803
24
26018
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7edda4803992076776a49c8bfb4df36d.jpg
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00018
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of the family of painter Mathias Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Family portrait of painter Mathias Alten, his wife Bertha, and daughters Ella, Camelia, and Viola.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/aba841b9f1f5b649d9a69fd6f549500c.jpg
5d6d8c5975776ee85828071473a80e96
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00017
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of Camelia Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of Camelia Alten, daughter of painter Mathias Alten, with her cat.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2413dd1cbff11d9c1f0750d36710fb80.jpg
99aeb8777154138edface179da93cfa1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00016
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten and daughter Viola
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten and his daughter Viola.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/535345457c3b34d54becb66874936f58.jpg
79718079044e89f6045b1da26424d2f4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00015
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
VanCamben?
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e82e4d815cc356f18978d062804db322.jpg
e1f1af5b590e89416294755fc5e0eef4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00014
Title
A name given to the resource
Home of painter Mathias Alten on the corner of Fuller and Hope in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Description
An account of the resource
Home of painter Mathias Alten on the corner of Fuller and Hope St. in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9dab893d61587fa72a2f5725f8013f6c.jpg
4691983b698d50aa095aa45bee0431fa
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00013
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten. Photograph is cut and mounted in diamond shape.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/bc3cdbf39fb243e7578fb35514d5fea0.jpg
1e54790cd154ae8cfa691ec13a481171
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00012
Title
A name given to the resource
Passport photograph of painter Mathias Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Passport photograph of painter Mathias Alten (seated right), Forest Emerson Mann (standing), and an unidentified sculptor (seated left) taken in Seville, Spain.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1912
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/01b5bc822dcf2a1a5c0adbebe6d174bc.jpg
5fed01d6988f5b72894fcc46f2ef32ad
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00011
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten and Rudy Heubner
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Noble, T. F.
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten and friend Rudy Heubner, 1893.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1893
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2cc5df74b895e0ae787b068011ef18f4.jpg
665adbc15d2178b35e9d163846bdf90f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00010
Title
A name given to the resource
Picture post card of painter Mathias Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten on picture post card.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5b86ee69d053edc1f3f7ea3abd862ee6.jpg
74236c13073e27bf85cc283ac7530719
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00009
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Noble, T.F.
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b1c8d554f942dcc6146d7644e75160bf.jpg
0a3c4837c5277c4555b21aa8afdc205d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00008
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Noble, T.F.
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1893
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/cbbdc407a6fead313a20b341b013afeb.jpg
ff6a05a687e16e86a1a6913610bf9640
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00007
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias Alten painting portrait in Grand Rapids studio
Description
An account of the resource
Painter Mathias Alten working on portrait of friend and neighbor Carl Bornecrantz? in his Grand Rapids studio.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d2d103ec7cf3a9565db9807c4983405d.jpg
387940c2286cfedbd83a9b5a0e3a7662
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00006
Title
A name given to the resource
Tally card from 17th wedding anniversary celebration
Description
An account of the resource
Illustrated tally card from the 17th wedding anniversary celebration of the marriage of Bertha Alten and painter Mathias Alten, 1912. The card is punched with 5 holes.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1912
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/80d049801fdf5e108053d98a31567ed1.jpg
451e98ea897572369b89bcfdc3ebbd38
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00005
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8dadfb33e36b2f4d253431722b832a53.jpg
67526f7d7c0cf3497e5be4f40ee988a1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00004
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/42ab0996ae4b1903cf03f0e5dde71b5e.jpg
1f8e21442f27ed493897e66715908d36
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00003
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0c5887ff850bad2601c6897d19819ca4.jpg
480510db808f0b3e6dbc22492b49ed2a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00002
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a6840d81198c167f9edb3e88c3a4adbf.jpg
59b50c067baed5770747be56aeea0457
Dublin Core
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Title
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Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
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Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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Image/jpg
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eng
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Image
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RHC-28
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1893 - 1929
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A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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RHC-28_MAlten_00001
Title
A name given to the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten
Description
An account of the resource
Portrait of painter Mathias Alten.
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
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eng
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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Image
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image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/1960b9f91441cfe4168a59ab45e08a39.pdf
c66eded7fb281d407779de9628210891
PDF Text
Text
Grand Valley State University Special Collections
Kent County Oral History collection, RHC-23
Gerritt VandenBosch
Tape # (7:54)
Interviewer: When did you come over to this country?
VandenBosch: We came in on, we arrived in New York on Memorial Day, 1920, in… New York
and from there we went to Inwood, Iowa, where a second cousin of my father lived, and we
stayed there for a few weeks until we found a place to live.
Interviewer: Did you have a problem finding a place?
VandenBosch: Not at that time because they arranged it, but it was right near their home in the
country on a farm.
Interviewer: Oh, this is of course what we have studied and we hear just the opposite. Did your
father have any problems with jobs? Did you just primarily farm?
VandenBosch: No it, this was after the war, after World War One and we were living in a time of
inflation then as we are right now, it was a period very similar, and he did have a problem
finding work because he had not farmed in the Netherlands. But he worked by the day, in
Inwood, in that area. He did some construction work, helped some farmers, anything he could
get a hold of at the time.
Interviewer: Did the, were the people that lived around you Dutch also? I mean, was like a
community?
VandenBosch: Most of them were, yes. Yes, it was a smaller Dutch community.
Interviewer: Let me see…did you feel discriminated at all because you were an
immigrant?..maybe at that age…
VandenBosch: Not there at first, remember I was only eight-years-old.
Interviewer: That’s true.
VandenBosch: And so I really don’t recall, but I don’t think that was true anyway. I don’t think
there was discrimination as we see it in many areas since that time, other races.
Interviewer: Was your family mobile, I mean was there the ability to move around the country?
Of course, like you say it was a time of inflation.
VandenBosch: You mean as far as transportation was concerned, or…?
Interviewer: Right, and well did you move like from city to city, like in years…?
�VandenBosch: Yes, but not as often. The rate of people moving I think today, is something like
the every five years, the average isn’t it? At that time I don’t think it was anywhere near that,
probably once in every ten or twelve years. But we moved to Inwood and lived there for a very
short time and then we moved to Steam Minnesota, and we lived there for a very short time and
we moved Sault Center, Iowa. And that was, all these communities were not too far apart, but we
lived in Sault Center Iowa for only a very short time and my father died. See we arrived in 1920,
and in January of 1922 my father died, and he didn’t like this country. He would’ve moved back
for anything in the world.
Interviewer: Why? Do you know?
VandenBosch: Well I think for one reason was that he couldn’t find the kind of work that he was
accustomed to in the Netherlands. And it was a time of inflation, prices were skyrocketing. They
had just a little money when they came and everything was used up on just the necessary things
to start a home, and so he couldn’t find the work, I think this was mostly it. And he had
intentions of going to Chicago, finding something to do and earning enough money to go back,
but he died.
Interviewer: How, who took care of you?
VandenBosch: Well my mother was left alone of course with five of us, I was the oldest and the
neighbors were very good, they understood he was thirty-six-years-old when he died, see. So
they were sympathetic and helpful. But at the same time it was a real struggle for her. And we, I
remember that we got assistance from the county, as a widow’s pension, she got a widow’s
pension. Which was a very small pension, but it helped.
Interviewer: Well sure. How, boy in your case, how did the Depression affect you? I mean, what
really…?
VandenBosch: Well the Depression of course came a little later for us, and the height of the
Depression was just prior to the Roosevelt administration in 1932, it was when Hoover was
president and yes it affected everyone there, the farmers as well. Then I recall that when
Roosevelt was elected, the farm program at that time was that all the farmers because the price of
the meat and pork and everything was so low that all the farmers should kill all the little pigs that
they raised. And many people, there were conservative areas there, a conservative Dutch
community, and many people didn’t go along with that, and so they didn’t all participate in that
program because they couldn’t see killing these little pigs. But they did. After this became a
policy I remember that the farmer that I happened to be with, decided the following year not to
raise any pigs, that’s how he cooperated with it.
Interviewer: Boy, this is really interesting. Tell me about your experiences with World War II.
Did you serve…?
�VandenBosch: I was too young to really know what world, what? World War II? Oh, that’s
different.
Interviewer: You probably were…
VandenBosch: Well yes, I was married and we had a family then. And I was classified 3A,
because of my family and because I had worked in the defense plan. I was working at the
Winters and Crampton Company at that time, as a Precision Inspector in Grandville, Michigan.
Later on this became known as the Jervis (?) Corporation, but I worked as an inspector there.
Interviewer: Are you a member of the Dutch Immigrant Society?
VandenBosch: No I am not.
Interviewer: Oh, I just wondered. I was just curious.
Man: He was. He didn’t pay his dues.
VandenBosch: I was. I slipped, I slipped, I didn’t pay my dues and I was expelled.
Man: Yep…(muffled laugh)
Interviewer: I’m sorry I didn’t mean to…I was just…I was..
VandenBosch: No, we were just having a little fun here.
Interviewer: Do you make any trips back to the Netherlands?
VandenBosch: I never have, no I’ve never gone back, I hope sometime to get back.
Interviewer: What are your feelings about America today, as opposed, I mean do you feel any
differently as opposed to Depression times, I mean as far as any more loyalty to the Netherlands
then than you do now, or just because you’ve been, were so young and raised here, do you feel,
you don’t feel any different?
VandenBosch: Well I think that, as your parents trained you of course, you never lose that, well
that feeling for your place of birth, no matter where that is or how long you’ve departed from it,
it’s always been your place of birth and you have a certain loyalty to that. But being only eightyears-old, or seven when I arrived here you don’t have the same feeling as, for example, an older
person who has gone through all the political programs and knows more about the country than I
do.
Interviewer: Do you find any, this will kind of wind us up now I think, do you find any problems
now at all with any discrimination? Of course, nobody really knows that you’re, I mean, do you
think the Dutch right now, like for instance the members of the society, do they find any
problems?
�VandenBosch: I, I doubt it.
Interviewer: I mean accepting…
VandenBosch:I think there is a real acceptance on the part of the people of this area to the Dutch.
I think this would be true of other nationalities as well. I think there is a very good understanding
amongst the people here in that respect.
Interviewer: Very good. Thank you very much.
VandenBosch: You are welcome.
D
Depression, the · 2, 3
Dutch Immigrant Society · 3
W
Winters and Crampton Company · 3
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/64a9d667c17d048346729ff669aeedce.mp3
cb090309654996c7d6d1244abef0da02
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Grand Rapids Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Local histories
Memoirs
Michigan--History
Oral histories (document genre)
Description
An account of the resource
Taped and transcribed interviews conducted in the early 1970s primarily of the children and grandchildren of many of the founders of Grand Rapids, Michigan; many of whom were residents of the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Interviews were collected to develop a significant collection of oral resources that would supplement other primary and secondary local history materials. Initially funded as a private project, Grand Valley State College (now University) assumed responsibility for continuing the project until 1977.
Creator
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Various
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/452">Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
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application/pdf; audio/mp3
Language
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eng
Type
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Text; Sound
Identifier
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RHC-23
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1971 - 1977
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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RHC-23_VandenBosch
Title
A name given to the resource
VandenBosch, Gerritt
Creator
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VandenBosch, Gerritt
Description
An account of the resource
Gerritt VandenBosch arrived in New York on Memorial Day, 1920. From there he moved to Inwood, Iowa. He discusses being a Dutch immigrant during the Depression.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Michigan--History
Local histories
Memoirs
Oral histories (document genre)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Personal narratives
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Grand Valley State University
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Sound
Format
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application/pdf
audio/mp3
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/128a73014e7dc2064f78d7b188077d64.pdf
80aa0821e5cf63474bb4cc5f4cd6cac1
PDF Text
Text
1
Grand Valley State University Special Collections
Kent County Oral History collections, RHC-23
M.R. Bissell
Interviewed on Sept. 16, 1971
Edited and indexed by Don Bryant, 2010 – bryant@wellswooster.com
Tape #9 and 10: (43:22)
Biographical Information
Melville R. Bissell, Jr. was born in Grand Rapids on 7 April 1882. He was married on 29 April
1907 to Olive E. Bulkeley in Grand Rapids. Olive was the daughter of William F. Bulkeley and
Abby A. Marks natives of New York. She died on 6 August 1964 at the Bissell home at 350
Plymouth SE. Melville died on 20 December 1972 in Grand Rapids and is buried in Oak Hill
Cemetery. Melville and Olive had three daughters, Barbara, Anne and Eleanor.
His father, Melville R. Bissell, Sr. was born 25 September 1843 in Hartwick, Otsego County,
New York and died 15 March 1889 in Grand Rapids. He married Anna Sutherland on 29
November 1865 in De Pere, Wisconsin where Anna’s parents had moved to from Nova Scotia.
Anna was born 2 December 1846 in River John, Pictou County, Nova Scotia, the daughter of
William and Eleanor Sutherland. She passed away on 8 November 1934 at her home at 112
College Avenue SE, Grand Rapids. Besides Melville R., Jr., the Bissell’s were parents to
Dorothy A., Harvey S., Irving J. and a daughter, Lillie May who died at the age of seven years.
___________
Interviewer: Mr. Bissell, where did your family live in Grand Rapids?
Bissell: Originally they lived down on Sheldon Street, eighty-five Sheldon. That was the Bissell
home at that time. I was about, oh, seven years of age at that time, but I can remember it.
Interviewer: Where is eighty-five Sheldon, approximately; is the house still standing?
Bissell: The house is still standing. I can't tell you exactly where the streets are 'cause I don't
remember. Well I'll tell you, it is pretty near where, you know where the hotel is now, the hotel
on, the corner on one of those streets? I'd say it’s in the next block above the Woman's City
Club.
Interviewer: Oh, I see.
Bissell: That's where it was. We lived there until I was about seven years of age. It was in
eighty-nine or eighty-seven my father bought the house up on College Avenue; and it was fixed
up and we lived [in it] from then on. My father had caught cold and died of pneumonia at that
time, so he never lived up on College Avenue; he always lived on Sheldon Street.
Interviewer: Was your father born in Grand Rapids?
�2
Bissell: No; no he moved here. He moved here from Kalamazoo - mother and father and
grandfather moved up here. And the old house that they lived in was here for a good many
years; and now, of course, it’s got a building on it, [?across from?] St. Mark's Church. You
know where St. Mark's Church is? Well, it’s on that corner there; that was the old house that I
remember my grandmother and grandfather lived there; and we used to go there and see them.
Before that, that house was where the Post Office was. They moved that house out from the
Post Office site to build the Post Office down there - the old Post Office. You know where that
is. The house was originally built there.
