, April 1982, Number 5. Submitted with written permission of Grayden D. Slowins, Editor:

BLIND JOHNNY SMITH DIES---A headline in the Lake Odessa Wave of forty-one years ago. Blind Johnny was the Son of Temperance Travis and the stepson of Andrew Travis after whom the Travis School was named. Johnny pretty well overcame his handicap and was quite free to travel as he wished. He had a talent for music, gave singing lessons to groups, sold organs, played piano and had a wide acquaintance in Sebewa. He traveled the state freely on the railroads.

Here is the February 13, 1941 report of his death as given in the WAVE. “It may be of interest to several of the older residents here to know that J. P. Smith of Leslie, better known as “Blind Johnny”, passed away at his home here on February 6. The funeral was held on Saturday, February 8. He was 86 years old and four months ago fell downstairs and fractured his arm. He suffered from shock and was ordered to bed but he grew weaker each day and seems to have had no resistance. Mrs. Smith wrote to Mr. & Mrs. Ed Snobble of his death. Besides Mrs. Smith he leaves a son, William, of Charlotte and a daughter, Louise, at Washington, D. C. He lived in Ionia for a year and in Lake Odessa and other villages.”

SURNAME: ECKARDT

A BASKETBALL LARK by Victor Eckardt ~ I think the story I’m about to relate may have happened in 1919 sometime in February or early March. Ervie Howard’s Lake Odessa High School basket ball team was playing in Clarksville on a Friday evening---no school activities were allowed except on Friday evenings. This was before the old High School building burned and Ervie’s team on which Donald Braden, Spencer Braden, Boyd Stockford and some others who played, held their games and practice at the old lakeside pavilion.

Harry James agreed to transport the team to Clarksville in his uncovered stake truck. That left the rest of the high school fans to get there the best way they could. I had a horse and cutter in Grove Cook’s livery barn at Lake Odessa. We had excellent train service in those days. A convenient westbound train left Lake Odessa at 4:30 P.M. Several of us got on this train. I believe the fare was about 2 cents a mile, so for 15 cents we easily got to Clarksville. The stores were still open and as in most towns in those days there was a bakery and a meat market. At the bakery we got cinnamon rolls (would you believe it?) for a dime a dozen. From the meat market a dime’s worth of bologna about 8 inches long with a half dozen rolls made a nice meal.

Of course Clarksville had no gymnasium in those days. They had a building with a basket hanging on either end. I don’t remember who won that game but I do remember the rest of the evening. There was no late evening train eastbound. Ernest (Slip) Klahn, Allen Rush, Clif Shellman, possibly Leo Wilson with several others and myself started trudging the snow between the railroad tracks toward home. We got to the crossing north of Ernest Klahn’s and he suggested I go home with him and spend the night. In the morning his dad was going to town with the sleighs with a load of feed. I accepted his offer. When we got to his house I called home to tell my folks that I would be home in the morning.

I remember the next morning we got up quite early. After the chores were done and the cows milked we had breakfast. I don’t remember anything else we may have had for breakfast but we did have apple pie. I’ll always remember that part, because I loved it---as a normal boy I liked all pies. After breakfast we loaded up a sleigh load of grain and started for Lake Odessa. I believe they were having a Grange meeting that Saturday and they invited me to stay. Reluctantly I decided against it. I went to the livery barn, got my horse and went home.

When I arrived home it was about the middle of the forenoon and my father had the horses hitched to the sleigh and was cleaning out the barn. You can guess the rest, I changed my clothes, got a fork and spent the rest of Saturday at manual labor.

As I look back over those days and remember the discipline we had, both at school and at home, it makes me appreciative of that era. I was required to get up in the morning before school, get my horse ready, milk 12-14 cows without the Hinman milker, eat breakfast and drive 4-5 miles with a horse, many mornings breaking a track through 2-3 feet of snow and get to school by 8:20. Try it sometime.

I am sure we were all human and none of us were perfect but we had very little vandalism and not too many juvenile problems. Our lives were quite safe on the road, well, because if we raced horses on the cutter and got spilled out in the snow, very little damage was done.

We have made some outstanding accomplishments since those days, yet there is still a pleasant flush of nostalgia when I think of those times. End.

TEACHER’S REPORT FOR THE SUMMER TERM commencing April 27, 1879 and ending August 28, 1879 in District No. Seven in the Township of Sebewa. Teacher---Anne Wooldridge

Thanks to Margaret Coppess, we have here the only record that I have seen of Sebewa School District No. 7 known as Baldwin School.

George Baldwin owned the SE 1/3 of SE ¼ of Section 20 Sebewa. The schoolhouse is shown in the Ionia County 1875 Atlas as being a little west of Kimmel Road on Musgrove Hwy.

In the early 1880’s there was a reorganization of the school district boundary lines in which old #7 was divided and parceled out to the Center and the newly created Johnson and Goddard districts.

The old district took in the Olry farm on Musgrove west to M 66, Kimmel Road from the Sindlinger farm south to Musgrove and Goddard Road from the Leak farms north to Bippley.

A small area along M 66 that had been part of the fractional district with the Bippley district was then added to the Johnson district and the West Sebewa district.

Name of Pupil, age, days present, times tardy, Minutes Lost, Deportment:

Phebe Gunn 16, 14, 5, 145, bad
Blanche McAllister 15, 61, 14, 370, good
Maggie Leak 14, 76, 35, 930, extra
Menmi Lapo, 10, 78, 2, extra
George VAnHouten, 13, 64, 14, 490, extra
Anna Leak, 12, 76, 10, 185, good
Geraldo Leak, 10, 78, 6, 175, very good
Daniel VanHouten, 10, 10, 2, 45, good
Reuben VanHouten, 8, 75, 17, 465, quite good
Willie Leak, 9, 59, 18, 235, quite good
Mary Baldwin, 10, 80, 7, 60, good
Lilie Leak, 10, 75, 11, 205, med.
Maud Estep, 7, 80, 10, 235, q good
Charles Ralston, 7, 68, 6, 70, good
Florence Ralston, 17, 72, 17, 36, whisper much
Guy Lapo, 8, 77, 5, 70, good
James Bond, 11, 69, 19, 460, med
Edward Aves, 10, 14, 6, 160, q good
David Davis, 11, 52, 8, 105, v good
John Gunn, 13, 19, 6, 175, good
Ellie Leak, 8, 4, 45, good
Libbie Leik, 6, 6, 95, 62, q good
Joseph Ralston, 5, 66, 5, 110, good
George Aves, 6, 60, 1, 5, good
Charles Baldwin, 7, 78, 7, 131, q good
Addie Baldwin, 5, 75, 6, 85, q good
Jemima Oberhaltzer, 8, 73, 21, 575, q good
Martha Oberhaltzer, 5, 73, 28, 610, q good
Susie Johnson, 8, 71, 9, 180, med
Samuel Johnson, 5, 77, 8, 265, med

Whole number of days attendance, 1865 ½
Average attendance per day, 24
Number of days taught, 80
Number of pupils enrolled, 30
Largest number present in one day, 30
Smallest number present in one day, 17
Number of visits from parents, 5
Other visits, 37

In addition to the visits the house was full of company the last day of school chiefly the parents of the scholars. I certify that the above is as correct report of any school as far as known to me. Anne M. Wooldridge, Teacher

Anne Mary Wooldridge came from Hull, England at age 3 in 1852. Her parents were Samuel and Mary (Lightfoot) Wooldridge---interment Easton Cemetery, Ionia County.

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin of The Sebewa Association;
Volume 17, June 1982, Number 6. Submitted with written permission of Grayden D. Slowins, Editor:

WOODBURY – MY HOME TOWN – 1925, By ViVerne Pierce

M-66, a paved cement road runs through Woodbury from the south to the north. It wasn’t always this way---just so many wagon tracks that had to be hand-shoveled out in the winter from snow banks, head high to a tall Indian---dragged and scraped and graded in the spring from ruts in the mud almost belly-deep to a team of horses, and dusty as the devil in the dry summer. Then it became #13, then #39 and eventually M-66. And every time the road bed was changed, Ma made Dad and I rearrange her rock garden on the bank alongside the road. No wonder I don’t like rock gardens even to this day.

The people in Woodbury in the 1920’s were very close to each other. I remember no family feuds or quarrels. If anybody had problems, no matter what, the whole town drew together and helped out. Perhaps the one thing that accounts for this was the fact that practically every one who lived there either worked in town or not more than five miles away at the most. The work was all hard, backbreaking, manual labor---no machines then. The closeness of the town was, perhaps, shown best when the “Great Depression of ‘29” hit the country. Everyone drew together, helped each other, shared with each other---nobody lost his home and none went hungry. It was with people such as these that I grew up among and gave me the fond memories I will share with you.

George and Bird Schelter made a living off their 10 or 12 acres at the edge of town. It was their well and pump that finally made me realize there was no Santa Claus. When I was six on Christmas Eve, my mother sent Dad over to Schelters for a pail of water. It was dark out and I went out on our front porch to yell at my dad and discovered all the Christmas presents on the porch. When Dad got back to the porch I said “There’s no Santa Claus, is there? You and Ma got us all these presents, didn’t you?”

He quietly said, “I guess you’re right, boy, but let’s not say anything to your sister about it. Let her believe as long as she will.”

Ricky Eckardt was an old maid, but a very nice one. She disturbed me only once and but for a short time, when she told my mother, “One spread to a slice of bread”. I was afraid Ma wasn’t going to put butter and jam together on my sandwiches anymore.

Jake and Lillie Miller operated a slaughterhouse, butchering cattle and hogs for people of that area. I didn’t know whether I liked Jake or not, after watching him shoot the animals in the head with his single barrel 25-20 rifle, but then, Lillie made up for him with the hot cracklings she passed around and especially when she let me use her old setting hen to hatch out a nest of duck eggs I had.

John and Emma Gerlinger and their son, Carl, were next. John moved an old schoolhouse onto his property and set up a wood-working shop. With that and his team of horses, he made a living for his family. Carl was my age and we were best of friends. The stories about Cobby and I would fill another book.

Ernest and Olive Grant (Itha McArthur’s parents) and their son, John, lived next to the P. M. tracks. How their house would shake every time the train went through. One would have thought the windows would fall out and dishes in the cupboard would break but somehow they didn’t. John was the reason for a firecracker exploding in my hand. I lit the big cracker, turned to throw it and there stood Johnnie Grant.

I didn’t dare let it go, so it exploded in my hand and I let him know it was all his fault. Grandma Grant lived up back of her son, Ernest, and I shall never forget the shock of seeing her sitting out on her little porch in a rocking chair and smoking a clay pipe. She was the only woman in Woodbury at that time who smoked, but I liked her because she had some good fruit trees and grape arbors that I was welcome to eat from.

My folks, Carl and Neva Pierce, lived on the corner of now M-66 and Maple Street and no boy could have been more fortunate in the location of his home. My Grandpa and Grandma Wells (W. R. Wells & Cassie) lived beside us and my Grandpa and Grandma Pierce (H. O. Pierce & Katie) lived across the road. How lucky could a boy be? And because this is not a family history, I will not go into any detail about them, except to say, “I loved them dearly”.

Cleophus and Dora DeCamp with their son, Forrest, lived next to Grandpa Pierce. He was a schoolteacher at Woodbury for many years and a very stern one. Consequently not too many children idolized him, but because he insisted that my mother let me read his Argosy magazine, maintaining that a boy could round out his education reading about the cowboys, soldiers and other adventurers I liked, I thought him a very nice man.

Across the street again, lived Gottlieb and Mary Morlok, (Dick Morlok’s Grandpa & Grandma). They were the parents of Carl Morlok, who, perhaps, brought more fame to Woodbury than any other one person. He was the father of the Morlok quadruplets, born in Lansing, Michigan. Bill Morlok, Dick’s father, was a man of few words and believed in going to the core of a problem to solve it. Like the time he was suffering from a very bad corn on his little toe. To cure it he placed his foot on a block of wood and with a sharp hatchet, proceeded to chop off the toe.

One incident I remember best, was when my Uncle Irol Wells and I were trying out our new bows and arrows that we had made---the bow from a thin piece of hickory with many pieces of store string wound together and waxed, and the arrows from dried cattail stalks. The target was Gottlieb Morlok’s Rhode Island Red Rooster. I know now that it wasn’t funny to see that rooster run around for two days with that arrow sticking out its rear end, but it seemed that way until our fathers caught up with us.