Interviewer: How did your family get into the carpet sweeper business?
Bissell: Well, that's very simple; my father was in the business of china - had a china shop.
When they opened up the stuff there was a great deal of, you know, rubbish along with the
china, from the unpacking and all like that. He wanted to clean it up and he tried to get a box
and a brush that would do it. And that's the way he got started. It really started as a bare floor
proposition, but it didn't work so well on the bare floor as it did on the carpet. So, he started
making carpet sweepers. He kept right on and my mother worked right along with him and they
worked it out together.
Interviewer: When your father died, did your mother take over the business?
Bissell: Yes, she was always a business woman. Even in a lot of years when I was a young boy
growing up, she was interested in her children but she didn't want to take care of them. She had
someone take care of us and she did the business, she ran the sweeper company.
Interviewer: How long did she run that business?
Bissell: She ran it until I came along and took over.
Interviewer: When was that, sir?
Bissell: Oh, let's see; when did I start? I don't remember - a long time ago.
Interviewer: How old are you now?
Bissell: I'm nearly ninety.
Interviewer: When you lived on College Avenue, what was it like growing up there as a child?
Bissell: Well, it was fine. There was just a few houses, people had barns and had horses in them
and coachmen and everything for the horses. Automobiles; I can remember when automobiles
first came in. I knew every person that had an automobile at that time, and the make of car he
had. When you'd hear a car coming, you'd run out to the street to see it go by.
Interviewer: Do you remember the first car you ever saw?
�3
Bissell: Well, I think it was Charlie Judd’s; I think that was called the U.S. Long Distance or
something like that. I can't remember exactly the name of it.
Interviewer: Was it quite a thrill?
Bissell: Oh, I'll tell you, cars were scarce, there weren't very many of them. There weren't
probably more than three or four cars in Grand Rapids. People tried to make them, you know.
They'd take a light carriage and try to put a motor in it, connect it up; that wasn't very
satisfactory, though. They had to start and build them up from the beginning to really run.
Interviewer: Were there any people manufacturing cars here then?
Bissell: Well, Austin was the only car man that was making cars here. They were shipping them
in from Detroit and so forth. But, Austin was the only one making them, the Austin, and that
was a very good car and it was a large car. We had one and my wife's family had one and they
were good cars. But of course it had the Planetary System; they didn't have a gear shift. You
know what a Planetary System is? Well, it's a set of gears down under the foot boards of the car
that run there; and they throw a lever on, that is sort of like a brake, and they run through that.
Interviewer: Why did they call it the Planetary System?
Bissell: I don't know. That was the way they did it at that time; that's the only kind of cars that
were running at all, didn't have gear systems. Of course, the cars were [had] two sitting in front
and then you went around in the back and got in through a door that was about that wide, just
big enough to get through, and sat in there and sort of on an angle like this or like that. This was
the door here, and they shut this, and then they had another little door that dropped down so you
could sit on the door. You could take five people.
Interviewer: What was the reaction of horses to the first cars?
Bissell: Well, they didn't like them; they didn't like them, I shouldn't say that. They were scared
of them, of course they made quite a noise and they were scared of them. The regulations were
that if you were in a car coming, you had to slow down for horses; if they shied or showed any
scaredness, you had to stop. And, in fact, once in a while you had to get out and lead the horse
past the car.
Interviewer: What was it like living on College Avenue in those days? I mean, what was the
style of living like?
Bissell: Well, it was very quiet in there. When we bought this house we even lived in it at that
time the house was being fixed up. The house had been there for a long time. It was built, I
think, by Foster of Foster and Stevens. [In the 1868 city directory, Wilder D. Foster’s residence
was listed as 7 College-av. It was also described as located on the east side of College-av.
between Fulton and Rose – Rose being Cherry street at that time.] Originally we lived there in
his house. It was built in two sections, the first section had the back that was mostly wood and
the next section was a brick section. Mother, when I was a boy about eight or nine years old,
�4
ripped off the back and built a section of brick in there for the house. We had one tub, bath tub,
that was downstairs and in a little room off the hall and this was where we took our baths and
had some kind of a heater in there, run by gas and that would heat up the water for you. We
took our Saturday night baths there.
Interviewer: Were there many children in the neighborhood when you were growing up?
Bissell: Oh yes, quite a lot of them. Fred Pantlind, Ralph Voigt -Ralph Voigt lived directly
across the street from us. I knew Ralph Voigt very well. There was a boy who lived in that
small brick house right next to or three houses over from the Voigt's. I can't think of his name
now, but I used to play with him all the time. And later on when Fred Pantlind was born, they
came over and had a house right next to ours.
Interviewer: Did the families interact as well as the children? Did the families have activities
together?
Bissell: Oh yes, my mother was a widow and so she always had somebody with her. She had
her sister a great deal with her, her niece and people that lived there with her so as to be with
her because she didn't want to live alone. Of course, they did some bossing of the children
because we were pretty young at that time.
Interviewer: Did your mother attend parties that were given within society?
Bissell: Oh, yes, she would go to some of the parties that were given. Of course Kent Country
Club was in this house. This is the old club house. Kent Country Club was organized here
originally, it was a boat club, and a tennis club, and everything, and finally got into a golf club.
I think golf is [an] all the way around game here you know, when I was a boy.
Interviewer: Was it a very good course?
Bissell: Well, not good in the way the clubs are now, but it was all right.
Interviewer: Was golf a relatively new game at that time?
Bissell: Very. I'll tell you how golf started here. Mr. Blodgett or somebody went abroad, and
saw golf, and bought a set of clubs and brought them back here. Everybody that played golf
used that set of clubs. Then of course they had to make more of them and everybody had their
own sets.
Interviewer: You were just talking about Wealthy Street.
Bissell: Wealthy was originally right straight through into Reed's Lake, I mean Fisk Lake. Of
course, there wasn't any way for us but to go back that way and go along that [?] road. You
know where Mrs. Avery lives out there on Plymouth? [Corner of Plymouth and Lake Drive]
Well, that was the toll gate for this district. That was a toll road and that was the road that went
out to our farm and to Reed's Lake. And then the [Mr.] Hanchett came along and wanted to get
�5
out to Reed's Lake with his cars - streetcars - and so they had to curve around here to get to
around the lake.
Interviewer: So, instead of Wealthy Street ending up at Fisk Lake, they changed the road so it
ended up at Reed's Lake?
Bissell: Yes. Of course first it was a dummy line. Then they got the streetcars running out there.
Then you’ve got Ramona and all in there.
Interviewer: Did you buy this house?
Bissell Yes.
Interviewer: How long have you lived here?
Bissell: About forty years.
Interviewer: When you bought this house, was this all developed out here like this?
Bissell: It is exactly how it was, and the way this house was. I imagine I'd made some
improvements on it. I built that window there. It went right from the post there and right across
on the other side of house, I built a porch over there, of course, but as far as the grounds is
concerned and the house itself, why it is exactly as it was before. It's a three story house and it
was the Kent Country Club. They used to play golf here and they played golf all around here.
All these places around here, they played golf on.
Interviewer: When you bought this house, did you buy it as a residence, or did you buy it as a
farm?
Bissell: No, I bought it as a residence. Mr. Hanchett owned it. And he used it as a home and it
was originally brick. It was plastered and I think Hanchett took that off and fixed it up.
Interviewer: Did Hanchett have his own private streetcar to take him downtown to work in the
morning?
Bissell: He had a private car that was run on the street here. He used it as, not as just going
downtown, but he used it to have parties on. He'd pick you up downtown and take you out to
Reed's Lake and they would have a party; and it was an open car and he had a driver and it was
run by electricity. The open cars were very nice; I've been on it. He went downtown, down
Monroe Street and right down a few times to Ottawa Beach. When they did that, they put one
of the drivers on that ran the electrical cars down there, 'cause they knew the route and they
wouldn't run too fast and control it.
Interviewer: You mentioned that up there at the corner of Plymouth and Lake Drive where Mrs.
Avery lives there was a toll road there?
�6
Bissell: There was a toll gate there.
Interviewer: Where did the toll road go?
Bissell: [The road] went right out that street there, you know where the ___ that section of the
[?] houses right out that way; that’s where our farm was. That’s where they used to go out,
drive out to the farm, out that street.
Interviewer: Where was your farm located, Mr. Bissell?
Bissell: Right out the street there.
Interviewer: Plymouth?
Bissell: No, not Plymouth, but . . .
Interviewer: Lake Drive?
Bissell: ... Lake Drive. It ran right out there on, about three or four miles. Of course, we had to
pay toll when we went out on the line.
Interviewer: How much was the toll?
Bissell: Well, I'll tell you. My father made arrangements with the toll gate; he paid them so
much a year and all the Bissell’s who had cottages and could come out there and so there was
no toll. I paid no toll. When I was a young boy, I had some fellows I knew and I would take
them out in the carriage out to the farm. I'd say: 'Now we're going past the toll gate, now get
down there and we'll run it; and they would. I'd whip the horse up a bit and get across fast and
run through the toll gate. As long as we could make it, it was all right. There [was] [apparently
referring to a map] the hospital property, this property and [?] across the street on both sides.
Originally, they cut down this bank over here for Wealthy and they run [sic] it right into the
lake. Of course we couldn't have the streetcars go through the lake so they had to curve around
right up here [pointing on a map?]. Ben Hanchett was really behind getting that curve in there,
because he was running the street railway.
Interviewer: When Mr. Hanchett moved out of this house, did he move off of College Avenue?
Bissell: He didn't live down there then. He didn't live here until long after that.
Interviewer: Long after he'd....[?]
Bissell: He didn't live on College Avenue for a long, long time. That was a few years. He had
his horses here, and there was a barn there. He had two or three horses and used to ride
downtown, and that was the only way to get downtown, at that time, was to ride down in a
carriage. When the streetcar was put in, like that, why lots of people would go down on the
streetcar.
�7
Interviewer: When you were growing up on College Avenue, what did the young people do for
entertainment?
Bissell: Oh, I don't know, they used to have shows of different kinds. They put on shows down
at the opera house.
Interviewer: Were there many dances and things like that?
Bissell: Oh yes, we had dances and especially at Christmas time when the schools were all out
and we were all home. My mother used to have dances for me and my friends and some of the
other people did too. We generally had them in the St. Cecilia or the old Armory which is
across from the depot.
Interviewer: The old railroad station?
Bissell: The old railroad station; the depot there.
Interviewer: Where did you go away to school?
Bissell: I went to the Gunnery first, and that was in Washington, Connecticut. I was there two
or three years, and then after that I went to a small school in (Suffern, New York for a few
years. And then, later on, I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. I didn't
graduate from there.
Interviewer: You didn't graduate from there?
Bissell: No, I just quit; I was there two years.
Interviewer: And then you came back to Grand Rapids?
Bissell: That's in Grand Rapids.
Interviewer: Oh! What was the name of the school?
Bissell: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Interviewer: What kind of a school was it?
Bissell: That was in Troy, New York. It was a technical school and engineering school. They
taught engineering and, believe me, you had to have some mathematics to stay in that place. I
never had so much mathematics till I got into that.
Interviewer: Are you a member of any clubs here in town?
�8
Bissell: Oh, several clubs. The Kent Country Club, of course, was started long before I was a
member of it, but my mother was a member of it and I had the privilege of using it in her name
until I got out of college, and then I became a member of the country club.
Interviewer: When did the University Club come into being?
Bissell: Oh, quite a long time ago, but not very long ago as far as years are concerned.
Interviewer: What about the Peninsular Club?
Bissell: The Peninsular Club was going when I got out of high school and that had been going
for a long time. I'm number one man down at the Peninsular Club.
Interviewer: Now?
Bissell: Now. That means that I have lived a great many years, longest of anybody in the club
and that I got a membership. I became a member in, I think, about ought-six[1906]. I've
continued that membership the longest of anybody in it, so I'm number one man; and my
brother was number two man. He died and then Heber Curtis, I think, came in there number
three. I don't know what the numbers are now. It makes no difference as far as [?] are
concerned, it's just an interesting thing being number one man at the country club or any club.
Interviewer: I heard a story about your mother - when she died - her last words. What were her
last words?
Bissell: I don't know.
Interviewer: Someone told me her last words were, “I am glad.” Someone said those were her
last words.
Bissell: No, I don't know. Now that might have been so, I don't know.
Interviewer: When you were running the factory, were the furniture companies going full steam
then?
Bissell: They were going full steam then. They have let down since then; and there are some
manufacturing companies that used to be here. There used to be a lot of them. Huge and small
ones, but . ? . Royal and. Berkey and Gay, a . . and, oh, dozens of them. They've all gone.
Interviewer: Did many of those men who ran those big manufacturing plants live around you in
your neighborhood?
Bissell: Oh, they lived all over town. See, then, by that time we had streetcars all over town and
they'd go back and forth to the business on the streetcar.
Interviewer: Before the streetcars what did they have?
�9
Bissell: Oh, they had carriages; and some men, I know one man, he was a lawyer in town, he
liked horses and he used to ride horseback down from his house. Of course, then you had horses
right in your barn, you see, and he used to ride downtown horseback and then put his horse in
the stable down there and then ride back again.
Interviewer: Was that a very common practice for men?
Bissell: No, no. But he did that for years because he liked horses and he wanted to ride so he
did it that way.
Interviewer: What was downtown like in those days?
Bissell: It was like all the other small towns around here. Monroe Street was the big shopping
street and all the stores were down there and the grocery stores and meat markets and a few
shops and all the things were down there. A little later on, at the corner down here why they got
a few stores in there.
Interviewer: Down on Wealthy and Lake Drive?
Bissell: Down Wealthy, yeah, and a few on Reed’s Lake. When I was a boy, the city ended at
Eastern Avenue. That was the end of the city. It was just country after that and then they kept
gradually going out further and further and further and so they got out to Wealthy and whatever
that street is down there.
Interviewer: Where did you spend your summers?
Bissell: I spent my summers right here; and I'd go down to Ottawa Beach for awhile and I used
to know pretty near everybody there. I was next door to Charlie Judd's, who was a man with the
company. He lived there and had a cottage there; and he had a boat - that was a launch - on
Black Lake there. We used to go down there. It was great coming in there in a launch, 'course it
was old-fashioned . . . (?)launch which was different from any other different kinds. They
weren't very fast but they were quite powerful. We used to ride all over Black Lake there with
it.
Interviewer: Were steamers coming in there from Chicago?
Bissell: Yes, particularly they came in there every Friday night and go back Sunday night.
People would come over on that from Chicago and stay here over the weekend and go back
Sunday night. Yes, there was a line of steamers going then. Some of them would stop at some
of these other places on the way down and pick up a load of fruit or something like that, and
carry it over to Chicago. But there was one landing in there pretty near every night.
Interviewer: Were there always dams in the Grand River? Can you remember the Grand River
ever being without dams?
�10
Bissell: No, I think there were quite a number of them. They did a lot of work on it and they
tried to running their steamboats up and down carrying freight and all that, and passengers, but
they didn't. There wasn't enough to. They were always running ashore, and it wasn't very deep
and it wasn't very good.
Interviewer: What was the most memorable experience from the time you were growing up?
What's the thing you remember most?
Bissell: Oh I don't know. I lived here all my life, I was born here and I lived here until I was
grown up - in the town. I went to school in the East, and I came back to Grand Rapids and took
a job in the company. Besides that I went out in the plant and learned how to make carpet
sweepers and do those things and learned all about it and I worked up from the bottom until I
finally became president.
Interviewer: Do you think there are any differences between the way men conducted their
business in those days compared to the way they conduct their businesses today?
Bissell: Oh yes, there's a lot of difference. Everything is a lot more technical now. Of course the
telephone and telegraph came in, we had them when I was a boy but not as strong as they are
now, they weren't as big. They didn't use it as much then. Some men do a big business on the
telephone now, on the cable - Western Union. Things are entirely different, everything's more
technical.
Interviewer: What do you think was the more preferable age to live in, the age when you were a
young man or the age today?
Bissell: Well, it depends on what you want. Now it's probably very mild compared to what it
was then because everything then... [?] For instance, Mr. Hanchett lived out in this house here,
ran the street railway and we had the streetcars to go on. I lived on College Avenue before I was
married, why I used to walk down Monroe Street, the whole length. I walked down from my
house on Washington Street, down to Monroe Street and back - sometimes twice a day, in the
morning and the afternoon. Of course they had Power's Theatre and they had shows down
there; and companies came in and stayed here and put on a different show every week. There
was Reed's Lake with all the amusements in it and it was, well you could hardly get on a
streetcar. They would have two or three cars would wait up there, about time the theatre was
getting out in the evening, and take the people into town. That was the only way they had
getting out there. Of course when the automobile came in, why they could go by a car.
Interviewer: Was that when the streetcar started to dissolve, when the automobile came in?
Bissell: Well, it didn't progress like it had before, because people had cars. It made a big
difference then because if they wanted to go to the lake, why they would go out in their car, and
a lot of them did. There weren't as many cars, of course, and the streetcars were crowded
coming in at night after the show. People wanted to get home. It'd probably take four or five car
loads to take them and get them out of there. It would be jammed full. It was pretty bad
sometimes when it rained and then at that time, why there was open cars. They took the closed
�11
cars off in the summertime and put on open cars. Those were run across like that [gesture?] and
there was a row of people here and have a row in here and another row in here. It was one of
our amusements in those days to take a streetcar ride in the evening, in a hot evening, to cool
off. We'd go out to North Park and then perhaps stay a little while there, and get a soda water or
something like that and get on and come into Grand Rapids again.
Interviewer: Was the Grand River used at all in those days for entertainment or for boating
events?
Bissell: Not very much, not very much. The Grand River wasn't very deep, you know. They had
some little boats and there were a few quicker, motor boats. Motors weren't very plentiful in
those days. They were noisy and dirty.
Interviewer: I think that is good enough, don't you?
Bissell: That's about all I can tell you.
Interviewer: Okay.
INDEX
A
H
Avery, Mrs. · 5, 6
Hanchett, Mr. · 5, 6, 10
B
J
Bissell, Anna Sutherland (Mother) · 2, 4, 7, 8
Bissell, Melville R. Sr. (Father) · 1, 2, 6
Black Lake · 9
Blodgett, Mr. · 4
Judd, Charlie · 3, 9
C
Curtis, Heber · 8
F
Fisk Lake · 5
Foster and Stevens Company · 3
G
Grand River · 10, 11
K
Kent Country Club · 4, 5, 8
O
Ottawa Beach · 6, 9
P
Pantlind, Fred · 4
Peninsular Club · 8
�12
R
V
Reed's Lake · 5, 9, 10
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute · 7
Voigt, Ralph · 4
S
W
Woman's City Club · 1
St. Mark's Church · 2
U
University Club · 8
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/aa3ac7df7c42608ff7abc5a2f88a111a.mp3
b09e66ac6d8b7a88b524e0593d1cce00
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Grand Rapids Oral Histories
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Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Local histories
Memoirs
Michigan--History
Oral histories (document genre)
Description
An account of the resource
Taped and transcribed interviews conducted in the early 1970s primarily of the children and grandchildren of many of the founders of Grand Rapids, Michigan; many of whom were residents of the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Interviews were collected to develop a significant collection of oral resources that would supplement other primary and secondary local history materials. Initially funded as a private project, Grand Valley State College (now University) assumed responsibility for continuing the project until 1977.
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Various
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/452">Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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eng
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RHC-23
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1971 - 1977
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RHC-23_9-10Bissell
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Bissell, M.R.
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Bissell, M.R.
Description
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M.R. Bissell was born on April 7, 1882 in Grand Rapids. His father (M.R. Sr.) invented the Bissell Carpet Sweeper. The Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company was established in 1883. When Mr. Bissell's father died prematurely, his mother took his place running the business. M. R. Bissell, Jr. attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York for two years but did not graduate. He returned to Grand Rapids to run the business, and became a member of the Kent Country Club, the Peninsular Club, and the University Club. He died December 20, 1972.
Subject
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Michigan--History
Local histories
Memoirs
Oral histories (document genre)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Personal narratives
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Grand Valley State University
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eng
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Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)
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1971
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c3f2d6de6e0228304703e3a56816b4a3.pdf
63d8cd6af7b13791af21949f96b77216
PDF Text
Text
1
Grand Valley State University Special Collections
Kent County Oral History collections, RHC-23
Mrs. Richard Meade
Interviewed on September 15, 1971
Edited and indexed by Don Bryant, 2010 – bryant@wellswooster.com
Tape #7, 8 (1:15:27)
Biographical Information
Mary Alice Martin was born 27 April 1897 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She died on 20 August
1982 in East Grand Rapids. Her parents were John B. Martin, born January 1867 in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, and Althea Winchester, born March 1867 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. John
and Althea were married in Grand Rapids on 11 October 1894. John was the son of Joseph H.
Martin and Mary Alice Lantsberry, both born in England. Althea was the daughter of Samuel
Alexander Winchester and Rebecca Bailey, both from New Hampshire.
Mary Alice Martin married Henry C. Robinson about 1926. As her second husband she married
Richard Hardaway Meade on 30 November 1946. Richard was the son of Richard Hardaway
Meade, Jr. and Eleanor Prior “Nellie” Atkins and he was born 10 May 1897 in Richmond,
Henrico County, Virginia. Richard died 5 February 1993 in Grand Rapids. Mary Alice Martin
Meade died 20 August 1982 at her home in East Grand Rapids.
A finding aid for the Bartholomew Plan mentioned in this interview can be seen at
http://www.grpl.org/wiki/images/c/cd/115.pdf
___________
Interviewer: Mrs. Meade, you just mentioned that your grandfather came here in eighteen fiftytwo. Where did he come from and why did he come to this area?
Mrs. Meade: My grandfather Martin came here in eighteen fifty-two. He originally came from
England and he came from Southampton, as far as we know. He and another family came over
and then went to Elyria, Ohio. We don‟t know exactly why he came to Grand Rapids from
Elyria, but he did come and there are many stories about his coming. Apparently he had a horse
and a wagon and he went to Chicago and before they came over, the horse fell overboard and my
grandfather jumped in after him and pulled him by his tail and got him back on the ship, but
anyway, they finally arrived in Grand Rapids. Originally I think he went in to the grocery store
business because in old pictures I have seen of Grabs Corners, you could see there was a sign
Joseph H. Martin. I think he started out probably as a grocer and then little by little he became
interested in real estate and he also had a brother named Uncle Thomas. And he and his brother
were very much interested in the Plank Road that went to Kalamazoo. At one point, as you
�2
probably know, they thought the railroad was coming to Grand Rapids and then afterwards they
decided it was going to Kalamazoo so many people in Grand Rapids sold their land because they
thought it was never going to develop. And they developed this road to Kalamazoo where they‟d
take, I suppose loads and things to ship and my grandfather helped with the regular freight line I
think. And then eventually, the railroad came to Grand Rapids so that road was no longer
important. But it was important at that time and then he went into the real estate business and
then he became a banker. He was on the first board of, I think you call it the Old National Bank
at that time when Harvey Hollister was the president. I can go back that far. Harvey Hollister and
my grandfather were great friends and even took a trip abroad and I have some of their letters
and diaries from that trip. So he lived here and he married a Mary Alice Lantsberry. The
Lantsberry family came over from England with the Martin family then they went to Elyria and
the Lantsberry family also came to Grand Rapids. And he married one of the daughters and I‟m
not sure but I think his brother married one of the other daughters. But anyway, I am named after
my, I am named Mary Alice Martin because of my grandmother‟s name became Mary Alice
Martin, she was a Lantsberry. Their graves are out here in the little old cemetery on Fulton Street
and my great grandfather is also buried there, Peter Martin and his wife and that‟s where most of
the old families are buried over there you‟ll see all of the graves. My grandfather on mother‟s
side was Samuel Winchester. And his family, the Winchester family came to this country much
earlier way back in the sixteen hundreds. They came to Boston and that family is a very large
family, you find the name Winchester throughout the country. Winchester Arms is part of that
family, Winchester, Massachusetts was named after one of the Winchesters; and I have the
history of that whole family. But my particular branch came, my grandfather‟s father I think was
a minister and he went from Boston then to Ashburnham, Massachusetts then to Keene, New
Hampshire and they lived up there for some time. They were farming families and they must
have been interested in furniture making and my grandfather‟s -this is particularly interesting to
Grand Rapids - my grandfather‟s sister Mary married old C.C. Comstock who is very much
involved in the history of Grand Rapids. He also came from Keene, New Hampshire or that area
and they came out here. She had tuberculosis and for some reason they felt that going west,
would help her. So they did come west and they finally ended in Grand Rapids and I should be
able to tell you the number of children, but they had two or three children. One was Mrs. [Mary
Ella Comstock] Konkle and I‟m sure Fran Russell could tell you all this because she died finally
and then Comstock married again and he married Fran Russell‟s grandmother and his mother and
Mrs. Boltwood were the children from that marriage so in a way Fran and I are related.
Interviewer: Mr. Russell is one of the people we are going to be interviewing.
Mrs. Meade: Oh, you must interview him because he has wonderful diaries, written by old C.C.
Comstock and the old building, there‟s still a little old office building one that they show when
they take people on that tour from museum. That little office building is still down there.
Interviewer: Is that supposedly the oldest building still standing in the city?
�3
Mrs. Meade: No, not the law office. No, but this is another building. It‟s on lower Monroe, but
kind of quite a ways out. The day I went on this tour they pointed that out and I never knew that
myself. C.C. Comstock had a lot to do with it. My grandfather Winchester and his brothers
started, I think the first furniture factories here but they didn‟t do very well with it and his
brother-in-law Comstock had to buy them out and that furniture factory I think originally, or
eventually became the factory that‟s called Nelson-Matter which was a famous well known
factory in the earlier days. I may be a little mixed up on these facts but this is the way I
remember it.
Interviewer: When did the Winchester branch of the family come to Grand Rapids?
Mrs. Meade: Well, I can‟t really tell you, I ought to be able to but I can‟t really tell you but I
think it was after my grandfather Martin came here.
Interviewer: Did they come because they were interested in furniture?
Mrs. Meade: Well, no they didn‟t, I think partly, but they also came because C.C. Comstock‟s
wife Mary was a sister and she wrote back and said this is a fine place to come and would be a
good place for making furniture and so forth and that‟s why I think they were interested in
coming. I think it was a little bit later and I can find that fact out for you I think if I search back
in some of these.
Interviewer: Your grandfather Martin, they had some children and your father was who?
Mrs. Meade: My father was John B. Martin and they had, I ought to be able to tell you, they had
about five children and three little boys, three of their children and one little girl died at a very
early age, all of them buried over here in the cemetery. My father and my aunt Martha lived and
my Aunt Martha married a clergyman and her name was Mrs. Thorton B. Penfield and she went
to live in the East and always lived there and there are great many children. I mean, she had 3
children there was quite a large family from her family and my father and my mother. My father
married a Winchester, my mother‟s name was Althea Winchester and there were four of us, three
boys and myself.
Interviewer: What did your father do, John B. Martin?
Mrs. Meade: He went into business with my grandfather. My grandfather worked so hard as
young man and as he grew up, also he lost his wife at a very early age and he didn‟t marry again
for quite a long time and when my father came back from being away at school, he was sent east
to Andover. I‟m mixing this all up, I‟m afraid, but anyway my father because he had no mother
they were both sent away to school and my father to Andover and the he was to go to Yale. In
the meantime, he went to school in Brooklyn and he met, well his best friend was a boy named
Irving Bush. His father was Irving Bush, who built the Bush Terminals in Brooklyn and if you
have lived down there and know New York at all, they were the big place where they brought
�4
freight in and everything. His father had overworked and they told him he had to take a year off
and not do anything. So he built a yacht and the yacht was called the Coronet. I‟ve grown up on
these stories. He told his boy of his that he could invite one of his friends to go with him on this
trip and they would be gone a year and they were going around the world. My father was invited
at the age of eighteen and he asked his father, my grandfather, Joseph Martin, said you may go
take this trip or you can go to college but you have to choose one or the other. So naturally he
took the trip around the world. I have all the diaries of that trip and it was the most amazing trip.
It was the first private yacht that ever as far as anybody knows that had gone around the world.
He went around in great fashion. A hundred and twenty foot yacht, a crew of I don‟t know how
many. My father had the most marvelous time in the world and we were all brought up on the
stories of this trip. Especially about China and Japan and the Far East, that was what interested
him the most and many of the things you see in this room, he brought back. The bronzes and
things, my father at the age eighteen brought those things back. He had enough sensitivity, I
don‟t think he knew a thing about them, but he did buy and bring back these lovely things and
we grew up on this trip, so I‟ll show you why this ties in eventually. When he got back, he
couldn‟t go to college because he wasn‟t supposed to but my grandfather was almost worn out
and so he had to give up business and in the meantime he married again a lovely person, the only
one I ever knew as my grandmother, her name was Rose Brooks and he married her. So he was
in and out of the business, more or less retired and father just took over. It was, how do I say it,
mortgages and loans and things like that. For instance, if somebody came and many, many
people like the Dutch and the Italians, people like that who came and needed a little money that
has nothing to do with the bank and borrow money you know that had no collateral or anything,
they‟d come to father or my grandfather and they would loan them enough to get started. Mr.