Pete Kussmaul’s family added the touch of sadness to Woodbury to balance out some of the joys. I often wondered why Ma wouldn’t let us kids burn the leaves that we had raked up in our yard in the fall. I found out that just about the time I was born the two Kussmaul children were playing in the leaves they were burning when the boy’s clothes caught fire. The parents grabbed him and rolled him in carpet to extinguish the flames, but he died from the extensive burns on his body. To this day I am apprehensive when I see children playing around burning leaves.

Reverend Lyons and his wife lived in the U. B. parsonage. He was an impressive looking man to me. He was quite tall, stood very straight, was always well-dressed and then had this immense head of pure white hair. He was the epitome of a preacher in my eyes and for many years I couldn’t understand how some men had become preachers when they didn’t look anything at all like our Rev. Lyons.

Abe Middaugh and family lived beside the church. He worked for George Smith at Smith Bros. Belte elevator for many years. Abe was a quiet sort of fellow, went about his work quietly and did it well. “He’s my right hand man”, Mr. Smith often said. But once in awhile Abe would get riled at some one or something and then the cuss words would roll out of him. I often wondered if living that close to the church took some of the sting out of them, because he lived to be quite an old man. Incidentally, Abe was Harlan Middaugh’s father.

Across the street from Middaughs was a vacant house owned by the Strimback family. Although nobody lived there when I was a child, I must tell the story my Grandpa Wells told me about a family that rented the house from Strimbacks. Apparently the family obtained a small pig and kept it in the basement of the house. This pig must have been the forerunner of a garbage disposal, because they fed it all their peelings, and table scraps from each meal. It came time to butcher the hog, but they couldn’t get the 350# live hog up the stairway, so they were forced to butcher it in the basement. Tale about building a boat in the basement!

George and Bessie Geisel and son, Kenneth, lived upstairs over the W. R. Wells store. Aunt Bessie, being a daughter of W. R. Wells, clerked in the store and George ran the grocery wagon through the countryside. George made many friends of the people on his routes. They looked forward to his coming for many reasons. He used to thread needles for several old ladies who were partially blind, carry messages for neighbors, and for the kids he always had “stick candy”. This is probably why Grandpa used to say that with women confiding in him, Uncle George usually knew when a lady was “expecting” before her husband did.

Mr. and Mrs. Gross lived across from the store. They were the parents of Rena Fender. Mr. Gross was a shoe cobbler. They were a very quiet family, speaking very broken English as I recall, and as kids, we sensed that they wanted to be left alone, so there is not much I remember about them.

Harlan and Olive Horn lived on the corner and her sister, Vera Gilson, lived with them and worked in the Horn’s store. Their house was about the nicest in town. Harlan hauled all the kids in Woodbury to school in Woodland when the Woodbury school was closed for eight years. Vera Gilson, next to my mother and grandmothers was probably the most influential woman I knew in my childhood years. She taught me to recognize and pronounce the wild bird names on the cards that used to come in Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. I had my collection for years. She also taught me how to play dominoes and checkers and impressed upon me how important good manners were for children. I remember that she always seemed to find time in the store to teach me something but with her it was more like play.

Jake and Roxie Schelter, down the street from Horn’s store were Ethel Hynes folks (Ardath Wilcox’s parents). I’ve often wondered how many yards of gravel he shoveled. He was a quiet, hard-working man. One time he had been working for my father and when it came payday, Dad asked “How much do I owe you, Jake?”

He responded quickly and quietly, “Six times eight is forty-eight---dollar and a half from last week, figure it up yourself, by God!” Roxie was a wonderful, warm lady. She always asked me in for a warm cookie and a cold glass of milk. Naturally I made it my business to know the time of the week she baked and always happened to be around then. Come to think of it, this happened at quite a few places in Woodbury.

George Smith, his wife, Louise and daughter, Hilda, lived on---what else---Smith St. He and his brother David started Smith Bros. & Velte Elevators. (Larry Smith’s uncle and father). The best way I can describe George Smith is with a comparison to a recent TV commercial. You have all seen the one where people stop and listen when the name E. F. Hutton is mentioned. Well sir, in Woodbury, when George Smith spoke, people listened, not out of awe, but with respect.

Mrs. Statsick, (Dorothy Smith’s mother) lived next to Smiths. The two things I remember best about her place were 1)she had the only smooth section of sidewalk in town on which to roller skate and 2)she had an enormous horse chestnut tree in her front yard and that was where I got all my ammunition for my slingshot. That was the only horse chestnut tree in town but the nuts wound up seeding the whole town.

Orley Middaugh lived on the corner of the highway and Kalamazoo Street along with his mother and brother, Adelburt. Orley ran the barbership and poolroom and Delbert was a wood cutter. As I remember, Delbert was always sharpening his axe, a double bitted one that shone like a new dime. When he chopped a block of wood, you never saw three or four axe marks to one slab of wood. I believe he could split a hair lengthwise with that axe. Orley had a beagle dog, (Old Susie) that was a very good rabbit dog. When hunting season rolled around it was our dog. He would let Dad take the dog home and when he wasn’t hunting with it, the dog had a special place in our kitchen and was given all the attention of visiting royalty.

Next to Middaughs lived Rev. Hettler and his family in the Evangelical parsonage. He was a good man and a good preacher, but he never seemed to be able to help Delbert Middaugh with his temper and profanity. The Hettlers had a son, Forest, who in the vernacular of those days “wasn’t quite right”, and after seeing him chase his sister-in-law with a butcher knife, our teasing of him let up somewhat.

Glen and DeEtte Rairigh and family lived down the street. Glen worked for years for Forrest DeCamp in the garage and also ran his own sawmill. But I remember him best for taking time out of his day to show me how to throw a baseball, how to use a ball bat and how to play the game in general. He is still alive and I always enjoy a chat with him when we happen to meet.

The Hildinger sisters, always referred to as the “Old Maids” lived next to Rairighs and they were always the brunt of our Halloween tricks. We would make tic-tacs from a thread spool, notched on the edges with rubber bands put through them and a wind-up stick. After winding one up and placing it on a window pane we’d let it go so it would make a terrible racket. Those two dear ladies never tried to retaliate and why we were so mean to them, I don’t know, but I’m sorry.

Leo and Ethel Hynes and children, Glendon, Cecil and Ardath were next. Leo also worked for George Smith and later for Harlan Horn before starting farming for himself. Ethel could never understand why her children had colds and runny noses most of the winter when they were bundled up with sweaters, coats, stocking caps, scarves, overshoes, mittens and anything else she could get on them, while I was running around bareheaded, shirt open, feet wet, wet mittens and never had a cold. She asked my Ma about this one day and my Ma simply said, “Ethel, maybe you ought to let those kids breathe a little.”

Then there was Mr. & Mrs. Winters, Ed Winters’ folks. I don’t recall anything in particular about them so it will suffice to say that they were just “nice people”.

Ted and Nina Pachulski lived across from Winters with their son Kenmore “Bud” Fender. I was eight or nine years old before I could understand why his last name was different from his parents. Divorce was unheard of in Woodbury at that time. Incidentally, I heard that Bud went down in a torpedoed submarine in World War II and his body was never recovered.

Clarence and Sarah Meyers lived on the north side at this time. They were another nice couple and at their place a young boy was always welcomed into the kitchen for cookies and milk. And you could play in their yard or run across it without feer of being “hollered at”. Come to think of it, there wasn’t any place in Woodbury like that.

Luther, “Mose” Brodbeck lived on the street across from the elevator with his wife and children. “Mose” was the station agent at the depot and that could be a whole story by itself. Their children were Marguerite and Luther Jr. but being younger than I, I don’t remember too much about them.

Now---George “Baldy” Kussmaul and Martha, his wife, I could write another whole book about him. Baldy worked at everything---section hand, woodcutter, thresher, ditch digger, farm hand, whatever there was to do, Baldy could do it. To me, he was my euchre partner, jew’sharp teacher and story teller. Just a person a young boy enjoyed being with because Baldy was young at heart also.

Just outside of town was Carl and Florence Eckardt. They delivered milk in town in the evening. Who remembers milk before it was pasteurized and when left on the porch a little too long on a cold evening would freeze and raise out of the bottle? That frozen cream was like ice cream to me. Ma accused me of leaving it out on the porch too long on purpose---she was right.

Dan Smith lived south of town. We could set our clocks when Dan came to get his mail at noon and for the men’s gabfest every night in Grandpa Wells’ store. He never missed coming to town twice a day as long as I knew him. He was also, to my knowledge, the most and best read Bible student in the area.

Across the road from Dan lived Mike Hildinger. Mike was a short roly-poly red-faced, laughing man, who liked his cider, but was always a most generous man when it came time to contributing to a worthy cause.

I have left to the last Ed and Martha Winters, the main reason being that Martha was like a second mother to me. Before her children, William and Helena were born, she would walk into Woodbury, take me as a baby into her arms and walk home and then bring me back at night. This continued long after I could walk with her. She showered me with so much love and affection, it was no wonder my day was complete when she walked into my daughter’s home two years ago to honor me with her presence at the celebration of my wife’s and my 40th wedding anniversary. She will always be Marsie to me.

Woodbury today has changed for me. Old buildings have been torn down while few have been built. Old majestic trees have been cut down with few replanted and saddest of all, practically everybody mentioned in this article has passed on leaving nothing but memories---but they are memories I’ll never forget.

My sincerest thanks to Robert Gierman for all the time he has spent reproducing the articles on Woodbury and the CK&S Railroad and using them in The Sebewa Recollecotor for all to enjoy. His efforts to compile and perpetuate these statistics and memories are deeply appreciated. VGP End

GRANDPA GRIEVES

John Grieves was a seventeen year old boy, who lived in Steuben County, New York state, when the President of the U.S., Abraham Lincoln, called for volunteers to join up in the Civil War in 1860. His parents were not in favor of his joining the service when he was so young. John climbed out of his upstairs bedroom window one night, ran out and enlisted in the Thirty-Fifth New York Infantry, Co. F., then drilling at Corning, N.Y., and then to Washington, D.C. where they camped on Meridian Heights and took part in the first battle of Bull Run, covered the retreat from that battle and camped at Arlington, near the present site of the National Cemetery.

Mr. Grieves (our grandfather) served in the battles of Fredericksburg, Yorktown and the Seven Days battle, then went with his company overland to Cedar Mountain and fought in the battles of the Rappanhannock, White Sulphur Springs and the second battle of Bull Run. Then they proceeded to South Mountain and Antietam, where they crossed the Potomac to Warrentown. He was present when McClellan was relieved of his command, which was given to Burnside.

In the battle of Fredericksburg, Mr. Grieves fought in “Franklin’s Grand Division”, which crossed the Potomac on pontoon bridges to Chancellorsville. He was mustered out of service June 11, 1863 and reenlisted in December 1863 in Co. L, Fourth Heavy Artillery at Cohocton, N.Y. He then fought in the second battle of Chancellorsville in 1864 and in the battle of Spottsylvania Courthouse and Cold Harbor. At City Point they were given mortar batteries and stationed before Petersburg during the winter of 1864. In the spring of 1865 Co. L was ordered to follow up the Second Corps Artillery Brigade where he was present at the surrender of Lee at Appomatix, April 9, 1865 and then the war was over. He was mustered out of service at Hart’s Island, N.Y. September of 1865, having served through the entire war without once being wounded or captured by the enemy.

He came to Michigan shortly after the war and obtained work in the lumber woods. He became acquainted with and hired by Horace Goodwin, who was a lumberman in the woods. Goodwin, with his wife and eight children lived in the area of Bear Lake, Michigan. John met and became acquainted with the hired girl of the Goodwin family. Her name was Marion Ruth Thompson from Alto, Bowne Township, Kent County. She was assisting her older sister (Mrs. Goodwin), Adelia, with the housework and care of her family. Their friendship grew and they were married in April 1870.

He was a stone mason by trade, following in the footsteps of his father in that business. The family later moved from Kent County and settled near Maple Corners near Portland. While living there he carried on his trade. One of the walls he built is along the street on Dilley Hill at the west end of Bridge Street in Portland.

He later bought land north of Morrison Lake and built a large frame house for his family on Townline Road south of Saranac where they lived and their family grew to adulthood. John and Marion lived on this farm some forty years before his death in 1925.