Russo got started that way, that Italian. A great many of the people that I have met since have
said to me “Oh, your grandfather, your father were the ones that helped us.” He loaned them
enough to get started and eventually they got into different kinds of business and particularly
banking. My father, you know was Vice President of the bank changed names so no longer the
old Grand Rapids Savings and it became Peoples Bank, but my grandfather was on the board of
the Old National which is now Old Kent Bank and my son Oliver is now in the Union Bank so
we‟re all mixed up in banks. Well, I probably have not told you what you wanted to know,
branching off here.
Interviewer: No. That‟s good I like to find out background about how families arrived in Grand
Rapids. Where did you grow up as a child?
Mrs. Meade: I grew up, I was born in Grand Rapids; I was born right on Madison Avenue, fivefifteen Madison Avenue. And I grew (up) in that house on Madison. We were all born there and
we all grew up there. We loved it, it was a wonderful house. It‟s in the Heritage Hill area and it
was a house that was built by I think his name was Stockwell and I think he was related to the
Belknaps. I think he was either a son-in-law or something, but he married a Belknap and built
that house. And after two or three years he sold it or wanted to sell it and my grandfather bought
�5
it for my mother and father and gave it to them, for a wedding present. My mother nearly died,
if you could go see it, it‟s a huge house with the ceilings ten and-twelve feet. To just even curtain
one window, was expensive to let alone all this. Anyway this was a gift, so they lived there and
little by little they furnished it and my grandfather and grandmother would come back part of the
year and live with them. They had a room, we had one big living room and then another room
and a bath that was my grandfather‟s and grandmother‟s. We all grew up [with] one bathroom
upstairs, plenty of bedrooms, but one bathroom. I can see it now, it was all lined with tin and
eventually it was very, very sophisticated because we got one of these things called geyser and
we got gas finally and you know you could light it then it heated it. You‟re too young to
remember this it would [heat] the water and then it was nice hot baths. The house had lots of
fireplaces; oh it was a beautiful house to grow up in. We had lovely times and gatherings.
Interviewer: What was the neighborhood like?
Mrs. Meade: Oh, the neighborhood was a lovely neighborhood; all my friends lived up and down
the whole Madison Avenue. We all went to school at Lafayette school down there. Now it has
been rebuilt, but that was the school, dandy school.
Interviewer: You went to the public schools then?
Mrs. Meade: Oh yes, we all went to the public school. There was a private school here, but I
don‟t know, I was never sent to it. Some of my friends were, but I thought we had a wonderful
education, there were marvelous teachers. Then from there we went up to what we called Central
Grammar and that was up, I suppose it was like the Junior High school but it was one year we
had in this school and it is no longer there, but it was right back where the old high school is
now. Not Central but the other one over there on Ransom or something. I don‟t know what they
call it now, a big old building up there and that was the high school and we went to a school right
back of that called Central, Central Grammar. From there I went to the new high school which
was Central up on Fountain and I don‟t know what other high school [was] but formerly it was
that other high school. I‟ll tell you something we used to do. Where we lived, there was a little
bit of pavement, in front of our house and from then on there was nothing but dirt roads and we
had a great big barn which is now burned down. I haven‟t been down to look at but it‟s burned
down. We always had horses, my father was a great horseman; he loved horses. He always had a
saddle horse and we always had ponies. Across from us on Madison Avenue, at that point, there
was nothing between Madison Avenue and College Avenue, it was all open territory. There was
no Morris Avenue at all. We had a big field there that we kept our cow in and our pony and our
horse. You won‟t believe this but we did. And my father was very interested in farming till the
day he died we had a farm. And every summer the entire Martin family would get into a carriage
before we had cars, or eventually when we had cars, and we had our first farm out near
Plainfield. If you go out the new Beltline, it was called Peach Ridge or Peach something, but it
was where Mr. [O. W.] Braman‟s farm and our farm was [Section 35, Plainfield Township]. We
had peaches and fruit and everything else. We built a cottage, a house out there and it is still
�6
standing there. We would have these Dutch families come over to work on the farm and my
father brought over any number of these families and the children would work, you see for their
father. Father never paid them but any way they‟d work on these farms until eventually they got
enough money so they could buy the farm. One of these farmers bought that farm from my
father. Then we bought another farm which we still own a little bit of land out here near Ada, the
Alta Dale farm, which is now called the Holiday farm.
Interviewer: Is that the one that is now owned by the Crawfords?
Mrs. Meade: Yes, that was our farm; it only had two ownerships before my father got it. One
belonged to Rix Robinson; he owned all that land from where our farm began all the way to Ada.
Then Philo Fuller, who was one of the former mayors of Grand Rapids, owned it for many years
and then my father bought it. It was four or five hundred acres. It went all along the river, very
rich bottom land. We had a dairy farm and then we had a grain farm. It was not a fruit farm; the
other farm was a fruit farm. I grew up on the farm at Peach Ridge, but that isn‟t quite it, out there
[It was called the High Lands (1907)]. When I was about ten we bought this other farm and we
all went out there to live. The first year we all lived in tents, we camped on top of this hill we
still own. We still own this place. The war came along although they had plans to build a house
and you couldn‟t build in those days. They wanted everybody to have War Gardens. You are too
young to remember this, but we all thought this was a fine idea to be patriotic. We hired a farmer
and I got all these girls, I was in Vassar at that point and I got all these girls from college to come
out and some of them from here, ten or twelve of us and we all lived in a big tent out there.
Father and Mother put up just a little tiny place where they could sleep and we could have a
kitchen and dining room where we could all eat. We had a War Garden and we had a great fun
along with the war I guess. Eventually they added on to that and eventually I built a house out
there. Father‟s finally burned down many years later and my house is still standing but is slightly
going to pieces I think. We still own that hill top.
Interviewer: Do you still use that cottage you have out there?
Mrs. Meade: I don‟t. My brother Joe, do you know my brother Joe?
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. Meade: Well, he‟s a great naturalist and he‟s always loved country and knows everything
about birds and everything else, so he used it as a sanctuary. He has the Audubon Society out and
everybody goes out and we go out of course and picnic and things like that. We have a place
down by the lake now so that I haven‟t used that cottage.
Interviewer: Yes, I grew up right in back of your brother.
Mrs. Meade: You did?
Interviewer: I used to be over there all the time; we used to be down…..
�7
Mrs. Meade: You mean on Cambridge?
Interviewer: On Plymouth.
Mrs. Meade: He has trouble with his eyes and he hasn‟t been able to do much. It‟s been pitiful
because he has such interest in things like that.
Interviewer: He‟s a great photographer.
Mrs. Meade: He is a great photographer and he has more hobbies and could do more things with
his hands; nobody in the else in the family could do anything but he can. He‟s marvelous with
children but he has used that a lot. And we still own the hilltop which is by far the nicest part.
When we got it, there wasn‟t a thing on it. There had been marvelous trees and marvelous forest
there and someone that I talked to one time, remembered when it was forested then they cut it all
off so when we got it there were no trees on top. Father had this old Mr. (?) well, he was the first
landscape man, hmm; this shows I‟m getting old here. Anyway, we imported, he imported
everything. In those days you couldn‟t buy all these shrubs and things in this country so he
imported something like twenty thousand shrubs and trees for that place. There are all sort of
unusual things on that twenty acres that we had where houses were. They used to come up from
Lansing and all over. He was very interested in different kind of conifers and we have a lot of
them. The birch trees in there are European Birch and the most beautiful trees. Our birch don‟t
last the way these do. Mr. [Mathias] Alten, the painter used to come out and paint those Birch
trees. You go in there sometime it‟s really beautiful.
Interviewer: I will, I know where that is.
Mrs. Meade: I‟m afraid we haven‟t kept it up lately because we haven‟t been able to get
anybody to do anything.
Interviewer: Did many of the families in your neighborhood and in the Hill District have farms
in the country like that? Summer retreats?
[Audio gets bad here 26:00]
Mrs. Meade: Well, I don‟t know many, I can think of for instance the Wilcox family. This place
right over here was the Wilcox farm. Where, do you know which was Mrs. Wilcox‟s house? The
original house is one that what‟s his name lives in, you know, the man who owns that motel.
Interviewer: You mean the large house that sits in off the road right near the quad where they
have the swimming pool? I know the house is for sale but I don‟t know who bought it. He owns
a motel?
Mrs. Meade: He owned that townhouse thing. He and someone else have an interest in that. I
don‟t know why I can‟t think of his name. That‟s the original Wilcox house, farm house they‟ve
done a lot to it but it was a farm house and this area was farm land. My family was always
�8
interested and I don‟t know why particularly because I don‟t think they came from farming
families in England but they were just interested. [For] my father it was a great hobby. Up to the
day he died, he was getting up to ride his horse at the age of eighty-nine when he died, he had a
stroke. So he was always interested in farming.
Interviewer: That sounds like George Welsh. He was riding till he was eighty-five.
Mrs. Meade: I knew George; he didn‟t die, did he?
Interviewer: No, I said up until he was eighty-five.
Mrs. Meade: Oh, I knew George, so did my father. He put me on the Planning Commission in
Grand Rapids at one point. If this wasn‟t a tape recording, I‟d tell you the rest of the story. I
always had a great deal of admiration for him as well as not approving for some of the things. I
think that he was very, never made a nickel out politics. I think he was very honest in that respect
and I think he saw what was happening to Grand Rapids and when he went to Boston, he saw the
problem of parking that they were having in Boston. He came back to Grand Rapids and he
immediately began to push for people having parking lots and buying up areas that weren‟t being
used and making parking possible. He was certainly the one that decided that we had to have
planning in Grand Rapids and my father had been chairman of the Planning Commission for
many years and they had done in the beginning a good job when they had some money. Little by
little, they [had] practically no money. He saw the importance of planning and that Ken Welsh
became the chairman of it and asked me to be on and some others. We got a good planning
commission and he backed us right to the hilt on everything we did. I have very high feelings
towards him. He did some things I didn‟t think were right too and I told him that but anyway by
in large.
Interviewer: Did anybody plan Heritage Hill out?
Mrs. Meade: I have the earliest plans here. All of that area was studied; I don‟t think as it
developed, how it was developed, that it was planned… I know the first plans were nineteen
eight, probably. There was a plan before the Bartholomew plan. And I have that plan. Then there
was the Bartholomew Plan which was about [nineteen] twenty-seven. Then when we took in (it?)
about nineteen forty-three I think it was, that plan was rolled up in the attic in the city hall. On
the other hand, I think if it had been effective in some ways and it was good planning for the
period.
Interviewer: Was this the plan for the Heritage Hill area?
Mrs. Meade: Well, no.
Interviewer: Or was this a plan for the city?
�9
Mrs. Meade: This was a plan for the city, it wasn‟t just Heritage Hill. Heritage Hill was
probably part of it but it wasn‟t. I think they probably have those plans at the library. I don‟t
think Heritage Hill was planned as such it just grew up to a certain point. Then there was a great
deal of interest of planning in the early days when they saw the way Philadelphia was developing
and New York and so forth. I can remember my father got very interested in the fact that we
should do something here. They brought in the planners and but the trouble was then no one
realized that planning was and everyday process and that couldn‟t just have someone do a plan
and then go off. It has to be brought into operation.
[32:40 the Audio clears up]
Interviewer: Why does Heritage Hill have such a diversity of architectural style?
Mrs. Meade: I‟m very interested in domestic architecture because I do think it reveals the history
of a city and when it developed and I think for instance if you will notice southern Michigan and
Northern Ohio, you find a great many houses that are similar to the houses you find in the east,
the early American houses. The reason for that is I think that after the war many of those men
were given land out in this area and many of them wanted to build the same type of houses that
they were very familiar with and I think that is one reason for many of those early American
houses and for Greek Revival there. Up here we were a little bit later in developing, from
eighteen thirty-seven on and where as you get a few Greek Revival houses, now the Greek
Revival period was from about eighteen twenty till about eighteen fifty. You get such as the Dix
House for instance and there are other houses here that were purely Greek Revival. Then Grand
Rapids was a little bit later and we went into the Victorian Era and we went into, the house I
grew up in was a Victorian house, late Victorian. Which I think called the Gothic Period. It was
really covered with little gargoyles and scrolls they developed the scroll saw you that did all this
fancy work and our whole house was filled with that sort decoration and it‟s not certainly not the
best period of architecture, little cupolas and those things. You found the Gothic Revival; you‟ll
see quite a few of those houses here. You also saw quite a few houses built out of river stone for
instance that little house next to the Art Gallery is built out of river stone. We had some other
lovely houses like that but many of them have been taken down. I think Grand Rapids to me is
interesting, because of the variety of architecture. It wasn‟t just one period but it was drawn from
all these various periods. Most of it not really the best period, I don‟t think.
Interviewer: Was there competition perhaps between people of means in the Hill District in the
Heritage Hill area in the design of their houses? I walk down the street and like you say the
diversity of styles, they will be a house here of one particular style and right next door is a house
just as large but it‟s a completely different style. Do you have any idea of why that [happened]
from your knowledge?
Mrs. Meade: No, I don‟t think I‟m old enough to have that knowledge. Most of those houses
were built when I grew up. For instance, I can remember going to all those houses, where all
�10
these friends of mine lived, [and] practically all of them had a ballroom in their attic, all those
houses. You‟ll find the old Wilcox house that was given to the YWCA, has a lovely ballroom.
My aunt, Mrs. Walter Winchester‟s house, wasn‟t a very big house down on Madison, they had a
ballroom. The Waters‟ house, which is now made into apartments, that had a beautiful ballroom.
And our parties as we were little children, we were quite young, they had parties at their houses.
We always walked to these things and we‟d dance up in these ballrooms. The Russell house, I
don‟t know about the Boltwood‟s, but the Russell is still standing, they had a beautiful ballroom.
That‟s where we used to have some of the best parties; there were never anything at school. We
had to go to somebody‟s house but everybody, so many people had ballrooms you see that that‟s
where we would, and they were big houses. I don‟t think there was any thought of competing
with somebody else. I think in those days, things were so much less expensive and there was
plenty of help, plenty of help. Even though they were paid only three dollars a week, that was
good pay you know. Our house which was a big house, we always had two people; I mean
usually a cook and a maid. That was much less than most people had. I mean everybody lived
that way, the hired girl you know.
Interviewer: What nationality were these hired people?
Mrs. Meade: Well, mostly Dutch and mostly they‟d come in from the farms and their family
would want the girl to have a job in town and would learn about housekeeping and so forth and
they‟d come in and you‟d train them. They wouldn‟t know anything usually when came to most
of us I mean some of them got very sophisticated help, but most of us didn‟t. Even when I was
first married, I had girl after girl that would come from up north or some little town and they‟d
come and you‟d teach them how do everything. To this day, I have any number of these girls
living right here in Grand Rapids and every so often they come and now they are now married.
And they come and bring their children. I‟ve even had one or two of daughters work for me since
then. It was a wonderful relationship, you did all sorts of things for them, but they weren‟t, I
wouldn‟t say they were meant to be part of the family, they cooked and wait on the table and do
that sort of thing but that‟s all gone now, there‟s nothing to that anymore. I don‟t think that was a
bad thing because they all learned and they went on to their own little houses and did things
nicely and brought up their children nicely. I‟m just proud of the ones I had.
Interviewer: Then it was a socializing process as much as it was a working?
Mrs. Meade: Yes I think so. There was no thought of being inferior or anything like that. The
same thing I think, my husband comes from Richmond, Virginia. There‟s nothing more “south”
then that and he grew up with a mammy that looked after all of them. These families just
worshipped these mammies. They took care of them till they died and his mammy couldn‟t read
or write, he used to teach her, try to teach her to read and write. There was a wonderful
relationship between these people and of course now it‟s all gone.
�11
Interviewer: Were there quite a few parties when you were young? Was there more partying
than there is today?
Mrs. Meade: Many. I don‟t know that there were more parties but I would say that we had a
great many parties. At Christmas time, if we were away at school or college and came back and
before that, each family gave a little party. They were usually quite early in the evening, and of
course we never had anything to drink or smoke or anything like that. I mean they were nice
parties and we thought they were absolutely marvelous but we certainly didn‟t know anything
about what they are doing today. I‟m sure today they think they, well they ask what you did. It
sounds absolutely silly when you tell them. We all thought we had a marvelous time.
Interviewer: What did you do at your parties?
Mrs. Meade: We mostly danced, I think.
Interviewer: Were they pretty formal affairs?
Mrs. Meade: Some were quite formal; yes some of them got to be quite formal, in those days. Of
course there was a great deal of wealth here in Grand Rapids and there were all these families
who I, our family never belong to the country club but I knew a few people who did and once in
a while somebody would give a party out there and then it was very formal and we all got
dressed up and went. Always chaperoned, in fact all the older people would come out and watch
us, dance and everything else. We didn‟t like that very much. Anyway, it was fun. To begin with
before that we didn‟t have any cars but after we had cars. For instance we used to have these
ponies and one of the things we did that was most fun, we had a sleigh and we had a long, long
bob sled and we would all pile on that bob sled . Somebody would drive the ponies and we‟d pull
this thing along behind. Eight or ten people or more than that could get on it you see. We‟d go all
over town with that or else we‟d take it out and we‟d slide down Washington Street. You know
Washington Street was the best one to slide on that there was; you didn‟t run into something at
the bottom. We‟d zip down that thing and all around the corner where the museum is now.
That‟s where we used to slide. We did that kind of thing. I can‟t remember anyone skiing but we
tobogganed and we slid and we skated. We skated out here all the time. I can remember Don
Baxter, who you remember Howard Baxter, of Baxter Laundry. Don was his brother and he
invented things. He invented something that had a propeller out in front just like an airplane you
know and a little box and we‟d sit in this thing behind and this thing would go across Reed‟s
Lake. It was terribly fast and we‟d all take turns riding on that. They had those ice sails and we
all did that. We did lots of things out of doors.
Interviewer: Getting back to those parties, those dances, someone mentioned to me that in one of
those houses they had a kind of floating dance floor, it bounced, it moved when you danced on it.
Did you ever?
Mrs. Meade: No, I don‟t remember that, which house was it?
�12
Interviewer: I can‟t remember. There‟s a name for that kind of dance floor.
Mrs. Meade: I‟ve been on them in New York, where they whirled, they moved slowly around
but I‟ve never been on one….
Interviewer: It was built so there would be a flex to the dance floor.
Mrs. Meade: That might be, but I don‟t recognize that, I don‟t remember that.
Interviewer: Were the families in your neighborhood when you were growing up quite close?
Was there a lot of interaction between the families?
Mrs. Meade: Yes, I just knew everybody up and down street.
Interviewer: Did your parents?
Mrs. Meade: We all did, right where I lived for instance, we knew the May family, and across
the street lived the Wallin family, the Van Wallin family. Do you know who Franklin Wallin is?
Well, his family was quite a prominent family and his grandfather was. There‟s a Wallin church
and so forth. They lived there and my aunt and uncle, Walter Winchester lived near us; the
Tietsorts, the Dean family lived on that street. Well, just that whole area. Senator [William
Alden] Smith lived up about a block from us. I don‟t think, but the place we thought was the
most elegant was Lafayette Street where the Fullers lived there and Mr. O‟Brien who was our
Ambassador to Japan and the Holt family. In that area right around there, I would say probably,
our most distinguished families or the most socially prominent families that lived there,
Lafayette up to Fountain right along there. It‟s all ruined now, more or less. You know that one
house, [with] that Jewish thing built out in front of it. I don‟t know, I haven‟t been along there to
notice but that was where they lived.
Interviewer: Who lived in that house, that the synagogue is built on to?
Mrs. Meade: Well, I don‟t know. There was the Fuller family, ones the Fullers and ones the
O‟Briens. It‟s the one or the other I can‟t remember which one. I think it was the O‟Brien House.
The Holts were a very distinguished family and well the Booths lived out there. They came a
little bit later but they were there. Jo Bender would know all that because she was more that
group you see. I mean I was a little bit younger, I was scared to death of them but she knew
them. They were the kind that looked you up and down you know and you never felt you were
properly dressed. They used to come out to country club and watch us dance. The Waters family
and the Hollisters and the White family were another very fine interesting family. You should
really sometime talk to Rugee White. He‟s caustic, but anyway his family, I mean there‟s
Stewart Edward White, who was the writer and there‟s Gilbert who was the artist and there was
Rod who was the violinist and they all did things, except Rugee.
�13
Interviewer: There‟s a funny story about him. He was at a party one night and a woman came up
to him and said, “Oh, you‟re one of the White family” and mentioned his brothers and she said,
“But you, what do you do?” And he looked up and said, “Oh, I freckle.”
Mrs. Meade: That would be just about what he„d say something like. But, on the other hand, he
was probably the best fisherman and hunter in Michigan. I mean he knew more about it, he‟s
never written anything, he could of, but he really knew everything, he was very good at that.
Interviewer: You mentioned you were scared to death of this older group, why was that?
Mrs. Meade: Well, only because people, I don‟t know why I always felt they were of the
ultimate socially and I didn‟t probably think, you know there is a certain age where you are
terribly shy and you don‟t feel you have any poise and you don‟t feel as though you probably are
dressed as you should be if you went to the party or something. Girls I know especially go
through a period like that. It makes me laugh as I look back on it but anyway, I can always
remember the first time I was invited to the Holt‟s house for lunch and I was so impressed that I
got asked.
Interviewer: You didn‟t make any blunders, did you?
Mrs. Meade: I hope not, but I was afraid I‟d might you know. Well, of course there was the
Blodgett family, and the Lowe family; the Blodgetts and the Lowes were the ultimate of the
whole thing, they were the wealthiest of all. But they couldn‟t have been nicer families, just
wonderful families. They were very nice to all of us, and were the Blodgett family, Katherine
Blodgett who is now Katherine Hadley was just my age and she‟s one of my closest friends now,
but I didn‟t know her as a little girl. She went to high school along with the rest of us and so I got
to know her very well. The Lowe family, there was no one exactly, Jimmie was a little bit
younger than I was and others were a little bit older but I knew them all. Mrs. Lowe was a very
gracious lovely hostess and so was Mrs. Blodgett. They lived beautifully and we used to always
love it, if we were invited there.
Interviewer: Was status a very important thing then?
Mrs. Meade: As compared to now or what, I don‟t know?
Interviewer: Yes, as compared to now?
Mrs. Meade: Well, I don‟t know how to answer that. I suppose it was. I was quite aware as I
grew up of the people who were in society so to speak. We had a society. It was a real society
then, there‟s no society anymore
Interviewer: How does that period of time differ from this period of time? When you say there is
no society today, what do you mean exactly?
�14
Mrs. Meade: I don‟t know every family that I think that was socially prominent was socially
prominent for some real reason. I mean the father was a distinguished person that had done
something important. It wasn‟t necessarily money. Well, you take the Campau family. I knew
them very well. Did you know DuBarry or any of that family? I mean they weren‟t a family of
wealth at all, but they were an old, old Grand Rapids family who helped found the city; we all
knew that you see. The Butterfield family, all of our families helped start this town and we all
had little part in it one way or another, some maybe more than others. Now you take for instance
some of the Jewish families that I grew up with here, the Wolf family and the Amberg family
and the Mays and the Housemans. We couldn‟t have had nicer Jewish people any place than
these families that I grew up with. Budge Hyman, Art Wolf, and Elizabeth Wolf and these
people were our close friends and they were part of our little group just as close as could be. In
the long run, most of them did marry into the Jewish, but I can remember wondering why in the
world people talk about, feel as they did, about the Jews when I never know anybody but the
nicest most generous cultured people. We were lucky to have and some of those families are still
here.
Interviewer: The ethnic groups, for example, Jews and Dutch, I would imagine that Dutch at that
time were mostly immigrants, is that correct?
Mrs. Meade: Well, no, because for instance the Steketee family certainly I wouldn‟t call them
immigrants. I grew up with all of them, knew them very well. I would of, yes I grew up with
them. I don‟t think, they maybe were as socially prominent as the Holt family or something like
but they were wonderful families. We all knew them well. The Keelers, they weren‟t Dutch were
they? There were a great many Dutch families of course that came to this area who were the
farming families but then there were some of the others that came too.
Interviewer: In other words there was a lot of social interaction between all groups because you
were a member of a particular ethnic group, you didn‟t stay in your own group at all? There was
mixing?
Mrs. Meade: No, I would say maybe the Polish. For instance, we got quite a big Polish group
that live on the West side, and we may have some little groups like that because they have Polish
Clubs I know and so forth. I don‟t remember knowing any Polish people that I think of. I don‟t
know why I didn‟t but I didn‟t.
Interviewer: Was there a great division between the west side and the east side?
Mrs. Meade: I, perhaps, think so because I grew up on this side for instance we owned a house
over on Mt. Vernon Street and [one day] somebody said to me, "What are you doing?" I said
“Oh, I am having a wonderful time. I‟m redoing or painting this house that we owned. It must
have belonged to some family, wealthy family; it‟s a beautiful house and its lovely old carved
stairway.” I was going on in great length and she said, “Where is it?” I said, “It was on a street
you never heard of. It‟s called Mt. Vernon Street.” She said, “Let me tell you that I lived on Mt.
�15
Vernon St. and all the people you know lived over there. Siegel Judd lived there; then all of the
Stewart family lived there.” And then she went on everybody I knew had lived on the west side
right in that area. Scribner, Mt. Vernon and all along there see and I didn‟t know that. I think
they all moved eventually to this side but many, many of our well known families started right
there on the west side.
Interviewer: How would you define society today? Today you said that today there is no society,
why do you feel that way?
Mrs. Meade: I don‟t know if I should have said that.
Interviewer: You said the thing that distinguished your society was that your position or
entrance into society did not necessarily depend on wealth, but on achievement
Mrs. Meade: I think, I just think that the families that we knew, nearly all were families that were
a real part of this town. Going all the way back from the Campaus on up to John Ball. Now for
instance, John Ball was one of our wonderful people in the early days. I have a marvelous book
about him. His children, his family were still living here. I knew some of them, Miss Ball one of
them worked down at the library for years and years and years. Another sister married a man
named Hopkins. I knew them because I think because they were a part of Grand Rapids. Yet, the
people I knew, the very small group compared to whole side of the city.
Interviewer: That society that was in existence when you were young, that isn‟t in existence any
longer, what can you attribute to the demise of that?
Mrs. Meade: Well, a lot of it, I mean should we talk about gracious living and so forth. That
takes time, leisure and money. Many of those families did have a great deal of money and they
did have the time to travel and they lived nicely because they had servants and so forth. I can
remember this time; I don‟t live that way anymore. Oliver says I would like to have the children
come in occasionally to see gracious living and all we do is have four candlesticks on the table,
and I get it, see. I don‟t call that gracious living. But we did live through a period where you
didn‟t talk about, you didn‟t think about, that‟s the way you lived, everybody lived that way,
practically.
Interviewer: What caused it to end?
Mrs. Meade: I don‟t know because they talk about the affluent society, I must say a lot of people
have plenty of money. First of all I think one thing that causes a lack of gracious living, is the
lack of help. Now nobody wishes to do this sort of work; nobody wishes to come in your house
and act as a servant, no matter how nicely you treat them. You can get a young student to come
and work so many hours a day or I can get my grand-daughter to come and help me or you know
that kind of thing. You can‟t get that kind of thing. If you want to give a lovely dinner, we all of
us had silver and the things you could do it with, you can‟t get anybody to come and do it for
�16
you. You can‟t do it yourself so you don‟t do it at all. So what you do is have a cocktail party or
you have somebody in Sunday night. I have just as much fun Sunday night maybe more, have a
casserole dish and everybody sit around the fire and eat on their laps and that kind of thing.
Maybe it‟s better; maybe everybody has a better time. I can‟t but I don‟t think when I watch
these kids, all of them have to have something, they have to have the television turned on or the
radio or all of these things. They don‟t know what to do if they haven‟t got something like that it
seems to me. We made up things to do.
Interviewer: What about the closeness of these various families that had a long history of
achievement in the city, why aren‟t those families still interacting as they did when you were
growing up?