During his lifetime he was active in the Hiel P. Clark G.A.R. Post in Saranac and his wife was a member of the W. R. C. there also. He attended Co. battalion meetings very faithfully and he always planned each year to attend the Ionia Free Fair and usually visited his brother, William and family, who lived on their homestead farm north of Ionia in Ronald Township. He spent some time in Ionia at the home of one of his son’s and attended the Fair with him.

He last attended the Fair at the age of 81 years and returned home with the statement, “This is the best fair I’ve ever attended.”

He seemed always to have on hand little packages of spruce gum and horehound candy and the grand children thought he was great. They also remember the red-hot cinnamon drops from the big black bureau drawer in the kitchen that grandmother kept for them.

Mrs. Ruth A. (Harry) York of the Sebewa Center area was the eldest of their five children. They had 19 grandchildren, 15 lived to adulthood, ten were boys and seven served in the military service of their country.

Ruth taught country school prior to her marriage to Harry York. She was always active in community affairs prior to her death in 1947.

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR – Bulletin of The Sebewa Center Association;
Volume 18, August 1982, Number 1. Submitted with written permission of editor, Grayden D. Slowins:

THE FRIEND FAMILY – THEIR TRIP TO AMERICA
From the BERIA ADVERTISER, 9-16-1904

About April 1833 England had become thickly populated and every avenue for business was crowded. The common school advantages were very inferior; many were desirous of leaving England and seeking home and fortune in the new land. Abut this time John Friend, with his wife and seven children; John, Betsy, William, Blanche, Maria, Thomas and James decided to leave their native land and seek a home in the new land under the new government. Mr. Friend lived in Devonshire, England. He had become a farmer of some note, managing and carrying on many acres of land at one time. The farms were owned by Lords and Squires, each farm having its own name, as, Black-a-Broom, Batzel, Dartimore, etc. Mr. Friend was small of stature, wide awake, energetic and always on the alert. The work was done by servants and managed by a foreman. Mr. Friend rode on horseback, giving orders. A foreman carried them out.

Before leaving England, Mr. Friend showed great forethought in case of accident or shipwreck that would separate the family. For each of the girls, being three in number, he provided a stout canvas bag, large enough to hold a guinea. Into these he put three hundred pounds (between twelve and fifteen hundred dollars). These were securely sewed around the waist under the clothing. The Voyage was made in a sailboat; taking weeks; steamboats coming into use a little later. The young ladies had many friends among the passengers and were often asked by young ladies as they paraded the deck, “Do you wear a bustle?” They always informed them they did, not explaining the value of the article.

The oldest boys were also provided with means. Into each of the linings of their vests, then called waistcoats, they had five hundred pounds quilted. Mr. and Mrs. Friend also had some money about their persons, so that in case they should be separated, each would be provided with means. The next step was not quite so discrete. The balance of the money was put into a large cask, and as all baggage was stored in the hold of the boat, that went with the rest.

All went well, until nearing New York, off Sandy Hook, now a summer resort, near Long Island, the ship struck a sand bar, when about two miles out at sea, and at two o’clock in the morning, and with every wave was washed further farther and father into the sand until she was fast. The scene on board was terrible, some crying, some praying and some cursing and swearing. The tide was running high and each effort to reach the shore proved fruitless. Every means was tried to reach the land, each time being driven back. It seemed all on board must be lost. About two o’clock in the afternoon the first and second mates said if they might be allowed, contrary to the rules of the boat, to leave the boat and try to reach land, and if it would please God to spare their lives and they could reach land, they would return to the vessel. They were fine swimmers and were granted their request. On leaving the ship, they carried with them a small line, attached to a larger, then a larger, then one still larger. As the breakers would be rolling high, the swimmers would be lost from sight all on board feeling that their brave rescuers had perished. In despair all on board felt they must be lost. After some time the heads of the swimmers would appear nearer shore. Once, twice they tried, each time being driven back. The third time, after being given up by all on board, they reached land.

On reaching land with the line, a communication was established with the ship. Then began the voyage back to the ship in small boats. After hard labor, with water-filled boats, they succeeded in reaching the wreck. The women and children were first to be rescued. To do this they were taken into small boats until they struck a sand bar, then they were taken from the boats by men and carried across the bar and put into other boats. This was twice repeated before reaching land. This being a dangerous point, there was a large building on the shore called “The Wreckers Home”. A fireman (the next paragraph is not readable print, with only sections of sentences clear enough to read)…….of the room. This was opened and a large……….who were wet, cold, being in salt water…..given each a small tea biscuit and a cup of…..of the men came to the front in the…..of her husband…..

In getting ashore, one of the small boys was separated from the rest. They searched up and down the shores in hopes of finding him, but in vain. Betsy and Blanche, after searching long and diligently, broke down and cried. Blanche’s crying attract…..of a rich man who was passing in a beautiful carriage. He ordered the driver to….and upon discovering the cause of their grief, took them into his carriage and drove along the beach in search of the missing brother. About two miles out, and at a hotel, they found him eating supper. Their grief was turned to joy. This gentleman was blind but very kind. He had a small cottage which he opened to Mr. Friend and his family. While there he brought them many eatables and luxuries.

The money which they had put in the cask was still in the wreck. After many attempts to secure it, Mr. Friend advertised for divers and offered a reward. After a number of days, the cask was secured and brought to shore. Immediately an old servant, faithful as he had always been, sat upon the gold and remained there as if taking a sun bath.

They remained there three days and each night robbers attacked the house, so that the men were obliged to guard it with firearms. Mr. Friend’s daughters, begging him to leave, took passage for Cleveland. He and Mr. Squires, whose descendants still live in Columbia, started in search of farms. This was between Beria and Binola.

Mr. Squires settled in Columbia and Mr. Friend one mile south of Bennett’s Corners. Mrs. Betsy Southam, the oldest member of this reunion, who is ninety years old, is the Betsy of this sketch. Mrs. Esther Clafin of Beria is the daughter of Maria Friend. Only two of the original family are living, Mrs. Betsy Southam and James Friend of Carlton, Michigan.

The above sketch appeared in the Beria Advertiser, the issue of Sept. 16, 1904 and was reprinted from a copy of that issue for the interest of the many descendants of John and Betsy Friend, by Annabelle Friend Braendle, a granddaughter of James Friend who died in 1923. Freeport, Michigan, September 28, 1929.

Annabelle was the daughter of Frank and Minnie Friend of Pleasant Valley in Campbell Township, Ionia County, Michigan. She was the sister of Dayton Friend and the wife of Ken Braendle of Portland. The Friends, Braendles and Brakes attended school together in Clarksville, Annabelle being in Crystal Brake Slowins’ class from country school on up.)

The following note was written on the sketch by Mrs. Marian Pryer Lakin: This sketch has to do with your ancestors on your Grandmother Phebe Maria Friend Baldwin side of the house. The first two characters mentioned are her Grandfather, John Friend and Betty Comb Friend, her Grandmother. The other 7 characters were their children. John Friend (II) was my Father, also your Grandmother Baldwin’s father and your great-grandfather ______born July 16, 1867.)

PORTLAND OBSERVER, JUNE 10, 1885
One week ago last Sunday, John Friend, who now resides in Alanson, Michigan received a paralytic stroke in his left side. Last Thursday, word was received in Portland that he was not expected to live and his five children, all residing at Sebewa, with the exception of Mrs. R. Baldwin, who resides in Portland, left for Alanson. Monday evening Mr. Baldwin received word from his wife that her father was better but not yet out of danger. THE OBSERVER most earnestly hopes that Mr. Friend will recover from his sickness.

June 17, 1885 OBITUARY- - -JOHN FRIEND
Died in Alanson, Michigan Wednesday, June 10th, aged 61 years, 3 months and 6 days. Mr. Friend’s death was caused by two strokes of paralysis on Tuesday evening, June 9th, about 6 o’clock, lasting about one hour; the last stroke was on his left side immediately over the heart and throat, lasting about one hour and a quarter. He remained unconscious until his death Wednesday morning at 5:15 o’clock. The remains were brought to Portland Thursday noon and taken to Sebewa, where on Friday they were interred under the direction of the Sebewa Lodge I. O. O. F. assisted by the Portland encampment, of which Mr. Friend was an honored member. About 100 Odd Fellows were present in the procession, representing lodges from Sunfield, Hoytville, Vermontville, Portland and Sebewa. The funeral services were held in a beautiful grove west of Sebewa Corners. Rev. F. N. Janes preached a short but effective sermon, after which the remains of the deceased were taken to the cemetery for interment, followed by almost 150 carriages and wagons, showing how highly Mr. Friend was esteemed by his neighbors and friends.

John Friend was born in Devonshire, England March 4th, 1824. His parents, John and Betty (Comb) Friend, were also natives of England. Mr. Friend’s ancestors were landowners and farmers. In April 1833 the family emigrated to America, settling at Royalton, Cuyahoga County, Ohio where Mr. Friend followed the occupation of farming.

June 17, 1843 John Friend married Miss Polly Ann Meachum, of Brunswick, Medina County Ohio. By this union were born four children, viz: Francis N.; Geo. E.; Phebe M. and Emma A.

In April 1854 Mr. Friend removed with his family to Sebewa Township, Ionia County, Michigan. December 16th, 1857 he was afflicted by the death of his estimable wife. During this time Mr. Friend conducted a general store at Sebewa, in connection with his farm, gristmill and sawmill.

December 24, 1858 he married for his second wife Miss Sarah J. Cramer of Herkimer County, N.Y. By this union there were born the following children - - viz: Estella, Edith, Bertha, Judson Zach, Mornie Bell and Ethel Rose. July 5th, 1875 Mr. Friend was afflicted by the death of his second wife.

November 12, 1876 he married for his third wife Mrs. Lou A. Farrel from whom he was divorced November 15th, 1880.

From 1849 to 1852 Mr. Friend engaged in business as a drover and stock-raiser. From 1852 to 1867 he followed the occupation of lumbering and from 1868 to 1871 was engaged in the hard lumber business. From 1871 to 1875 he resumed the business of stock raising and from 1875 to 1879 kept a general assortment store at Sebewa and during this time continuing the management of his extensive farms. He was an ardent supporter of the Union in the War of the Rebellion and has been a Republican since the organization of that party.

THE VANDERHEYDEN HOUSE By Grayden Slowins

The VanderHeyden house of Ionia was again featured on the Ionia Homes Tour in May. While perhaps not quite as elegant as the Blanchard house, it has half again as much floor space, bright sunlit rooms, and a hillside setting, which only a shepherd can fully appreciate.

The tour guide was woefully lacking in information about the house and when I mentioned that my relatives built it, she asked me to compile some facts about it for next time.

The house, located at 926 W. Main Street, was built in 1879, a year before the Blanchard house, a year after my own house and contemporary with many other Italianate houses in Ionia City and County. A main point to remember is that this house was designed and built symmetrically for two separate but related families right from the start. So it was not cut up later and ruined like so many old houses. There are two of everything on each floor except the central halls and the front and rear stairs: two parlors, two living-dining rooms, two kitchens, two summer kitchen-woodsheds. There are four large bedrooms upstairs and two full baths plus pleasant servants’ quarters in the upstairs rear.

The house was built for William H. and Frederick H. VanderHeyden, father and son, although Fred was still a boy when it was designed. They were the only owners before the Bruce Young family. Much of the original furnishings survived until the Young’s 1975 sale. William VanderHeyden lived in the east half and Fred in the west half. After William’s death in 1910, Fred used the east half for daily living and the west became a library, study (or office), small bedroom and laundry. Fred’s widow died in 1963 and Youngs purchased the place intact.

Originally there were two wood-coal furnaces, later stoker fired. Youngs put in two gas furnaces. The original lights were carbide gas, as were both fireplace grates. The basement has brick floors and 10 foot ceilings. Upper floors have 12 foot and 13 foot ceilings. The low attic originally led to a 30 foot widow’s walk, which has been removed and sealed over to prevent leaking. The often-called white brick or yellow brick by old-timers, is most accurately described as ivory-brick, although VanderHeyden bricks do vary from house to house and some within the same house.

William H. VanderHeyden was born in Herkimer County, New York, in 1836 and died in Ionia, August 16, 1910. He was married to Emily E. Wood, born in Detroit, 1840, died in Ionia, 1918, daughter of John Wood, also a brick manufacturer. William learned the brick trade in New York State, started his own yard in Ionia and then bought the Cornell brickyard about 1866. He also had a branch in Big Rapids for several years and sold the entire business to his son, Frederick H. in 1892. William and Emily are buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, which adjoins the brickyard on the north. Their children were: William H. II, who died young; Ella M., who married H. B. Webber of Ionia; Dora E., who married Dr. A. H. Holiday and lived in Long Beach, California; and Frederick H.

Fred was born in Ionia in 1869, died in Ionia, Sept. 13, 1952. He was married January 25, 1895, to Eleanor M. Clark, born in Muskegon, Michigan February 28, 1874, died in Ionia, March 27, 1963. Both are buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.

Regarding my opening remark that my relatives built the house, some explanation is in order. Those involved were the Biehler, Banhagel, Steinberg and Slowinski families. All were related through their foremothers, the Schnabels, and all were brick makers and bricklayers, and/or stonecutters and stonemasons. They dug the clay and fired the brick kilns. They quarried the sandstone, gathered the fieldstone, cut them as neatly as modern blocks, and then laid the stones and bricks. Almost every stone foundation, brick and stone home, public or commercial building built in Ionia City and surrounding area in the 1870’s through the early 1950’s was touched by them.

George Biehler, Sr., had been a brick maker in Alsace-Loraaine, France, and his son, Frank Sr., started work at VanderHeyden brickyard and became foreman of John C. Blanchard & Co. Ionia Sandstone Quarry. Frank’s daughter, Mamie, was born in a summer cottage at the bottom of the quarry. He was a stonecutter on the VanderHeyden house, the Blanchard house, the Burhans (Leddick) house, Ionia Court House, Ionia State Hospital, the Michigan Reformatory and others.

Frank Banhagel Sr. & Sons laid the brick streets of Ionia, the Armory, the First Presbyterian Church and later its addition, the Ionia Fair Grounds buildings and the manse at SS. Peter & Paul Catholic Church.

Frank Slowinski Sr. was said to be the fussiest bricklayer in the family and Frank Steinberg Sr. the best stonecutter. Chris and August Slowinski specialized in barn and other foundations.

Ionia’s First Christian Church, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Zion United Methodist Church, First Baptist Church and SS. Peter & Paul Catholic Church were all built of VanderHeyden brick.

The First Methodist Church has been built twice using the same bricks. First built in 1871-1873, using VanderHeyden brick and Ionia Variegated Sandstone, it was destroyed by fire in 1930. After the fire, many of these bricks were salvaged, cleaned and used to build the walls of the new church. The quarry was reopened and enough stone gotten out to completely face the brick with sandstone. The bricks can still be seen exposed at the south gable end of the main structure.

VanderHeyden bricks were turned out at the rate of three to five million per year at peak production and shipped by rail to such projects as the Veterans’ Home in Grand Rapids. The bricks are imprinted with the initials WHV or FHV, not FVH as has mistakenly been reported.

The VanderHeyden house was designed and built well, of the best materials available. The inside shutters were the best idea of their day for cutting winter drafts and summer sun. The home can be purchased for $55,000, it is said, and with an immediate addition of custom-made Plexiglas storm windows of the type used on various churches in Ionia, it could be a comfortable home for a large family or two separate but related families.

A final word of caution, however. The family is only exaggerating slightly when they say George Biehler III was paid an annual retainer to watch over the plumbing systems. End

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR - Bulletin of The Sebewa Center Association;
Volume 18, October 1982, Number 2. Submitted with written permission of current editor, Grayden D. Slowins:

DRIVE SUNFIELD HIGHWAY past the pioneer settlement of the Eleazer Browns and Jacob Showermans and you will see the homestead that was built by son, Lucius, and long occupied by grandson, Hugh Showerman, replaced by a neat space of openness. A sign of the time, perhaps, the house was torched to make way for more crops.

THE SUNFIELD SENTINEL, December 7, 1916 OBITUARY – Irving A. Brown Died Sunday

Irving Adelbert Brown, a pioneer resident of Sebewa and widely known thru this section died Sunday. Mr. Brown had been in poor health for some time but death came rather suddenly, heart failure and paralysis being the cause. Irving A. Brown was born in Sebewa, Michigan Jan. 9, 1847, and died at his home there (part of the same homestead) Dec. 2, 1916 aged 69 years, 10 months and 23 days.

In 1865---a boy of eighteen---he enlisted in Co. H. Sixth Michigan Cavalry, and served one year. While still in dismounted camp near Washington, expecting to be ordered to the front, the war ended, and soon after the grand review, his regiment was sent west against the Indians. He was honorably discharged at Fort Bridger, Utah, and returned to civilization with seven comrades in a private schooner.

His next few years were spent in and near Ionia, Michigan, attending school and teaching. He began the study of medicine, but was forced to give it up because of eye trouble, which for some time threatened him with blindness. December 8, 1871, he was married to Delia M. Stacy, who, with their three sons and his brother, Heman S. Brown, survive him. Soon after their marriage they moved to his old home in Sebewa, where the rest of his life has been spent.

In early manhood he joined the M. E. Church at Ionia, transferring membership later to Sebewa Corners, and later still, helping to organize the class at Sebewa Center, where for years he served as class leader and Sunday School superintendent. Truly brother Brown did serve his God and his country and his influence will be felt for years to come. The funeral services were held December 5 at Sebewa Center church, Rev. D. C. Crawford of Palo, Michigan, a former pastor, preached the funeral sermon.

FIFTY YEARS OF MARRIED LIFE – Heman Brown and Amelia Maxim – THE SUNFIELD SENTINEL
Heman Brown and Amelia Maxim began that intimate acquaintance and friendship which culminated in their marriage fifty years ago today (January 1, 1916) in the winter of 1848-49 when he did chores for his board for her father (John Maxim) and both attended school at the old Knox or Merchant schoolhouse, she at the age of fourteen and he at the age of twenty.

After the winter of intimacy in the home circle and school room, their friendship ripened as opportunity for intercourse came to them from time to time, until the troublesome days of the Civil War brought many loving hearts to a realization of their realizations toward each other. Except for one summer, he had worked his mother’s farm, while the bride-to-be had spent at least one summer within the wall of the school room teaching the young ideas how to sprout.

On September 5th, 1862, H. S. signed the enlistment paper, pledging loyal service to United States for three years unless sooner discharged by proper authority. Passing through all the preliminaries he was sent to Washington with his regiment, the 6th Michigan Cavalry, in the winter of 1862-3. His horse falling lame on the very first raid made by his regiment, he soon fell behind the column and was captured by prowling bushwackers.

After being in captivity a total of only 17 days, during the last five of which he enjoyed the far famed hospitality of Libby Prison, he was paroled not to fight against the Southern Confederacy until properly exchanged, and was returned to federal lines. Although a prisoner for only so short a time he exhibited a wonderful capacity for hard-tack, salt pork and coffee when he again reached his friends. Indeed, at first, it almost seemed that his friends were continuing the policy of his captors in that he was not allowed to satisfy his craving for food.

Later in his service he tested the quality of rebel lead by having one of their bullets pass thru his foot from above the great toe joint to below the small toe joint. This disarranged so many of the small bones usually found in that locality and took so long to rearrange them that he was kept from the fighting line until the close of the war. Once while dressing the wound, his surgeon said to him “If you had been a drinking man, nothing could have kept your foot from amputation”.

Finally the three years of service was ended and he was discharged Nov. 24, 1865. Meantime white-winged doves of peace had been flying regularly between camp and home and it did not take long after the discharge to fix the wedding date as January 1st, 1866. The ceremony was performed at the home of the bride’s parents by Reverend Blanchard of Portland, grandfather of the present Blanchard brothers.

The newly wedded couple began housekeeping in the spring on his mother’s farm and at once commenced that life of hard work and economy, which has always characterized them and which has brought to them the competence they now possess. The title to their present home was transferred to them by his mother at a named consideration of $200 in fulfillment of an agreement made at the time of his enlistment and in recognition of the help he had given in supporting the family since the death of his father in March 1852.

They lived on his mother’s farm until the spring of 1873 when they built a temporary house on their own premises where they lived while accumulating material, making plans for, and building the present structure.

This sketch would not be complete without reference to the church work, which has occupied so much of their thought and energy. There had been a preaching appointment and summer Sunday school at the High schoolhouse north of the Corners almost from time immemorial, the preaching being supplied from Portland or Lyons and later from Danby and the Sunday school by local talent. Here H. S. received considerable experience as teacher, superintendent and choir-master even before his war service.

Soon after the close of the war the community divided into various functions, each advocating a different point of meeting. There being no prospect of immediate harmonizing of the various interests, D. F. Barnes, P. E., of Ionia District, drove out from Ionia, bringing Rev. E. A. Tanner, a young student from Drew Theological Seminary of Madison, N. J. After discussion of conditions, Rev. Tanner was left with H. S. Brown and wife, apparently with instructions to develop a paying appointment at the schoolhouse of school district No. 4, usually called the Center school. The point not developing as expected, renewed efforts to bring the various factions together resulted in a point of established in the hall above the blacksmith shop at the Corners and under pastorate of the Danby pastors, to which circuit Sebewa was attached. After a few years that veteran church builder, Rev. T. J. Spencer, was appointed to Danby and was not long in ascertaining the possibilities at Sebewa. In due time, satisfactory subscriptions had been secured, the church was built and dedicated free of debt just before conference in 1876. In all this work our friends did their full share but perhaps their best appreciated work was holding the free singing schools at the church on Sunday afternoon in the interest of church music.

And so the influence of their lives have been for loyalty, uprightness and piety. They quietly wait, unfearing, near the point of departure for the final summons.
Compiled by I. A. Brown (Heman’s brother)

A LETTER FROM CORPORAL DON BENSCHOTER TO HIS WIFE. Coblenz, Germany, Dec. 6, 1918:
Dear Wife: Will write you a few lines again tonight to sort of make up for lost time. Our company went on guard last night at 4 o’clock. Two corporals and myself have a detail of 12 men guarding a shoe factory here in Coblenz about a half mile from where the Moselle flows into the Blaine and about 60 rods from our main barracks. Will hold this guard for about three days and then be relieved.

We have a nice room in an old office in the factory, has steam heat and electric lights and street car line, so you see everything is lovely.
I suppose by the time you get this letter the snow will be good and deep in Sebewa and you will be hovering around one of those registers to keep your blood warm.

Haven’t heard from you since about Nov. 20, when I was in Commency, France, for there has been such a great movement of troops and supplies that I suppose the mail is all balled up somewhere, but I hope to hear from you soon. Had a little snowfall night before last and there is still some on the ground yet, so you see it seemed quite like Xmas yesterday to see the white coat lying on the ground.

Well, I guess this is all for tonight, will close and write again in a few days. Wishing you a Happy New Year and hoping to see you by your next birthday (Is not that taking time enough?) I am as ever your true loving husband.
Cpl. Don A. Benschoter, Co. H. 39 Reg. 4 Div A. E. F.
P.S. Received eight letters from you and eight from my mother as well as one from Mrs. H. S. Allen, also the papers your mother sent, today. Some mail! Tell all the folks I wish them a bright and Happy New Year.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LICH SR.

My grandfather was John Lich I from Lansing, Illinois. He was an onion set farmer. My maternal grandfather was Henry Dorn. He was a plasterer by trade but he lived on a truck farm when he first came from Holland. Next year my wife and I and three couples, friends, are going to go to Holland in June to visit the place of origin. One of the men was born and raised there. He grows plants and he plans to take us all around Holland. I really look forward to that trip. I like to have somebody along who knows the place.

My mother’s name was Sadie and my dad’s name was Peter. My parents had three children. I was the oldest, Henry was two years younger, and our brother, Peter, died when he was five years old. I was born in 1915 in Chicago at 63rd and Crawthers, where the folks lived at that time, adjacent to the Midway Airport in the clearing section of Chicago.