Mrs. Meade: Many of those families are right here now. The Hutchins family was one of the
families that I knew well. They were a bunch of as you know his father was very community
minded and his grandfather and his father and that whole family. All those families that lived
along there; the Keelers, the [Victor M.] Tuthills, all of them I think have gone on. For instance,
Marguerite Inslee who was a Tuthill, she‟s been very interested in the Art Gallery, very generous
in music and so forth and all of them have taken jobs on boards of the hospital or Community
Chest or you know. I think all of us were brought up to feel if we happen to have a little more
than someone else, that you had a responsibility to the community. It made a difference as to
what you went into. I mean I happen to be interested in planning and that type of thing. My
brother John was interested in politics, my sister-in-law Helen had interests in all sorts of things;
everything there was to be. I think all those families had gone on taking their part in the
community.
Interviewer: Do you think the splitting up of the neighborhood, for example it sounds as if the
families were located in a relatively close distance of each other spread of the suburbs and so had
an effect on this?
Mrs. Meade: I guess an effect on their interest in the city and then what they wanted to do.
Interviewer: What about in terms of social interaction just with each other?
Mrs. Meade: I know that I‟ve carried on with all the same friends that I‟ve had. I belong to
something that a reading club that we started forty, fifty years ago. The same people are there are
in it, some have died you know. I think we had very close associations then and I think it is
always carried on. I don‟t know that now there‟s the closeness that there was when we grew up.
We didn‟t have all the things; we couldn‟t go off and do all the thing that people… these high
school kids now think they have to go abroad. Even in high school the tour, my grandchildren
have already done that. Why, I never went abroad till I was way out of college. There are so
many things that kind seems to shatter closeness now. I think it‟s hard for families to keep close,
harder than it was, it seems to me.
�17
Interviewer: Why do you think it is?
Mrs. Meade: Well, I think it‟s just, maybe restlessness; everybody has it, maybe we all have it,
maybe I have it now. We used to be satisfied and happy with things that were simpler. We didn‟t
know about these other things; we didn‟t listen to the Today Show every day and know what was
going on in the world. I don‟t know; I‟ve always been a person with a lot of adventure. I‟ve had
an interesting life because I‟ve had that maybe more so than my friends but that‟s why I lived in
China and did different things. We‟ve always liked it but I should ask you some questions, I‟m
afraid I‟m giving a terribly bad impression. When I‟m talking about society, you know there are
so many misconceptions about the word society.
Interviewer: Why don‟t I stop this tape and I‟ll start another. I‟d like to hear what these
misconceptions. I don‟t want you to feel like you gave a misconception on this tape.
Mrs. Meade: I don‟t know if I did or not. Is this being done just for Heritage Hill?
Interviewer: Yes, just for Heritage Hill.
Mrs. Meade: You‟re trying to get a picture of just that area there?
Interviewer: I think that the farm for example, Alta Dale that you had, what people did in the
summer time, where they went is important too, because it gives a picture of the style of living?
That‟s what we are trying to get.
Mrs. Meade: Well, it wasn‟t so stylish to go live on a farm as it was to go to Ottawa Beach. I
always longed to have a cottage at Ottawa Beach but the Martin family never had one. Anyway
our friends used to love to come to the farm, but I don‟t think by and large most people did that
in the summer. They were much more apt to go to Ottawa Beach. Only one or two friends of
mine that I ever remember ever took a trip abroad were sort of set apart if you were, to be able to
do that you know because people just didn‟t do that in those days. My mother, when my mother
became engaged to my father, my grandfather took her abroad for six months with his daughter.
This was before father and mother were married and she had the grand tour and I have her diary
about that. That was just a beautiful trip. Imagine going for six months. When people went
abroad they stayed that long. My mother‟s family didn‟t have very much: my mother taught
school and she would never have had a trip abroad ever, you see, and I think my grandfather
wanted her to, you know have all the background possible probably, so he gave her this trip,
which of course she just loved.
Interviewer: You were mentioning while we were changing tapes about the difference in parties
today. You didn‟t have liquor at your parties?
�18
Mrs. Meade: I can‟t ever remember anybody having liquor. The first time I remember anyone
having anything to drink at anything, even a house party at Ann Arbor. I can remember the boy
who had something to drink was taken away, nervously taken out. We were none of us supposed
to realize he had anything to drink but he was drunk, I guess. But, we never in the early days
ever had anything like that.
Interviewer: What about...?
Mrs. Meade: I think I‟m trying to think all the way through high school, I can‟t remember; now
maybe they did and I didn‟t know it, because I was pretty innocent. But anyway I don‟t
remember them. We certainly never had stunts pulled or anything of that kind, of course I
remember lots of it since, but not….
Interviewer: What about your parents parties, did they?
Mrs. Meade: Well, my parents never had it. I think there were families that did, but my family
were very anti, any kind of drinking, so we never had anything in our house, we never had
anything to drink. But I „m sure probably people like the O‟Briens and Holts, people like that,
they‟d lived abroad a good deal and everything I‟m sure they must have had. I don‟t know if they
would have cocktails but I‟m sure they‟d have a wine probably, with dinners. But I was too
young to ever go to anything like that, and I don‟t think that, I know my parents didn‟t, but I
think there were probably some that did.
Interviewer: The parties that were held for the adults, and your parents and so on, the parties that
they attended, can you ever remember them going to a cocktail party?
Mrs. Meade: I don‟t think they, they didn‟t have things that was such a thing called a cocktail
party until within the last number of years. You‟d maybe have a cocktail, I had, the first time I
was confronted with cocktails I remember, was when I was twenty-two or three years old. And
we went to China, the whole family and we went to the Embassy in Peking and we went to
various, we were invited to various places and we were served cocktails, which I took, whether
my family liked it or not. But anyway, but what I thought when in Rome do as the Romans…
But my father never enjoyed drinking anything, we tried to teach him but we couldn‟t. No, no, it
was something, I think probably their friends, maybe some of their friends did but most of them
did not drink, and we just weren‟t confronted with it and finally when we were we just had to
figure it out, whether we would or we wouldn‟t, I guess.
Interviewer: Besides parties that were held at people‟s houses and skating and so on and Reed‟s
Lake in the wintertime, or traveling across the ice on a propelled bike, what kind of
entertainment did people pursue?
Mrs. Meade: You mean did we go to the movies or something like that?
Interviewer: Were there movies?
�19
Mrs Meade: Well, when I was very little I was not allowed to go, but the first thing was called a
vaudette, they cost five cents. You were not supposed, I was never supposed to go in one, but I
did. And it was just one of these flickery things you know, somebody playing the piano and…
Interviewer: When was that?
Mrs. Meade: Oh, I can‟t, I don‟t know how old I was then, and I know just where it was right on
Monroe Avenue, but I can‟t, I don‟t know how old I was.
Interviewer: What was downtown like in those days?
Mrs. Meade: Well, I can‟t say Monroe was like it is now, but that was the main part of the
shopping area, was right down what‟s now the mall. And of course we had streetcars; that was
the nice part, we could if we didn‟t have a car to drive down, which we didn‟t mostly, we‟d go
out and get on the streetcar at corner of Madison and Wealthy and ride downtown and get off and
shop and then you‟d get back on. We had mailboxes on the streetcar that was another thing that
was wonderful, you could mail your letters there, stop a car there if you wanted to put „em there,
a letter. We often rode down on the streetcar and then they took those off and then the era of the
bus came. But I loved the streetcar era. Another one of the families that was quite prominent was
the Hanchett family. They were the ones, of course, that owned the street railway company.
That‟s somebody you ought to talk to is Brownie Hanchett, if you want back history, she‟s very
good.
Interviewer: I‟ll remember that. When did they do away with the streetcar?
Mrs. Meade: Well, I should remember, you know you can‟t remember dates when they did
things like that, I can‟t remember when that happened.
Interviewer: Was it in the twenties?
Mrs. Meade: I wouldn‟t, I‟d hate to tell you. I don‟t really know, they just disappear and then
you realize they‟re gone.
Interviewer: Did the First World War have an effect on society, the way people lived, and the
way people thought?
Mrs. Meade: Well, it certainly did while the war was going on, very much so. I mean because so
many of the boys that we knew were in it, you see. I mean well, all the Cassard boys and Randy
Rogers, and George Hollister and all the sons and my brother and all the people my age were all
in that war, and a number of them that were killed, of course. So that we were all working in the
Red Cross and doings things like that. No it wasn‟t very gay, we did do that, we did have that
War Garden, that one summer.
Interviewer: What was it like after the war? Do you remember any kind of a change that you
might have noticed in the tempo of living, and so on?
�20
Mrs. Meade: That would be twenty… Well, I tell you, I think after the war it was gayer in a
different kind of way, the kind of a keyed-up gayness. You hear, they talk about the twenties
now and I try to think back and there was a period there when everybody was kind of, you know,
terribly keyed up. And I forgot when, I‟m trying to think about when Prohibition came in. I guess
that was later, but this was when all the dances, you know, the Charleston and all those different
things came; and jazz and we all wore the short skirts and that kind of thing. We hadn‟t realized
we were lively through an era, but I guess we were. I don‟t, I think the tempo of life has changed,
but maybe that, maybe that‟s when the, that may be when all the big parties that, the really
formal parties and things, that may be when they really did stop. I think it was then probably.
Interviewer: This is off, away from parties, but what church was your family affiliated with?
Mrs. Meade: Park Congregational. My grandfather went there; my father went there, until he
was the oldest member of the church. We all went there, sat along in a line…. I guess in those
days everybody had a pew, all the families, different families had pews. I can just see us now, the
Keeney family sat back of us, and then we sat there and then the Irwin family and everybody,
and then afterwards they gave that up too, but in those days that was what you paid for your pew,
see.
Interviewer: Was the church, was that important at all to, was that an important input factor in
the community?
Mrs. Meade: I think the church, especially in the era when my mother and father grew up, that
was the social center of the town. I think from reading her diaries and letters and things like that,
where people went to meet each other and the young people‟s meeting and that kind of thing,
which in my era was not as important. I mean we went to church, but our whole social life didn‟t
depend upon what was going on at the church. But my mother and father, that was where it was.
Now it may not have been with all the families, but my families were very strong
Congregationalists and my father was the head of the Sunday school, and I don‟t know, Mother
was the head of the United Workers. I always feel guilty now because I‟m not any of those
things. In fact, most of the family well, we‟ve had, great changes, around. My brother John
became a, went to Fountain Street Church and he was a great worker in that, and my brother Joe
doesn‟t go at all, and I‟m the only one that stayed in the Congregational Church. And yet they
had such a battle down the old Park Church that I had to move out here to the Mayflower
Church. Oh, heavens I, now listen you‟d better take that out…
Interviewer: Well, that won‟t be that important. I think that, I think we covered about everything
I wanted to cover. One last question though, and you don‟t have to answer this if you don‟t want
to, but how old are you?
Mrs. Meade: I am seventy-four. I wish I weren‟t, but I am….
�21
INDEX
A
F
Alta Dale farm · 7, 19
Alten, Mr. [Mathias] · 8
Amberg family · 16
Art Gallery · 10, 18
Audubon Society · 7
First World War · 22
Fountain Street Church · 23
Fuller family · 14
Fuller, Philo · 7
B
G
Bailey, Rebecca · 1
Ball, John · 17
Bartholomew plan · 9
Baxter Laundry · 13
Baxter, Don · 13
Baxter, Howard · 13
Bender, Jo · 14
Blodgett family · 15
Blodgett, Katherine · 15
Blodgett, Mrs. · 15
Boltwood, Mrs. · 3
Booth family · 14
Braman‟s farm · 6
Brooks, Rose · 5
Bush, Irving · 4
Butterfield family · 16
Gilbert, artist · 14
Gilbert, Rod · 14
Grand Rapids Savings bank · 5
H
Hanchett, Brownie · 21
Heritage Hill · 5, 9, 10, 11, 19
Holiday farm · 7
Hollister family · 14
Hollister, George · 22
Hollister, Harvey · 2
Holt family · 14, 16
Holt‟s house · 15
Houseman familiy · 16
Hutchins family · 18
Hyman, Budge · 16
C
Campau family · 17
Campau, DuBarry · 15
Cassard boys · 22
Central Grammar school · 6
Community Chest · 18
Comstock, C.C. · 2, 3
Crawford family · 7
I
Inslee, Marguerite · 18
Irwin family · 22
J
Judd, Siegel · 17
D
Dean family · 14
Dix House · 10
K
Keeler family · 16, 18
Keeney family · 22
Konkle, Mrs. · 3
�22
L
Lafayette school · 6
Lantsberry family · 2
Lantsberry, Mary Alice · 1, 2
Lowe family · 15
M
Martin, grandfather · 1, 3
Martin, John B. · 1, 4
Martin, Joseph H. · 1, 2
Martin, Mary Alice · 1, 2
Martin, Peter · 2
Martin, Uncle Thomas · 2
May family · 13, 16
Mayflower Congregational church · 23
Meade, Richard Hardaway · 1
N
Nelson-Matter Furniture Company · 3
O
O‟Brien family · 14, 20
O‟Brien house · 14
O‟Brien, Mr. · 14
Old Kent Bank · 5
Old National Bank · 2, 5
P
Park Congregational church · 23
Park Congregational church · 22
Penfield, Mrs. Thorton B. · 4
Peoples Bank · 5
Plank Road · 2
Prior, Eleanor · 1
Prohibition · 22
R
Reed‟s Lake · 13, 21
Robinson, Henry C. · 1
Robinson, Rix · 7
Rogers, Randy · 22
Russell house · 11
Russell, Fran · 3
Russo, Mr. · 5
S
Smith, Senator [William Alden] · 14
Steketee family · 16
Stewart family · 17
T
Tietsort family · 14
Tuthill family [Victor] · 18
U
Union Bank · 5
W
Wallin church · 13
Wallin family · 13
Wallin, Franklin · 13
War Garden · 7, 22
Waters family · 14
Waters‟ house · 11
Welsh, George · 9
Welsh, Ken · 9
White family · 14
White, Rugee · 14
White, Stewart Edward · 14
Wilcox family · 8
Winchester family · 2, 3
Winchester, Althea · 1, 4
Winchester, grandfather · 3
Winchester, Samuel · 2
Winchester, Samuel Alexander · 1
Winchester, Walter · 11, 13
Wolf family · 16
Wolf, Art · 16
Wolf, Elizabeth · 16
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a8ea3040c939b34b8cec954c312c451e.mp3
99df13c02b98b1a3889c4998f4ac63be
Dublin Core
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Title
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Grand Rapids Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Local histories
Memoirs
Michigan--History
Oral histories (document genre)
Description
An account of the resource
Taped and transcribed interviews conducted in the early 1970s primarily of the children and grandchildren of many of the founders of Grand Rapids, Michigan; many of whom were residents of the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Interviews were collected to develop a significant collection of oral resources that would supplement other primary and secondary local history materials. Initially funded as a private project, Grand Valley State College (now University) assumed responsibility for continuing the project until 1977.