My dad had a produce store in the Chicago market. He sold to the grocery stores. The grocers would come to the market early and buy their vegetables from a produce man. He would stay all night at the market while the farmers were bringing their produce in. He and others were called scalpers because they would buy from the farmer who wanted to get back to working on another crop. The scalpers would then sell to the storekeepers at an hour more convenient to them. When I was seven years old, as I remember, I sat on the thousand bags of sweet corn. The ears were bagged, 5 dozen to a sugar sack. Farmers could not afford to stay at the market for a long time to wait for the top price so they would sell to a fellow like my dad. The store keepers depended on him. When the melons were ready in Indiana we would send trucks to get them. We would try to get tomatoes from as far south as Indianapolis to have them before the local crop. From that age on I was always with my dad on the market. We did everything in cash. I can remember walking around with a roll of bills as they say, “you could choke a hog with”.

My dad was very good in figuring. Charles Dawes, who was later Vice President of United States, had pneumonia and tuberculosis. He was at Houghton Lake, Michigan. A man by the name of Anderson, a big plastering contractor, owned a big ranch at Houghton Lake and was a personal friend of Charles Dawes. He had a special open air house there where Dawes was sent for the treatment that was popular then. Mr. Anderson taught my dad arithmetic. He was fantastic at arithmetic. You could give my dad a string of figures and when you were through he would give you the addition or subtraction. He taught a little bit of that to me. You would take the round figures and then take the odd ones along with it and you could work it out pretty well. My folks were at that ranch for two years. My mother did the cooking. It was there that my brother, Henry, was born. I was two years old and, of course, do not remember.

In Chicago my Grandfather Lich had four children and Grandfather Dorn had ten children. They had rough going when they came to Holland. My dad grew up with a group of guys around the stockyards. When he married my mother he was drinking a little too much to suit Grandpa Dorn. Grandpa got hold of Mr. Anderson, the plastering contractor, and asked him if he had a place for his son-in-law. He needed a foreman on the ranch at Houghton Lake. Pa took the job and got straightened out all right. When we went back to Chicago he got into the produce business.

I went to high school in Chicago. I went only two years because it was right through the depression. I had a chance to get a job then with a fellow by the name of Sam Muscaralla, an Italian guy. He had a route for delivery to stores all over the South Side. We knew him at the market. He wanted to know if I would drive truck for him, so I quit high school. At that time the banks were closing.

My mother was at a Ladies Aid meeting and heard that the Bain Banks of Chicago---a big group of banks, were having problems. My folks had some money, a nice new house in Chicago, I had $700 and my brother had $400. I remember sitting around the table when my folks said maybe if we boys did not mind, we could take that money out and make a payment on the house. Mama went there that morning and drew that money out and at noon the bank closed. That was quite a deal.

Shortly after that Nell and I got married. I worked for Sam Muscaralla. My dad had begun to have ulcers and quit the market. He was elected Chief of Police at Evergreen Park. He held that position through four administrations for fourteen years. He did a good job at that. One time there was a truck for Arthur Dixon Transfer Co., a big cartage company in Chicago, that came through Evergreen Park with an overload. That was in 1934. Pa pinched them. They sent out a foreman to see if they could fix the ticket and get the thing straightened out. Pa said there was no fixing the ticket. They just had to get their trucks within the legal limit.

After they talked and visited, the guy asked if there was anybody there that would need a job. The Arthur Dixon Transfer Company had the complete cartage contract for the World’s Fair. They moved everything into the Fair and they moved everything out of the Fair---all the foreign villages went in there through Dixon. A man by the name of Hibbard had that contract and he worked for Arthur Dixon. Even every ice cream cone went through there. All the parts for Ford Motor Company and Chevrolet (they made cars there at the fair) all went through Dixon.

At that time they had 400 teamsters who would haul freight from every railroad. C. B. & Q., the I. C., Northwestern, Burlington---railroads from everywhere. Dixon was a transfer company for freight. Frank Gary came out and talked to Pa. Next day Pa asked if I wanted a job with Arthur Dixon. He told Pa I would not get pushed around and I could go down there and get a job. I went there at age 18 and he put me on the job right off the bat. There were men there who had worked 35 years. Often they would sit on the sidelines while I would get work. We had no union at that time. Because I had a drag, I got a job.

He gave me a truck with five helpers and I hauled rolls of paper from the team truck right underneath the Wrigley Tower where we would take it across the river over to Popular Mechanics Magazine. It was the heavy paper that made the covers for the magazines. We had five cars to empty a day. I had a great big Packard, solid-tired truck. We would unload that---of course I was a pretty decent ball player and when the printers started having their dinners from eleven o’clock to two o’clock and played ball on their free time, I was in on the games. I had what they called a steady house job, a prime job paying $54.50 per week and that was a lot of money for those days.

Two years later in August Nell and I got married and I still had this steady house job. In the meantime the union came in. There was a racketeer union, 705, in Chicago. I have a withdrawal card from them I got when I moved to Michigan. I voted for the union then. Frank Galvin was the head of the union. He was shot and killed right on the steps of our building by a rival union. They assessed us five bucks for flowers for him. The first of December the union went into effect and with it the seniority lists applied. All that my seniority would get me then was three half days a week. I would go down in the morning and there was nothing to do. We would stay around until noon and then there were some tractor-semis that would pull out. Three half days for the whole month of December was all I had. There was no more favoritism with guys who had a drag like I had had.

Then I realized I could bump in on a city truck and go with a tractor and semi-trailer from different railroads with trailer loads of stuff to another. They would load trucks at night with stuff coming into Chicago to be delivered to different stores. I got a south run with a pretty good sized Ford truck. I would deliver goods to various stores all the way out to 135th St. or 140th St. south and then I’d call back to the dispatcher and he would give me a few pickups back into the city. That job paid $34.50 but that was better than three half days a week.

Pa and I had heard that there was a man in Alto, Michigan who had quite a group of men raising onions and we needed onions. My dad and I came out here and found Floyd Hunt in 1934. We wanted only the small onions. There was a poor onion crop here with a lot of small onions they could not sell. We wanted them for onion sets. There were very few onion sets in Chicago. Onions less than 11/16th were called over runs. I stayed with Floyd and Jane in Alto. We rented a store on Main Street where we hired a group of people to screen the onions we bought from the farmers. All the onions over an inch and one eighth we put in 10# bags and took them to a warehouse in Chicago where they were sold to the onion set people, who mixed them with onion sets and that made them a crop to sell. That is how I got interested in this Michigan country.

I still remember going with Floyd south of Sunfield down where Bert Creitz lived because he raised onions. His dad-in-law, Clarence Downing, had developed one of the best strains of onion seed available and that Downing strain is used yet. Just off Sunfield Highway where you hit M-50 and turn to your left and up a hill there was an old man who raised some onions in a couple of pockets of muck. They called him “Shifty-eyed Lumbert”. His eyes would shift back and forth all the time. I’ll never forget that because it impressed me so much.

One of the things that brought me here to Sebewa was that at that time I lived here with Floyd when we went all around buying onions and when we would come at a farm at 11 o’clock in the morning to buy some onions and we would be talking about the onions, the lady of the house would start making dinner and we had to stay for dinner. I had never realized that kind of hospitality and friendship. In Chicago you did not know the people who lived two doors away from you. That friendliness really struck me.

There was a man over near Hastings by the name of Kaiser who had a hundred and some acres of asparagus. He was selling it to a canning company in South Haven. They cut him down to a cent and a half a pound. He had his neighbors raising asparagus also. At that price they could not make anything of their crop. I was then a 17-year-old kid. He came to Alto and asked me if I knew of a market for that asparagus. I knew a beautiful market for it with Libby, McNeil & Libby, a big canning company in Chicago. My dad came out to get a load of onions and I was all excited about that asparagus crop. I felt that we could make a nice living and we could pay those guys 2 ½ or 3 cents a pound and they could make a living and we could get 5 or 6 cents a pound for it in Chicago. My dad said “Kid, you know nothing about that. We’d have to have refrigeration trucks and other equipment”. To my protest that we could buy it, it was, “No”. He couldn’t stand it.

One week end I went home and went to Libby, McNeil and Libby, saw the purchasing agent on the seventh floor, told him my story and said I could get the “grass” if you will buy it. He said, “I’ll take every bit of that you can bring here and I’ll give you a contract for 5 ½ cents a pound.” I came back and my dad would not listen to me. He could not see getting into that. I always had that in the back of my mind. It was then I went to work for Sam Muscaralla and soon after that for Dixon. The Dixon firm did not work on holidays. So, on a Washington’s birthday we planned a visit to the Hunts. I had not seen Floyd, Jane, Bud and their two daughters for some time. I was then married. I had written Hunts a couple of times. The holiday happened to fall on a Friday and we were off until Monday. On Thursday Nell and I drove out to Alto. They were glad to see us. On a drive around the country I asked Floyd about the asparagus. We drive over to Kaiser’s. There was some 20 acres of asparagus left. The rest had all gone back. He was then selling to a place in Fennville and getting a fairly decent price for it. In our ride around I said, “Boy, I sure wish I could farm”.

Floyd said, “You mean that?” I said, “I sure do, I would love to farm.” He asked if I had any money and I had to reply I had none. I was working but we lived the check. We stayed there that week end. Floyd said he would see what he could think of.

On March 15 he wrote me a letter to the effect that the Depositors Corporation, headed by Erm Garlinger, had foreclosed on a lot of the farms around here and they had what was called the Wallace farm on the Clarksville Road next to Corey VanDeBurg. Floyd owned the muck land across the road, now owned by DeBruyns. He owned the 40 acres there and the “Rattle Snake Forty” back of that, back of Patrick’s. Erm Garlinger had told Floyd that the Depositors Corporation wanted to liquidate some of their holdings they had out here. He told Erm that he had a young man in Chicago who wanted a piece of muck. There was a long 40 and a square forty where Ken and Evelyn David now live. Floyd wrote saying he could buy me a piece of muck right across from his forty for $1500 for the 80 acres. It had a spring on the ditch there with a tile where you could get water. There was an orchard, a well and a basement on the top of the hill a little further south from David’s house.

The old Wallace farm had been abandoned as a dwelling and the “Swamp Angels” used to play cards in the old house until they got wild one night and burned the place down. On March 20 my dad and I and Nell and her mother came to Sebewa to look at that place. I was all excited. I was going to build a garage-house on that foundation and try to farm the muck. My dad said, “I don’t see how you can do this”. It was spitting rain and snow and my mother-in-law was crying. We walked back through the humps where the ditch had been cleaned out; went up there and got them a drink from the spring; they thought I was crazy, I guess.

I said to Floyd, “I’ll buy it.” He said “How much have you got”. I said I could raise a couple of hundred dollars. Would you believe this? He had a little farm in Clarksville next to Timson’s Orchard southwest of Clarksville. He went to the bank and put a mortgage on that 80 acres of ground and went to the Depositors Corporation and bought this forty acres and then turned around and sold it to me for $100 down and a hundred dollars a year until I paid for it. Floyd was more than a father to me. He taught me everything I know about farming. I knew about selling crops but nothing about raising them.

We drove down the hill and headed for Harry and Letha Patterson’s store. Standing on the steps there was Carl Creighton, a boy twelve or thirteen years old. I went up to him and told him who I was and that we had just bought the Wallace farm. He said, “I’m your neighbor next door”. I asked him if he knew if there was any place around here to rent. He pointed across the fields and said that George Coe and his wife had just died. Their place was next to Ralph Coe and maybe if I would talk to Ralph I could find out about the place.

We introduced ourselves to Ralph and had a nice little talk and I told him what I wanted. He said, “I’ll show you the place.” All the furniture was in there though the place had not yet been hooked up to electricity. He told me to go see Rex Karcher, who was administrator for the place. We went to see Rex and meantime Ralph had called Rex and told him to rent the place to me. On the way over to Rex’s my dad had said that if we could rent the place for $30 a month it would be better than trying to build something on the old Wallace foundation while we were getting the crops in. Finally I asked Rex how much rent he would have to have. He asked, “Is three dollars a month too much?” I agreed to wire the house for $15 and that made me 5 months rent in advance.

Nell was pregnant with Johnny. We moved in the house. I worked for Floyd for a dollar an hour and when I used his equipment on my land he charged me a dollar an hour for that. Floyd also had the eighty acres of muck on Henderson Road.