Creator
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Various
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/452">Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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eng
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RHC-23
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1971 - 1977
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RHC-23_7-8Meade
Title
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Meade, Mary Alice
Creator
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Meade, Mary Alice
Description
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Mary Alice Martin was born in Grand Rapids in 1897. She returned home from Vassar College during WWI to farm.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Michigan--History
Local histories
Memoirs
Oral histories (document genre)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Personal narratives
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Grand Valley State University
Women
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eng
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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Text
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application/pdf
audio/mp3
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Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)
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1971
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/95a6b0ff5ed76327d1fc2690609cd12e.pdf
ca634a646d8c202078698b21d4a3c4b0
PDF Text
Text
1
Grand Valley State University Special Collections
Kent County Oral History Collection RHC-23
Mrs. C. L. Lockwood
Interviewed on September 14, 1971
Edited and indexed by Don Bryant, 2010 – bryant@wellswooster.com
Tapes #5 & #6 (41:37)
Biographical Information:
Katherine Maria Pantlind was born 25 December 1888 in Grand Rapids. She was the
daughter of James Boyd Pantlind and Jessie Louise Aldrich. Katherine married Closson
L. Lockwood 10 November 1909 in Grand Rapids. She died 16 March 1976.
Closson L. Lockwood was born 22 January 1879 in Grand Rapids. He was the son of
Closson L. Lockwood, Sr. and Frances E. Wycoff. He died 10 December 1944. Closson
and Katherine Lockwood are both buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.
James Boyd Pantlind was born 20 January 1851 in Norwalk, Huron County, Ohio, the
son of Ralph Nevius Pantlind and Catherine McGorgon. He came to Grand Rapids with
his uncle, Arunius Voorhees Pantlind in 1874. J. Boyd Pantlind married Jessie Louise
Aldrich on 14 April 1880 in Grand Rapids. He died 25 December 1925 in Grand Rapids.
Jessie Louise Aldrich was born 1 January 1858 in Grand Rapids, the daughter of Moses
Vail Aldrich and Euphrasia Jones Ledyard. Jessie died 15 August 1936 in Grand Rapids.
Both Jessie and J. Boyd Pantlind are buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.
___________
Interviewer: This interview with Mrs. C. L. Lockwood was recorded September the
fourteenth, nineteen seventy-one. Now, why don’t you say a couple of words or
something, to see if it’s recording?
Mrs. Lockwood:
Oh, I see. What do you want me to say, it’s a nice day?
Interviewer: Something like that.
Mrs. Lockwood: It’s a beautiful day.
Interviewer: That’s fine.
Mrs. Lockwood: What about what I like and enjoy?
Interviewer: Good, that’s fine. Maybe, the question that I’d like to start with is, do you
remember a Moses Aldrich?
Mrs. Lockwood: Moses Aldrich was my grandfather.
�2
Interviewer:
Do you remember him?
Mrs. Lockwood: No, he died before I was born.
Interviewer:
Oh.
Mrs. Lockwood: He died when my mother was married. He’s been dead many, many
years.
Interviewer: Oh.
Mrs. Lockwood: No, I never knew him. And my grandfather, my great-grandfather was
still alive, William B. Ledyard, when I was born, but I don’t remember him.
Interviewer: Now, Ledyards and Aldriches did they come here?
Mrs. Lockwood: They came from Plymouth, Michigan
Interviewer:
I see.
Mrs. Lockwood: My grandmother was a Ledyard, she was Euphrasia Ledyard, and she
married Moses V. Aldrich. Moses Vail Aldrich.
Interviewer: And he was the mayor of Grand Rapids?
Mrs. Lockwood: Mayor of Grand Rapids many, many years ago. I’m awfully sorry, I
don’t remember him, I forgot to get his picture when I was there.
Interviewer:
When were you born, if I may ask?
Mrs. Lockwood: I was born in eighteen eighty-eight.
Interviewer:
Eighteen eighty-eight?
Mrs. Lockwood: I’m eighty-three years old. Back in way, way back in the history of
Grand Rapids.
Interviewer: What was it like where did you grow up as a child?
Mrs. Lockwood: I grew up on College Avenue, one thirty-four College Avenue. It’s
now part of the Hillmount [Apartments].
Interviewer: Oh, yes
Mrs. Lockwood: One thirty-four is on the south side of the street.
�3
Interviewer: What was it like in those days?
Mrs. Lockwood: Well, the way early days?
Interviewer: Yes
Mrs. Lockwood: Well, the early days I had the goats, and I use to drive the goats back
and forth, up and down the street, I even drove them downtown. My Father ran the
Morton Hotel. I’d tie the goats to a telegraph pole and I’d go in and get a nickel and I’d
go in and get a soda at the Church & [Wick?] Drug Store and then I’d come out and drive
the goats home. I was only about fifth grade. But there were no streetcars. There were
streetcars, but there were no automobiles. And of course, I avoided the streetcars.
Interviewer: Why was that?
I didn’t like the streetcars and my goats didn’t like them either. And they were very, very
stubborn, my goats. They’d go out and sit right down, in the harnesses and wouldn’t
move at all. I’d get the old buckboard and I’d drive up and down the street.
Interviewer: How many goats did you have pulling your cart?
Mrs. Lockwood: I had three at one time, but only two on the cart. When, I was a child, I
wanted to ride everything; I rode everything in the neighborhood. I rode all the horses
and things that were in the stable. And my father said I was too heavy for one goat so I
came around the house riding two goats; one leg over one, and one over the other. He
said I don’t know what I’ve done. But I was very, very well behaved when I was riding
them. And I was a funny child. I’ve done everything.
Interviewer: Were there many houses around your family’s home?
Mrs. Lockwood: There were houses; the Bissells lived next door to us, Mrs. M.R. Bissell
and Lewis Withey lived beyond … then the Waters. Mary Waters and I were great
friends. And we went riding on the streets there.
Interviewer: Was there a gazebo on the Waters’ property, do you remember?
Mrs. Lockwood: What was that?
Interviewer: It’s like, it’s kind of an outdoor building that people spend time in the
summertime.
Mrs. Lockwood: There was a summer house up on the hill, behind Mr. Waters’ house. I
didn’t know what a gazebo was.
Interviewer: I never knew either until I saw a movie called The Gazebo and they
explained it.
�4
Mrs. Lockwood: I’ve never known anything like that for it. A gazebo, I’ll remember that.
Interviewer: Were the families very close?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh very, we went back and forth, very friendly with the Bissell boy, we
were great friends. And I’d stay there for dinner till I got dessert there, then I’d go home
for dessert. I’d stay anyplace where dessert was good because I enjoyed it so much.
Interviewer: Do you still like dessert?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh, I still love dessert. And Irving Bissell and I were great friends.
We’d ride goats together. We’d ride everywhere. He had a white goat.
Interviewer: What color were your goats?
Mrs. Lockwood: My goats were brown and white, and black and white.
Interviewer: What did families do, for example it seems as if families that today in the
neighborhoods are not as closely knit as they were in those days, I mean the families,
from what I understand the living was like in those days, the families today don’t have as
much interaction.
Mrs. Lockwood: We had a great deal of very good, very friendly with our neighbors. I
think the automobile is the reason for that, don’t you?
Interviewer: The automobile?
Mrs. Lockwood: You see we all took street cars, everywhere. We’d meet on the
streetcars and we were very friendly with everyone in our neighborhood. Grandmother
Aldrich lived on the corner of Cherry and College, Grandmother Aldrich, then my father,
and then Mrs. M.R. Bissell, then Mr. Withey, then Mrs. Waters. And Mr. and Mrs.
Barnhart lived across the street where Mrs. Edith Putnam lived and then, afterwards Mr.
Barnhart bought that house. We knew them all. And the Voigt family lived across the
street and the Byrnes family lived across the street from us. Gordon Dudley lived where
Mrs. Waer is now living. Then Charles Fox was in the Castle and the Fox family had
dogs. I was over there a great deal with Mrs. Fox because she got me to come feed the
dogs and help her with the dogs, give them baths and things. Which I enjoyed very much.
Interviewer: Why do you think the auto, what effects do you think the automobile had
in the neighborhood?
Mrs. Lockwood: I think it’s taken the people away from home a great deal, don’t you?
It’s a very independent life now. I don’t begin to know my neighbors, the way I used to.
When we sat on the front porch, people came and dropped in, people don’t drop in
anymore.
�5
Interviewer:
porch…
Were there many people that, in the evening when you’d be sitting on your
Mrs. Lockwood: Sitting on the front porch and other people would see you and they’d
come across the street and call on you. Stay for half and hour or something like, that. And
there’s none of that anymore. People don’t call anymore; don’t you think that’s true?
Interviewer: I don’t know because I’ve never lived in an age without the automobile.
Mrs. Lockwood: That’s true. Well of course, I was about sixteen when the automobile
was invented, the real automobile which means ones that you could buy. And my father
had an Olds. The first car, it was an Olds and a very good car. I learned to drive when I
was about sixteen.
Interviewer: What year was it when your father bought a car?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh I couldn’t tell you.
Interviewer: Well, now if you were sixteen… it must have been eighteen ninety-eight?
You were born in eighteen eighty-two?
Mrs. Lockwood: Eighteen eighty-eight.
Interviewer: That would be nineteen four.
Mrs. Lockwood: Nineteen four. That sounds right.
Interviewer: Was that one of the first automobiles in Grand Rapids?
Mrs. Lockwood: Let’s see, I don’t think father had the first automobile. He was, he was
not very interested in them at first, but he grew very fond of his automobile. The first car
he had was an Olds.
Interviewer: Were there any people, friends or acquaintances of your family that refused
to buy automobiles?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh no! Everybody bought automobiles. It caught right on everybody
enjoyed it. And my father never learned to drive, there was a chauffeur. And then when
we grew older, my brother and I drove it all the time. I liked to drive it very much. It had
acetylene lights and I would light the lights. It had no starter on the car. You had to have
a handle and what do you say?
Interviewer: Crank it?
�6
Mrs. Lockwood: Crank it. I’d crank it about an hour. Ira Batchhelder and I used to crank
his automobile, when I was a child. I had a very happy childhood.
Interviewer: What was downtown like when, did you say your father owned the Morton
House?
Mrs. Lockwood: Owned the Morton House. And afterwards we rented the Pantlind. He
never owned the Pantlind, but he owned the Morton House.
Interviewer: What was your father’s name?
Mrs. Lockwood: Pantlind, J. Boyd Pantlind. James Boyd Pantlind. He was in… he was
brought here with A. V. Pantlind [his uncle Arundius Voorhees Pantlind] and was the
original partner here in Grand Rapids. They ran the Morton House. They brought Father
here as a little boy, about fourteen years old. And he ran the Morton until he died. Of
course he was running the Pantlind also.
Interviewer: What was the Morton House like in those days?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh very, very attractive really. There was a mezzanine floor where we
would sit and watch everything going on there all the time. It was very attractive hotel
with the lovely pictures, lots of carpets and many conventions in came there. There was a
very attractive grill at the back that was connected with the bar, I suppose that’s what
appealed to men, but we used to go there as children and have our supper. It was very
well done, very. I guess that’s all I’m talking about is myself. Don’t you want me to say
something that I know about Grand Rapids?
Interviewer: Alright, tell me something that you know about Grand Rapids.
Mrs. Lockwood: I mean something you’d like to know about Grand Rapids?
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. Lockwood: Well, I know that the statue from Lookout Park is now over here on the
intersection of Cherry and State street. That statue used to be at Lookout Park. When I
was a little child we used to go up there. Do you know where Lookout Park is?
Interviewer: I think so.
Mrs. Lockwood: Okay.
Interviewer: Why’d they move the statue?
Mrs. Lockwood: I have no idea. But I knew it very well, I discovered afterwards when
here, in our Park and there was a large fountain where the horses would drink because
there were only horses, no automobiles. Everybody had horses, my mother drove a horse
�7
and my father liked to drive. I rode horse-back, had ponies and things like that, (the
Bissell boy did too) and no cars, it was a very different life, a very simple life compared
with now. I think the automobile has, changed the entire community, don’t you?
Interviewer: Well
Mrs. Lockwood: You don’t remember when there were not cars?
Interviewer: No, I don’t.
Mrs. Lockwood: The automobiles, the movies and the television, I think that changed the
world very, very, much.
Interviewer: What did, how did family groups spend their time in those days when there
weren’t movies, automobiles and televisions?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh we had enormous family parties. There were thirty-five in our
family for Christmas dinner. We had Christmas dinner on the third floor at father’s house
he’d dress up as a chef with a cap and apron and everything. He’d carve the turkey up
there. We had beautiful parties up there. I had a… when I was married we had a supper
up there. It was just as attractive as it could be. That’s the way people lived. They all had
third floors. They all had dancing parties. They had a billiards table up there where you
could play the afternoon and evening but that was a very close family life when I was
young. We were very close to our parents. And we were very close to your neighbors.
Interviewer: Were during the year, other than the holiday season, were there, would,
families give parties and invite friends in?
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes, We have them almost every Sunday, [] we went to some member
of the family.
Interviewer: I see
Mrs. Lockwood: I had many relatives here. Mrs. J. H. Wonderly is my aunt, and, Mrs.
Richard Smith was my cousin, the doctor’s wife and my Aunt Kate Blake who was Mrs.
John Blake, he’s been dead for many, many years was here too and then I went there to
school, she had a house.. it’s the old Dix house on Cherry Street. You know where the
Dix house? [Horace P. Dix]
Interviewer: No
Mrs. Lockwood: That’s right across from that Oakwood Manor; it’s that house with the
pillars in the front. [540 Cherry St]
Interviewer: Oh, that Greek Revival.
�8
Mrs. Lockwood:
Yes.
Interviewer: You went to school there?
Mrs. Lockwood: I went to school there. Went to school on the first floor at the back of
the house.
Interviewer: What kind of school was it?
Mrs. Lockwood: A private school. I don’t think it was as good as the public school but
we all went there. The whole neighborhood went there. And we enjoyed it very much.
Interviewer: Why did your parents send you to the private school?
Mrs. Lockwood: It was right here, we were closer to home. And we all went to Mr.
Powell’s School up on College Avenue. Then I went in high school, finally, which I
enjoyed very, very much. I highly approve of the public school. I think they’re much
better for youngsters.
Interviewer: Than private schools?
Mrs. Lockwood: Than private schools. I think you rub elbows with everybody, you
learn to adjust yourself to the world. I think it’s very wise to send a child to public school.