The next year I filled the George Coe barn with onions and then moved them over to Tannis’ Storage at Clarksville. One day, Floyd, acting very much the father to me said, “You ought to have a hog”. He took me over to John Long’s west of Clarksville where we bought a Duroc sow with five pigs, one for me and one for Bud---$25 apience. Bud had six pigs and I had five pigs. I helped Ralph Coe and Allen Cross and with what we could scrounge and with scraps from the table, I raised that hog. At Christmas time we butchered those hogs---one for us and one I took to my mother-in-law in Chicago.

One day Issi Fletcher came over. John Sargeant had lost his place to Issi Fletcher. John had bought 20 acres across the road and couldn’t pay for it and just turned it over to Issi. Issi asked how about me buying that land. I said O.K. what is the price. He wanted $1800 for that forty acres. So I bought that for $100 down and $100 a year until it was paid. Mrs. Henderleiter was at Grandma Coe’s. She had a 40 acres on the back of the Sargeant 40. Grandma Coe remembered a house back there on a knoll and she used to carry butter from a well back there when she was a girl. She talked to Kitty Henderleiter on the phone and told her about us as her neighbors. Kitty wanted to sell her 40 to us. I went to see her and bought that from her for $1200. Then we lived in the Sargeant house. The George Coe house was rented for a couple of years and then I bought that forty from Mark Westbrook. That made me 120 acres on Henderson Raod and the 80 on the Clarksville Road. Those two pieces joined on the corner of Floyd’s 80. We arranged a legal right-of-way at that junction.

We moved here April 15, 1940. My uncle, Oliver Dorn, who was a truck gardener, moved us with his nice new truck. I said to him “if I just had your truck.” I knew where I could buy onions; Corey VanDeBurg was raising spinach and I could sell these things in Chicago. Uncle Oliver said, “John, you’ve just got to slow down a little bit. Just look at me. I’m 60 years old and I just got this truck”. I never forgot that. I was full of steam and raring to go and here was Uncle Ollie, who had worked and waited until he was 60 years old to get such a truck.

During war times here, labor was short. I organized a group of ladies---Wilma Coe, Irene Hunt, Grace Bailiff, Dorothy Meyers---they all worked for me for a number of years helping harvest our celery and onions.

One day I walked over to Fred Sindlinger’s---I had been working a few fields of his place, Clyde Avery worked a couple of fields and Dale Shetterly worked a couple of fields. I said, “Fred, would you sell me your farm”. He was concerned as to where they would live. I explained that with a life lease they could continue to live there as they had. Two weeks later I saw Fred walking toward our house. He said they would like to go talk to attorney Douglas Welch about selling. We made a deal where I would keep up the outside of the house and I sunk a 21-foot well near the house. Nora had carried water from the spring always before. They agreed to sell the place at $100 an acre with four per cent interest. (To be continued.)

THE HEMAN BROWN GOLDEN WEDDING story ended in 1916 on a note of completion of life. Heman lived until 1923. In December of that year Heman received an anonymous letter demanding a large sum of money to be made available at a drop. Heman made an appearance as if prepared to pay but with the “law” observing at a distance. Nobody showed up to claim the money.

A week later, Heman was dead, presumably from a fall down his hay chute in his barn. A sheriff’s investigation concluded that there was no foul play. The neighborhood long held suspicions in the case but nobody---even that renowned neighboring detective, Oscar Lincoln (Welcome Lumbert) could bring any charges. Mrs. Brown outlived her husband by many years.

LETTER FROM SOLDIER—August V. Meyers writes of trip from Camp Custer to Camp McArthur

Following are extracts taken from two letters written to Will Meyers of Sebewa by his son, A. V. Meyers, who was among the first to be drafted from Ionia County. He was first sent to Camp Custer and later sent to Camp McArthur, Texas. The letters cover the time the soldiers were preparing to leave Camp Custer and the trip to Texas.

October 30, 1917. Hello Folks:
I am well and having a high old time with all the boys. They hate to see us go but they are trying to keep us happy and they have done fine except with one man. He has been crying ever since he heard he was going. One of the boys went to the Captain for a pass home but the Captain was afraid he could not get back in time. But the Captain broke down and cried when he told him “No”. And that is the way the Captain felt. He did not get his orders until too late to let us go home or he would have got a pass as long as three or four days.

October 31---Leave here at 3:30 PM. It is now at 5:30 and have not left Kalamazoo. There are lots of people out to see us go through and they are yelling at us and we are making as much (noise) as they do and lots more. I sleep in the top berth #1 in car 14. We left Kalamazoo at 6 PM. Mess at 7:10. We hit Chicago about midnight. Was up until 1:30. We have seen the lake and a few skyscrapers and not much else.

November 1---Went on siding at 1:30 AM and stayed until 4 AM. In that time we get a call to change cars as our car had a broken wheel. We were ready to go at 4. Cold and snow on the ground. Get up at 7 AM and were just outside of Clinton on the Illinois Central. We have gone through lots of little towns since then and lots of woods of all kinds---Tamarack and hardwoods like we have at home. Tell Bernice we ate some of the jelly last night for supper and finished it this morning for breakfast and the boys say it is good. It is the best I ever ate.

An airship in sight. We saw it for about two minutes. We will hit Centralia, Fulton and Memphis. Good Bye, As ever.

Hello Folks, how are you this morning? I am well and so are all the rest of the boys. We saw some genuine Southern Pine this morning. They have been threshing flax here. They have a long sweep on a post and tie horses to it and drive them in a circle. It is on the ground.

It is clear as a bell this morning, not a cloud in sight. There are some razorbacked hogs along the railroad just out of Kingsland, a small burg. Big Barrel Mill at Foryce (Ark.) covers about ten or fifteen acres. Saw an eagle just now. Not any trees but pine and oak. The roads are mostly gravel and good gravel at that through Arkansas but they are narrow. Just outside Millville five miles they are making turpentine and boiling it in a big kettle.

We crossed the Washita River at 10:15. The way they drive a 4-horse team down here is to ride the back near horse. There is lots of lumber down here. Every town has a sawmill and it is a big one too. We saw our first cowboy at Texarkana---the line between Arkansas and Texas. We got here at 1:15 PM and leave at 3:10. We are in Texas at 3:10. We just passed part of Ringling Bros. Shows, just pulling out of Anaka at 5:12 and they are bringing in mess. Arrived at Waco at 5:20 AM Saturday and at McArthur at 6:30. We are all well and having a good time. My address is Camp McArthur, Waco, Texas.

We live in tents down here. It is warm but not too warm.
August Valentine Meyers

Reprint from THE SUNFIELD SENTINEL of November 22, 1917

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin of The Sebewa Association; Volume 18, December 1982, Number 3. Submitted with written permission of Grayden D. Slowins, Editor:

WORLD WAR I BLUES – From the SUNFIELD SENTINEL OF January 10, 1918:
My Tuesdays are meatless, My Wednesdays are wheatless, I’m getting more eatless each day. My home is heatless, My bed is sheetless, They’re all sent to the Y. M. C. A. The barrooms are treatless, My coffee is sweetless, Each day I grow thinner and wiser. My stockings are feetless, My trousers are seatless, By Heck! But I do hate the Kaiser.

1918 SMUGNESS

ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO: Nobody had a silo. Operations were rare. Nobody swatted the fly. Nobody had appendicitis. Nobody sprayed orchards. Nobody wore white shoes. Cream was 5 cents a pint. Cantaloupes were muskmelons. Advertisers did not tell the truth. Milk shake was the favorite drink. You never heard of a Tin Lizzie. Doctors wanted to see your tongue. The hired girl drew one fifty a week. Nobody listened in on a telephone. Farmers came to town for their mail. Nobody cared for the price of gasoline. Folks said pneumatic tires were a joke. The butcher threw in a chunk of liver. Strawstacks were burned instead of baled. People thought English Sparrows were birds. There were no sane 4ths nor electric meters. Jules Verne was the only convert to submarines. Publishing a country newspaper was not a business. You stuck tubes in your ears to hear a phonograph and it cost a dime.

AT CHRISTMAS WE CAN “GO HOME AGAIN” by Zack York

There is often something sad and melancholy about remembering the old days. Nostalgia can be self-indulgent, even maudlin. Whatever therapy or purgation might accrue in looking backward is lost in the wave of homesickness, which I frankly admit, springs from our failing to draw with sensitivity and perception, the line between sentiment and sentimentality.

As I remember it, after Thanksgiving, most of December was highlighted by the outdoor winter games we played at noon and recess, and practicing for the Christmas Program. Following any fresh snowfall Fox and Geese and Cut the Pie---both a variation of the game involving the chase, the hunter and the hunted, someone who was IT and the lucky ones who weren’t. Sliding down hill was fun and although the hill in the schoolyard was really only a gentle slope, a great deal of excitement and sustained competition could be generated in establishing long distance records or the belly-floppers and a particular sled. My sled was called FIREFLY and others bore such names as FLY AWAY, CHAMPION and SNOW FLAKE. Some were old and the names were no longer legible. Helen, my sister’s sled was one of these which she had inherited from our brother, John. Often the big kids were the belly-floppers and championed us young ones by using our sleds and vying for the distinction of establishing records by coasting the greatest distance. I can remember how proud I was when Allen Cross belly-flopped my FIRE FLY to become the school champion.

Another favorite activity at recess and noon hour was building snow forts. I think we had more fun constructing them than we ever did in waging battle and capturing the enemy stronghold. Victory, of course, included reducing the fortification to a pile of snow, the last evidence of winter’s fun remaining when the January thaw bared the rest of the schoolyard or the spring rains came.

Recalling childhood memories can come uncomfortably close to sentimentality, but those of you who enjoy a nostalgic journey back to your childhood, if that childhood was spent on a farm, in the twenties, would find pleasure in reading A NOSTALGIC ALMANAC by Edna Hong. Her childhood in rural Wisconsin was much like that of us who were brought up on a farm in Sebewa, Ionia County, Michigan. This author says, in her chapter December “The whole month of December seems to have been spent getting ready for the Christmas Program….for rural school teachers were judged, not by good teaching, but on good Christmas Programs……and the verdict was “good program, good teacher” or “poor program, poor teacher”.

Considering the hullabaloo often raised today regarding the relationship of prayer in the schools to Church and State, I’m sure that if the one-room school at Sebewa Center were still operating today and were to put on a Christmas Program like the ones I remember, somebody would get up on his soap-box and either the teacher or the school board would be called to time for allowing religion to be a part of the daily program of the school---especially during the Christmas season.

At the Center, the Methodist Church is just across the road from the school, and for as long as I can remember, the children of the church and the school collaborated on the program. The teacher and the “scholars” prepared the major part of the program, which was always presented in the church some evening prior to Christmas. The preacher always gave an invocation at the opening of the program. (The Center church was one of his three charges---Sebewa Corners and Sunfield being the other two.)

His reward was usually a generous assortment of presents from his flock; recently butchered meat, a live rooster and an assortment of fresh baked goods and cans of preserved fruits and vegetables.

The Christmas story from Luke appeared early in the program and was read by either the preacher, the Sunday School Superintendent or one of the “big” kids. A song by the “Young People’ Sunday School Class” concluded the part of the program not prepared by the teacher. The school’s part of the program usually began with a song by the entire school. Interspersed throughout the remainder of the program were songs by the “big kids”, sons by the “little kids”, and maybe a solo or duet if there were voices strong enough to be heard or that could stay on pitch. They were all accompanied by piano, while I was in school, by Minnie Gunn, who always had problems seeing the music through her bifocals. There were recitations, plays and playlets and the usual Christmas acrostic with each child speaking his piece at the conclusion of which he held up a large cardboard letter covered with red paper. Sometimes the letters spelled MERRY CHRISTMAS, especially if there were fourteen kids in grades one to three. They were considered the “little kids”. Fourth graders were automatically “big kids” because they didn’t go home at the last recess, but stayed until four o’clock.

We were fortunate at the Center to have a raised platform at the front of the church. Although the altar rail separated it from the audience, the rostrum was a definite improvement over the temporary platforms most country schools had to construct from boards and planks laid across sawhorses. A temporary platform was not only noisy but was sure to prove precarious and tip at an inappropriate time during the program. A heavy wire was strung across the front of the church and sheets pinned together were suspended by big safety pins, and pulled noisily open and shut by some child, who was especially privileged to be the curtain puller.

We always drew names to exchange gifts and thus each child was assured of getting at least three gifts when Santa Claus came at the end of the exercises. He received one present from one of his peers who had drawn his name (the present was not to exceed ten cents), one from the teacher; and a small box of candy, peanuts in their shucks and pop corn from the Sunday School. There was always eager anticipation of drawing the name of some one we liked and the bitter disappointment when we drew, instead, the name of one of the children who was not popular, or who was always one of the last picked when we chose up sides for games, or who fell into the category of being a victim of the many cruelties of which children can be guilty.

Getting the Christmas tree was the responsibility of the Sunday School Superintendent and the decorating was usually left up to the Young Peoples’ Sunday School Class. The tree had to be a reasonably tall one in order to show up properly in the front of the church. There was often difference of opinion on how much should be spent from the church treasury for the tree. The best solution, of course, was to get somebody to donate the tree with the privilege of taking it home after the program. This was all very well if the date of the program fell a day or so before the 25th. For many of the families in our community, the Christmas tree at the church was the only Christmas they had. There wasn’t another decorated tree at home.

Once, before my time, there was a well shaped Christmas tree in our front yard. (It was an arbor vitae tree, but because it was an evergreen we always called it the Christmas tree). One Christmas my father was on the Sunday School Christmas tree committee. He grew impatient with others in the group who were reluctant to spend any money and when nobody volunteered to buy one, he said, “For Heaven’s sake, you can cut the top out of the Arbor Vitae in my front yard”. Thinking he would shame the chairman into buying a tree, he made the offer not quite sincerely. Instead, the stingy old codger took him at his work and appeared in our front yard later that day when my father was not at home, and to my mother’s horror cut out the top of the tree before she was aware of what he was up to.
Of course the high point of the evening was the coming of Santa Claus and there was always a good deal of conjecture as to who was the person behind the Santa Claus mask, wearing the red suit, heavily padded with pillows. The more successfully Santa’s identity was hidden, the greater was the pleasure of old and young alike. The big kids especially prided themselves if they guessed who was Santa Claus, bragging that they had “kept their eyes peeled” and seen so and so slip out before the program was over to get dressed up. Everybody enjoyed the guessing game and once in a while the Santa Claus committee buffaloed everybody. They would bring in some one from outside the neighborhood and Santa’ identity remained a mystery until somebody “in the now’ let the cat out of the bag.

It was a good think that there was a week or so of vacation following the Christmas Program and that we didn’t have to go back to school until the Monday after New Year’s Day. The interim gave us a chance to simmer down from the excitement of Christmas.

We filled the long winter days with sliding down hill and ice skating. At our place we were blessed by having two ponds for skating and a good hill for coasting. We never lacked for things to do on the farm. Our lives were filled with school and chores and church on Sunday. After the Christmas season we looked forward to the next big event on the calendar. These highlights between Christmastides were the last day of school, the Sunday School picnic, the Fourth of July and at the end of the summer, the Ionia Free Fair. Sprinkled in between were lesser events such as birthdays, family reunions and neighborhood picnics. With the start of school, it wasn’t long until Thanksgiving and Suddenly Christmas would be upon us. It is still the big event of the year and as we have grown older it has become a time when we enjoy the memories of Christmases past. Perhaps it is the one time when we can prove Thomas Wolf wrong and we can “go home again”. End

THE JOHN LICH SR. INTERVIEW CONTINUED:

(Editor’s note; Lucille Sindlinger Warren thinks that John “over-remembered the incident of the well for her parents. She says that her husband, Ken Warren, augered the well in 1946 and a short time later installed a pressure pump and the bathroom in the immediate postwar years when plumbing supplies were scarce.)

Fred Sindlinger was giving me a break by charging only four per cent interest when he could as well have had six at that time. That included 340 acres. Fred and Nora continued to live at the farm.

We farmed the muck crops all those years. For help we had Jamaicans, we had prisoners of war, we had Mexicans and we had that group of local ladies who did a beautiful job in harvesting our crops. All this time I was buying onions with Floyd. He would buy onions until wintertime when he went to Florida. Then he would give me $5,000 and say, “I have bought so many cars of onions at Sheridan, Clarksville and Sunfield and you can take care of the shipping.” I would ship them all winter, first by rail out of Lake Odessa, Clarksville or even Edmore. Over the years the shipping was all turned to trucks. We had a broker at St. Johns who would send out semis to haul them. McGuffy was at Gun Lake and he was the guy we bought the onions for---Michigan Land Co.

Floyd would come back from Florida in the spring and I’d give him the $5,000 back and we would split the profit. That kept his business going and I had something to do in winter, buying a lot of onions and getting to know a lot of people.

While Floyd was in Florida, he was always looking around for an opportunity. He found 120 acres available on Lake Como. He bought that 120 acres for $40 an acre. Then he wanted McGuffy and me to have a part of that because we were in business together. By that time we had the truck crops and a few potatoes. Also I had started in the hog business and had some sheep on the Sindlinger farm to browse some of the fields we wanted to clear. Floyd asked Nell and me to come to Florida to look at the Lake Como land. We got Nell’s parents to come here and stay with the kids while we went to Florida for two weeks. Floyd said that Carl McGuffy wanted the west side and I could take my choice of the middle or east side. Floyd had talked of a kind of a park there. I said I would take the east side.

Floyd was a fantastic man. He said, “I’ll set a price on it of $4,000 for that 40 acres and put it on a 10-year contract with payments of $160. That amounts to 4% interest and all you pay me is that $160 for ten years and you will own the place.” Later he died and made me administrator of his estate. I handled his estate here and in Clarksville but in Florida it is required that the administrator be blood relative, so Loretta finished it up there. A couple of years later my contract was up and Vera and I went to see Loretta to pay her the $4,000. She said that Floyd always said that when the contract was up I would have the place and she would give me a deed to it. When Floyd died he did not have it in his will that I was to have the place. But she insisted it was to be that way. So then I told her that as long as she lived I would pay her $160 each December and that is the way it has been.

The next year after Floyd bought the Florida land he got a bulldozer and cleared the place. In 1956 after the November election here we took our whole family and went to Florida for a month. We rented a house to stay in and we planted our orange trees. Floyd had everything ready and he took care of the planting afterward. When Floyd died, Carl took care of the grove for a while. When I quit farming I took care of the oranges, including Carl’s, for now he is 87 although he still helps at it.

We went to Florida the first time for a week, the next time for two weeks. I would have to arrange my hog farming so that they were not pigging when we wanted to go.

Charlie Colby, the Clarksville banker, got 40 acres adjoining us at Lake Como and he put a little house on it. It was arranged so that one month we could have it, another he would be there and one month his sister, Leona, who worked in his bank, would be there. That took up January, February and March. Finally in 1967 we built our A frame house. All the kids came down and helped. Don and Elaine Nash, Kendall Cross---our kids---we once had fifteen there helping with the house.

We stayed farming here until Nell got sick. The A frame was 24’ x 24’. The timbers we got in Tampa where they had come by boat from Oregon. I spent the summer collecting materials for building and finally loaded the big truck with all those things for the building. The main timbers we had planed and then gave them a varnish finish before we erected them. We had bought here a bent (100 sheets) of plywood from Sherm. We built that house from February 5 to April 5. Neil Huizenga came and helped me. The next year we brought the furniture we had collected and even had a tractor on that load. I still use that tractor in the orange grove.

When Nell got sick I was still farming but the livestock were gone and the farming was all corn, wheat and soy beans. By that time we were six months here and six months in Florida. I had had the mix-mill business. Allen Cross had helped me put the mills up all over the state. That was kind of petering out and I didn’t want to be away from home that much anymore.

Nell passed away and I was here by myself. Then one of my nephews married one of Vera’s daughters. They asked me to come to Chicago in the fall and asked me how I was getting along. I had to admit I was pretty much by myself. The new bride said, “I sure wish you could meet my mother. She is in California by herself.” Nell’s sister said, “She’s a real nice lady.” She gave me her name and address and telephone number and said, “Now it’s up to you”.

So finally I called her one time and I went out there and met Vera. I don’t know how the Lord ever did that. She has been a wonderful wife. We tried to farm the first year. I didn’t want to move in the house where Nell and I had lived, so I sold that to Joyce and Rich Tuitman. Joyce was Nell’s favorite niece. John and Shirley were living in Nora’s house since Nora died; Ken and Evelyn David were living at Coats Grove; Linda was working in Grand Rapids so none of the children wanted the place. We bought a motor home and parked between the pine trees on the old Sindlinger farm. That summer we planted the crops and Vera enjoyed it but she was never a farm girl. We had a wedding invitation from a nephew in California. John offered to harvest the wheat, leaving the corn and soy beans for me to handle when we came home.

While we were idling at Laguna Beach I said to Vera, “The bloom of farming is all off now”. Everything on the farm was what Nell and I had done together. We were reading THE BANNER, our church magazine. In it was an ad asking for an agriculturist for a mission in Mexico. Before Vera went to California she had worked for the BACK TO GOD HOUR as the Spanish secretary for the Spanish speaking minister. Because she was born in Italy and knew Italian, they had sent her to school to learn Spanish as a Secretary. She knew Spanish well.

We talked it over and I called the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids. The Grand Rapids people knew me from my association with the Portland Christian Reformed Church. They had sent a missionary to Mexico and he had started little churches. The people there were hungry. If you asked a woman how many children she had, she would list five dead and four living or three dead and two living, on that order. The missionary had asked for the Church to send some agriculturists. A young fellow from Michigan State University and one from Ohio State University were there. They wanted them to teach the Mexicans to raise crops. They got into the land that had once been home to the Mayas. It was beautiful land but all grown up and they had to bulldoze it all down. They were going to buy a big D 8 Caterpillar tractor for $150,000. I said I had had a couple of Caterpillars when I was on the farm. They asked if I would go down there and volunteer a couple of years to get the project on the road. We said, “Yes”.

John and Johnnie came running over to our motor home on the Sindlinger place on the motorcycle for coffee one day. I said, “We have decided we are going to quit farming, would you like to buy the place?”

John replied, “Yes, Dad, I’d like to keep it in the units.” We had all the ASC acreage allotments and to transfer it would not break up the arrangement. John said, “I would like to have it.”

By that time Ken and Evelyn wanted to buy the original 80 acres. So they were over there at Coats Grove and bought the Wallace eighty; John bought this here; Larry got a piece on Bippley Road and Linda got some money; she lives in Grand Rapids. With that taken care of, we took off.

In February we flew to Mexico to see what we had to do. After I saw the kind of trees they had there I thought I could get by with a brand new D 4 Caterpillar tractor. That would cost only $40,000. I was risking that my judgment might be wrong. We bought the new Cat in Peoria, Illinois, had it shipped to Mexico City and moved it on to Merida where we put it in a garage. We put it in a shop after we arrived there in April and had a cab welded on the tractor and put rippers on the blade like Phil Spitzley had, so that when he backed up it would rip the roots out. We hired a truck and had the tractor hauled 150 miles into the bush to a little town 25 miles inland from the Yucatan city of Campeche on the Gulf of Mexico. We went there. They started a cooperative of 22 men. The idea was to give each of them two hektares (5 acres) of cleared land and in turn they had two haktares that they worked for the Church. Cal Lubbers was the agriculturist. He told me the rains would come on May 15 though it was still dry in April.

We started bulldozing at 110 degrees in the heat of the day. I worked there every day at that. I called for some help. They sent me a man from Grand Rapids, a young fellow who was attending Reformed Bible College. He was from Iowa. His father had an Oliver business and the boy had run a Caterpillar in Iowa. He came to Mexico and he would take over the Cat when I would leave and do a little more before I came to work in the morning. I had a big John Deere disc to chop up the soil and we had a piece of railroad steel we dragged behind the disc to level the ground. The rains did not come until June. We got sixty some acres of land ready for the 22 men.

I trained two men, one 22 years old and one 34 years old to run that tractor. They learned how to drain the oil, how to use the hour-meters and keep watch of the filters. We have gone back there every year since we were there in 1973-74. We bought the motor home and took it to the project rather than living in a house where I would have to drive to reach the place. The Church paid our expenses though we volunteered our time.

Vera was asked to teach the Maya people to speak Spanish so they could sell their crops in the market. They knew some Spanish but they could not talk or figure in the market place. Vera went with me three days a week to the village to teach Spanish. Their animals were kept in the villa a mile away from the crop land. There were seven Maya temples that the government was unaware of. The boys had dug around in them a couple of years before we got there because they had heard that the Gringos wanted stuff out of there. They said all they got was some broken pottery because much earlier, the Spaniards had looted the valuables.

Today they have sold the Caterpillar and they have two big John Deere tractors. They have five irrigation wells and 600 acres under cultivation. They are raising corn, soy beans and peanuts. Their diet had been mostly corn, all carbohydrates, and I was trying to teach them to grow some crops with protein. Now they have a great big granary made of posts with a raised floor to protect it from rats. All their corn is shelled and placed in big coffee bags. They are a grain exporting community now. Instead of 22 families in the cooperative there are now forty.

The next year we went into the mountains in Wahakah (spelling?). There were coffee growers there. They wanted us to teach them to raise some variety of crops. I had a garden plot there. A Mexican doctor loaned his tractor for fitting it. We were there a year helping them raise hogs and chickens. We got a hog setup going that has worked into a big deal for their supplementary income.

For all the good experience of farming in Sebewa and all our many friends there, the mission work in Mexico has been the most rewarding thing the both of us have every experienced. You can imagine the friends you make. We have had people from there come to Florida to visit us and we go back there to visit and keep up our contacts with the projects.

We had quite a decision to make a year ago. The Church wanted an agriculturist to go to Bangaladesh. We struggled with that for three months. I would have liked to have gone but they wanted a commitment of six years and at our age that seemed overwhelming. They also have a project in Sierra Leone in Africa. Perhaps some younger people can take on those jobs while we help support them as we can.
John Lich, Lake Como, Florida 32057

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR; Bulletin of the Sebewa Center Association;
February 1983, Volume 18, Number 4: (Submitted with written permission of editor, Grayden D. Slowins)

THE MICROFILM READER AT THE SUNFIELD LIBRARY

The Sunfield Library is about to have a microfilm reader. To those of you who have not used this kind of instrument, it is time to get acquainted. Microfilming is photographing on a reel of film of newspapers, magazines or whatever is desirable.

When the reel is in place on the machine, the film can be read on the screen that faces the operator. Microfilming is desirable because the film reels take up little storage space in relation to the material copied. A shoebox of film storage holds all of the SUNFIELD SENTINELS from 1896 to 1934. Compared to the cost of reproducing those issues of the paper in print, the film is very inexpensive.

During the past year those early volumes of the SENTINEL have been microfilmed and the film is available for use at the library. A copy is retained at the State Library in Lansing for use there or for loan to other libraries on request. Similarly, other local newspapers throughout Michigan have been microfilmed and can be borrowed from the State Library by local libraries when you make a request for them.

Census records, too, are on microfilm and those records for Eaton and Ionia Counties are soon to be available at the Sunfield Library. When you look at a census reel you are seeing the record in the handwriting of the census taker for the years of 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900 and 1910. Walter Reed told me that as a young man, he took census for half of Sebewa Township in 1910. I remember Louise Gunn and Henry Whorley doing the same in 1920. The census records are released after 70 years of confidentiality. This gold mine of information is shortly to be available at the Sunfield Library. Portland Library also has a microfilm reader. Make the most of it!

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR; Bulletin of the Sebewa Center Association;
April 1983, Volume 18, Number 5: (Submitted with written permission of editor, Grayden D. Slowins)

GETTING AROUND By Grayden Slowins - In January the Sebewa Township officers attended the Michigan Townships Association convention at the Dearborn Hyatt Regency Hotel. The last morning of the session I went down to the coffee shop alone for breakfast and sat next to a fellow about my age with similar graying hair and beard. As usual the greeting was, “Where are you from and what office do you hold?”

He replied, “Theron Parker, Supervisor from Cadillac”.
“And from what township?”
“Haring” was his reply.

I asked, “are you familiar with the story of the man who founded Haring and owned the sawmill, general store and post office and invented a steam locomotive adapted to logging there?”

“Well, I know about Ephraim Shay and his steam locomotive, although I hadn’t realized he started the town, too. The building he used as a general store and post office was only recently torn down. (It was still there across from the cemetery when I visited Haring in 1976). The upstairs had always been the Town Hall. Many people in the community were married and buried from that hall. No one seemed interested in following my suggestion to form an historical society and make the building into a museum. So they just tore it down, after all those years. Sad”. “How do you know about Ephraim Shay and Haring Township?” he asked.

I replied, “He lived in our township and learned about steam engines at the Gunn sawmill. He founded a town just south of us, similar to Haring, and called it Shaytown.”
What is your township?”
“Sebewa”.
“Sebewa? I know Sebewa! I went to school there two years. Back in the Great Depression. Times were extra tough in the poor, sandy farmland around Haring. Dad made a few extra bucks as a horse trader. Mother was a school teacher, but couldn’t find a school to teach. She wrote to the State School Superintendent and he put her in touch with the Halladay school. There were ten of us kids. The seven oldest stayed on the farm with Dad. The three youngest came to Sebewa with Mother and lived in a rented farmhouse. She taught the Halladay school for two years. We got home once in a while on weekends or Dad came down. I can’t remember what house we lived in nor who owned it.”

“I was the oldest of the three younger kids and I started school there. The only other kids I can remember were from a big family, very poor, named Jarvis.”
“Jarman?” I suggested.
“That’s it! Jarman. Years later, after WWII, we seven brothers had a spray painting rig and painted barns in Ionia County and all over Michigan. Big white stars on the barn doors was our trademark. One Saturday night I was driving up M 66 and picked up a hitchhiker. It was Bob Jarman, who had been in my class in first and second grades.”

Time and mobility gives Sebewa connections all around the state, the country and the world. One of Ephraim Shay’s locomotives is on display in the Cadillac park. It is in need of restoration work.

POOR HOUSE CEMETERY UPDATE by Robert W. Gierman

Learning about the country poor house system from what have been obscure records has been an interesting experience. You might think that to find out about the County Poor House, inquiry at the Court House from county officials would open the records. But what records? Nobody had ever heard of any!

One clue did develop. Somebody remembered that Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Gibson of Ionia had been the last custodians at the poor farm. I made a call at the Gibsons, now in their 80’s. From them I learned that under administrations previous to theirs, the poor house had been far from an ideal place for homeless and often near helpless people. With the advent of the convalescent home care in the 1930’s, minimal though many times it was, the burden for admission to the poor farm lessened Better standards for poor house care had brought State Fire Marshall condemnation of upper floor use of Ionia’s poor house. The poor farm idea was on the decline.

After more visits with the Gibsons I learned that there was a poor house book---a ledger of entries, deaths and discharges. Mrs. Gibson had tried to give the book to Ionia County officials and/or the library. She found nobody interested in such records. The book was left at the building at the time the property transferred to the Department of Natural Resources. D. N. R. had no notion of maintaining a poor house or anything like it. To get on with their plans for a new state park, the building was razed and when the bulldozers left, no trace of the poor house remained.

So, back to D. N. R. where I had gotten the copper box with its corner stone contents on a previous visit. “Yes, there had been a poor house record book.” If I would be patient they would try to locate it. Next day the phone call came saying that the book had been sent to the State Archives on North Logan Street in Lansing.

At the Archives I found the book in its permanent home---nobody could remove it---with a wealth of information in its many pages. The record began in 1884, some 28 years after the establishment of the first poor farm in Ronald Township in 1856. Here were entered the names of the “inmates”, their ages and dates of birth, nationalities and reasons for commitment and what township or political unit was responsible. If there was a death, date was given with a notation of “burial on farm”, or “friends or family took the body” or “sent to Ann Arbor”. Apparently the medical school at the University did not lack for cadavers for student training.

Thumbing through the pages was enough for one afternoon. In a day or two, Marge Smith went with me to make a record of burials. We found the names of 44 people who had been “buried on farm” in the almost forgotten quarter acre cemetery in Ronald Township. No doubt the graves had been marked with simple wooden crosses as those on the Riverside Drive location had been later. None of those crosses survive. That little cemetery has been left to itself enough so that little rows of depressions clearly show where there were graves. This is the cemetery that is now in County ownership and is scheduled for fencing in the coming summer season.

After the 1907 fire that destroyed the poor house at the Ronald Township location, the records move to the Berlin Township site on Riverside Drive. Somebody saved the record book from the fire. There we find the first burial in the “new cemetery” was that of John Grinels, who died July 4, 1908. Records of 55 other burials follow to the last notation being that of William Peplar, who died February 15, 1934. Perhaps there was the last burial there, but considering that those were depression years, it seems more likely that careless record keeping might be the better explanation. From 1934 on, there was a change in the way the records were entered.

Another visit to the Gibson home disclosed that some of the later records had been kept at their home. Mrs. Gibson made a search and found several entry pads and index cards from which I got a list of 500 names of entrants from 1928 to 1967. There was some duplication of names but allowing for that, the number for the period was well over 400. This covered the time when the people of our big wave of immigration of the 1890’s were nearing the end of their lives. There were many entries of foreign born people. These records, too, I took to the State Archives for sasfe-keeping.

We have a sort of promise that these records of the Ionia County Commissioners of the Poor will one day be microfilmed so that they can again become available locally. Perhaps in these days of tight state budgets it is too much to hope that the microfilming will be soon. My impression is that there at least 200 pages in the book.

As a result of all this stir, another development has shed some light on the history of that quarter and burial plot in Ronald. The first settler in Ronald Township was Joshua Shepard. This is noted in the Schenck History of Ionia and Montcalm Counties. Shepard took up land from the U. S. Government. Perhaps pioneering in that forested wilderness was too much for him. From a descendant of his we now learn that he died and was buried on his farm in 1837. Court House records show that title to the farm went from Shepard to David Baldie. In 1856, Baldie sold the farm to the County of Ionia for its first poor farm. Baldie, however, made a reservation that the little quarter acre for cemetery purposes and that is the last entry in the Register of Deeds office for the cemetery. In 1907 the County sold the farm, the cemetery excepted, to Normington, Normington to Welch and Welch to Wittenbach. With no other claimants, the three adjoining property owners have now quit claimed it in favor of Ionia County.

Somehow we have to raise some money to set up a marker on each of those cemeteries---perhaps even list the names of the known burials---to protect them from other use by unknowing persons in the future. Wish us luck and a financial boost if you feel inclined.
~ Robert W. Gierman

A FEARFUL FALL from THE PORTLAND OBSERVER of April 1, 1873:

Last Tuesday evening, just after dark, William Conkrite, a boy about 12 years old, son of William Conkrite of this village, was crossing the Centerline Bridge in Danby in a buggy when his horse became frightened of some object ahead and commenced backing. There was no railing on the bridge at that spot, and instead of going straight back, the buggy cramped and ran off at the side of the bridge.

As the two wheels dropped down, they fell to the water below, a distance of about twelve feet. As he came to the surface, he looked up and saw the horse and buggy coming down directly upon him. Being a good swimmer, he brought all his muscle to bear in that direction, and, with a couple of swoops toward shore he barely got from under as the horse and buggy struck the water, the horse going under, just brushing his clothes. He soon made shore but being dripping wet and a blinding snowstorm raging, he was unable to do anything toward rescuing the horse alone, and as he started for the nearest house to get help he could hear the horse struggling in the water, which was at least ten feet deep and full of anchor ice, with the bank too abrupt for any possibility of the animal getting out.

Upon arriving at the house of Mr. Saxton, that gentleman, with three or four neighbors went to search for the horse and buggy. After searching for over half an hour without finding any trace of him, they concluded that the horse must have drowned and all returned home except Mr. Saxton, who determined to make one more effort, and, going upstream about 40 rods from the bridge, found the horse standing on some ice near the shore with the buggy right side up and everything all right; the only articles missing being the buffalo robe and whip.

Mr. Saxton took the horse to his barn and cared for it properly and then started for the village to see if the boy, who, after putting on a pair of dry pants, which Mrs. Saxton had furnished him, left the house while that lady was in another room getting more dry garments for him, had arrived safely. Before getting far on his journey he was met by the boy’s father on his way to look for the horse, his boy having gotten home and related his adventures.

Although badly chilled, having walked over six miles, facing a driving storm with all his wet clothes on except the pants, Willie was all right and the next morning, having taken not so much as a slight cold.

The escape of all three, the boy, horse and buggy; going through what they did and coming out without a scratch, is almost a miracle. That horse and boy, if they should see fit to continue in their line of exploits, could doubtless soon excel the renowned Sam Patch. END