Interviewer: What was the public school you attended?
Mrs. Lockwood: I went up there to Central High School. Central was on Ransom Street
then. I don’t know it’s there now. It’s no longer there.
Interviewer: Not on Ransom Street now.
Mrs. Lockwood: No, it was called Central High School when I was young. And I went
to into grade school then I went right into high school.
Interviewer: What kind of, was it basically the same education in the private schools
that they had in the public schools?
Mrs. Lockwood: Well, I thought much harder then, when I was young, very much harder
than now. That isn’t, that’s not true at all. I was a very, very poor student. Isaac Keeler
sat right in front of me. I’d never been through arithmetic if it hadn’t been for Isaac
Keeler. He helped me with my work all the time.
Interviewer: He was a good student?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh he was a wonderful student, wonderful student and I was a very poor
student. I was very conscientious. I tried very hard but I was a poor student.
�9
Interviewer: Did you go to college after high school?
Mrs. Lockwood: No, I went to Dana Hall which is in Wellesley, Massachusetts. It’s a
very good school for the wealthy. I didn’t go on to college.
Interviewer: Did many of your neighbors, did the children that you grew up with, did
they go to college?
Mrs. Lockwood: Very few went on to college when I was young.
Interviewer: What did they do after they got through with high school?
Mrs. Lockwood: They came home and made their debuts and usually married very, very
young. I was just twenty when I was married. I was very happily married and I had a
perfectly beautiful time but I, I think I was much too young, at twenty years old to marry.
Don’t you think that’s very young?
Interviewer: I think it depends on the individual.
Mrs. Lockwood: I think so too. Well, I had a very happy married life; I had a very
devoted, very sweet husband. I wish I could talk of something besides myself.
Interviewer: Oh I think that, personal recollections, something you were involved in
yourself, and that you saw and experienced are the best recollections.
Mrs. Lockwood: Well, I have very happy recollections. My father said, he couldn’t
arrange my life for me, adjust my life for me, but he could give me a happy childhood.
That was his ambition, and he certainly did. He gave me a perfectly wonderful childhood.
Interviewer: That’s a fine memory.
Mrs. Lockwood: Um hum, it’s a wonderful memory to have of a person. Of course Grand
Rapids was dirt streets and it was very, very different from now. And I could only go
from Fountain to Cherry on my pony and with my goats. I wasn’t allowed to go farther
than that.
Interviewer: Why was that?
Mrs. Lockwood: Because I was so little, I was only five years old.
Interviewer: Oh.
Mrs. Lockwood: When I got older I rode everywhere. And father had a farm when we
were older and we used to ride, I used to ride out there almost every day, had a tennis
�10
court out there, It’s now the cemetery. It’s the Catholic and Protestant Cemetery it’s
called… out on Kalamazoo Avenue.
Interviewer: Yes
Mrs. Lockwood: You must know that cemetery.
Interviewer: Which one?
Mrs. Lockwood: Woodlawn. Woodlawn.
Interviewer: That was out in the country then?
Mrs. Lockwood: It was way in the country. It was miles away. It’s not very far now by
automobile but it took a pony a long time to get out there.
Interviewer: where the country begins in terms of where you lived on College Avenue?
What was considered out in the country?
Mrs. Lockwood: Well, you were getting in the country really… you’d go out Kalamazoo
Avenue and I would say that at Burton Avenue you were in the country.
Interviewer: How about southeast what’s now East Grand Rapids and so on? Was
that…?
Mrs. Lockwood: East Grand Rapids wasn’t there at all and that was very much in the
country, when I was young.
Interviewer: Did you ever go out to Reed’s Lake?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh, I went there all the time. And they had the Ramona out there you
know when I was a child. And we’d skate out there in the winter and the Ramona in the
summer, vaudeville every night. We’d go out in the streetcar and there’d be streetcars
that would bring you home. The last streetcar we always had to catch. It was delightful.
We’d roller-skate out there in the summer time, ice-skate in the winter. And Mr. Rose
was a son of Mr. Rose Senior. I don’t know what the name was, it was Todd Rose’s
father, was in charge of the swimming when I was a little girl. I enjoyed it very much. I
was more than a little girl; I must have been fifteen or sixteen years old.
Interviewer: What was your most memorable experience as not only, what was your
memorable experience as a young person not only as a child but, let’s say as a teenager
and so on?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh, let me see. I think that would be very hard for me to decide, I had so
many memorable experiences. I have no idea. Maybe too many to tell.
�11
Interviewer: Well, can you try and tell me a couple?
Mrs. Lockwood: Well, one experience I remember very well, Margie Stanton was a
friend of mine and we met Teddy Roosevelt, and she told him that she had a raccoon
named Teddy. That tickled me almost to death. As a child, that pleased me so.
Interviewer: Where did you happen to meet Teddy Roosevelt?
Mrs. Lockwood: He was here in Grand Rapids. We met him down at the hotel.
Interviewer: At the Morton House?
Mrs. Lockwood: At the Morton.
Interviewer: What did he come to Grand Rapids for?
Mrs. Lockwood: [To] speak. Must be for running for election. I went to see but I was too
small to remember.
Interviewer: What did he say when the girl told him that her raccoon….
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh, he said, “I’m delighted, I’m just delighted.” He smiled all over and
she was so pleased she could hardly stand it. And she said, “I have a cute raccoon and
named him Teddy for you.” He was very pleased by it. And very amused by it.
Interviewer: Did many politicians come to Grand Rapids, to campaign or one thing or
another in those days?
Mrs. Lockwood: Well, President Taft came here and Theodore Roosevelt was here. No I
don’t remember any others. Oh, Bryan was here, too.
Interviewer: William Jennings Bryan?
Mrs. Lockwood: William Jennings Bryan. I’m a Republican so I didn’t hear William
Jennings Bryan, but I saw him. He was down in the square.
Let’s see if any, anything else exciting happened. I don’t believe so, in the way of
political life. Alice Roosevelt Longworth was staying here with her husband years ago.
And Mrs. Hanchett and her husband took them on the Honolulu [I] remember, the only
one I remember. It was his streetcar and they took him out to the Cattery. And they
wanted to get Mrs. Longworthy a cat but she didn’t want it.
Interviewer: What was it, what’s the Cattery?
Mrs. Lockwood: It was on the corner of Carlton and Lake Drive. I can’t tell you the name
of the woman, she raised cats. She had hundreds of cats in that house. And she raised
�12
them. She wanted to give Mrs. Longworth a cat but Mrs. Longworth couldn’t take care of
a cat.
Interviewer: (Hanchett) he owned the street car line.
Mrs. Lockwood: That’s right and afterwards he was across from my father and mother
on College Avenue, and they occupied that house. I was very fond of Mr. and Mrs.
Hanchett. Mr. Hanchett was very fond of horses too.
Interviewer: Did they, did they ever have races with their horses?
Mrs. Lockwood: They used to race down on Jefferson Avenue, every Sunday afternoon.
Ride fast horses in the cutter. I used to go there often and they raced their horses, up and
down the street. And they had races out here at the fairgrounds out here in the south end.
I never went out there.
Interviewer: What….excuse me.
Mrs. Lockwood: I used to go to the fairgrounds out here.
Interviewer: Yes, where are the, where were the fairgrounds?
Mrs. Lockwood: The fairgrounds were out… let’s see where that is now? It’s well, it’s
out where the, what is there out there now? It was out by Mill Creek out that way.
Interviewer: By Middle Creek?
Mrs. Lockwood: No, Mill, Mill Creek it was called. Mill Creek.
Interviewer: I don’t know where that is.
Mrs. Lockwood: It’s in the north side of the city. It’s beyond North Park, across the river
from North Park.
Interviewer: Oh, I see.
Mrs. Lockwood: You know where the Soldier’s home is?
Interviewer: Yes
Mrs. Lockwood: It was right out that bridge. Right out that road.
Interviewer: In these horse races, there down on Jefferson Avenue, would they race like a
jockey race or would they (?)
�13
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh no, they, just in their cutters. They had cutters. And the men would
have fast horses and just race Sunday afternoons.
Interviewer: Did your father ever race?
Mrs. Lockwood: No, he never raced. He wasn’t fond of anything like that. So I never
raced either. I’d like to, but my pony wasn’t fast enough and they were very good looking
horses they were racing. I used to drive, ride down there and watch them. When the
circus would come to town we’d all go to the circus and had wonderful times like that.
Interviewer: Did many people go down to Jefferson Avenue to watch the horse races?
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes, they did. Had big crowds there on Sunday afternoon applauding for
who had the fastest horse great crowds there, on Sunday afternoon. On pleasant winter
days in the cutters, we’d all go bobsledding. We’d take the bobs and the wintertime and
ride with the milkman. When he was delivering milk we rode with him.
Interviewer: What, what’s a bob? Is that the sled?
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes. Bob, that’s the sled.
Interviewer: You’d hold on the back of his open cart then?
Mrs. Lockwood: Back of his cart, open cart and he had a bobsled on it and he’d drive he
had some youngsters on the back of it all the time. And that was a lot fun. It’s very
different now. You couldn’t do that now. You couldn’t have a bob sled in Grand Rapids.
You’d be killed getting off and getting on. There’s nothing else you’d like to ask me?
Interviewer: Yes, there are a lot of things. I’m just thinking and just trying to picture that
who would any of the men in your neighborhood or in this area around here race cutters?
Mrs. Lockwood: No, I don’t think so.
Interviewer: Who were the men that raced the cutters?
Mrs. Lockwood: I don’t know the men at all. I’ve no idea. But anybody that had a fast
horse, trotting horses and pacing horses, they were all in the race, on Sunday afternoons.
And I’d go down on my pony just to watch them go by, but I didn’t know the men.
Interviewer: When did you get married?
Mrs. Lockwood: In nineteen nine, nineteen-0-nine - that’s a long time ago.
Interviewer: Did you spend your married life in this house here?
�14
Mrs. Lockwood: No, I’ve been here fifty six years; I was married and first lived on
Washington Street. It’s where those double houses are on Washington Street. It was four0-seven Washington. It was right next to George Thompsons.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. Lockwood: Just north of him, we were there for about a three years and then father
bought this house when had some (?) builder built it. (?) He was very amusing person, a
very attractive person. But Grand Rapids in those days was a beautiful city, the streets
were lovely and the trees were so beautiful on College Avenue. Of course, there was no
East Grand Rapids at all. As far as we ever went was Reed’s Lake. We never went any
farther east than Reed’s Lake on the streetcar.
Interviewer: Did people do much traveling in those days?
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes, my grandmother went to California every winter. She had a house
in California and a great many people went there. Mrs. Murphy went there every winter.
Interviewer: In California?
Mrs. Lockwood: In California.
And people didn’t go abroad the way they do now, but they went to California. I think
California was a very good favorite place in the winter and of course Father knew it too.
But they were very, very fond of California.
Interviewer: That certainly sounds different.
Mrs. Lockwood: It was a different world. Yes, of course there was no, there was no push
then there was no, nothing to make you rush. Everybody went to church and they drove
to church and drove home from church, the hitching posts for the horses, was a very
relaxing age. We’ve come to a very, I can’t quite describe what I mean but it’s, I think
there’s such a push we’ve got for everything now. Don’t you have that feeling?
Interviewer: Yes, I have that feeling.
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes
Interviewer: What do you think that ended that age that way of living?
Mrs. Lockwood: The automobile.
Interviewer: Do you think it was just the introduction of the automobile?
�15
Mrs. Lockwood: I think it was the cars. Then everybody could get away so quickly you
know. I don’t think it was very good to the young people.
Interviewer: Well, if people had such lovely times in the neighborhoods and with their
friends and their families, when the automobile was introduced why did they hurry away?
Mrs. Lockwood: Well, they finally got out in the country by themselves I guess. I just
don’t know.
Interviewer:
Yes
Mrs. Lockwood: But I do think the automobile has done a great deal, had changed
people’s lives. Don’t you feel that way?
Interviewer: Yes, I think it has sure had a terrific effect on American life.
Mrs. Lockwood: And we used to have neighborhood parties, I mean children’s parties.
You don’t have anything like that now for children. You’d go to someone’s house and
spend the evening and play tap in and tap out, post office and have the best time, they
don’t do that anymore.
Interviewer: The Aldrich family came from New York is that right?
Mrs. Lockwood: No, it was Plymouth, Michigan.
Interviewer: Plymouth Michigan?
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes,
Interviewer: Where did they come from before Plymouth, Michigan?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh, I think you’ve asked me something I can’t answer.
Interviewer: Well that’s not that important.
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes, they came from different places. I think originally from New York
State, from Rochester, New York, but I’m not sure of that. I know they, they were born in
Plymouth, Michigan.
Interviewer: After, after the Second, or the First World War you’ve been living in this
house for fifty-six years, what was the difference in, in the way people lived in society in
let’s say the twenties, after the First World War between then and the beginning of the
Depression? That span of time compared to the nineteen hundreds to nineteen-fifteen, for
example.
Mrs. Lockwood: I think people lived at home very much more before the war.
�16
Interviewer: Yes
Mrs. Lockwood: That and I think the country clubs.
Interviewer: Were you and your husband members of the country club?
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes, he was very fond of golf and but there was, I think there was, much
more family life when we were young.
Interviewer: Yes, what effect did the Depression have on the Hill District?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh it was very bad, nobody had any clothes any clothes that were new
and pretty and then nobody could have new because it was (?).And of course everybody
felt the depression very, very keenly.
Interviewer:
Did it affect you and your husband?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh yes, he was in the lumber business and it affected him very much.
We had to curtail everything but everybody else was curtailed, too.
Interviewer:
So almost everybody was suffering together?
Mrs. Lockwood: Everybody was suffering together. There were no comparisons at all.
And I remember Mr. Benjamin Robinson bought a new car and we were all simply
appalled that he could afford to buy a new car. He bought a new Packard car and we all
wanted to ride in it because it was brand new. And we were so impressed that he bought a
new car, of course he had no children. We had children, bringing them up and going off
the school and all sorts of things, it was a very hard time.
Interviewer: Are your children, still living in Grand Rapids?
Mrs. Lockwood: No, my daughter lives, she’s been living in Chicago, now she lives just
outside the Castle, Castle Park just below Holland. And my other daughter lives in
Parkton, Pennsylvania. I have four grand-children and three great-grandchildren.
Interviewer:
Three great grand-children?
Mrs. Lockwood: I’m very, very fortunate. I have a great grand-child almost thirteen
years old. She’s a young lady.
Interviewer: That’s amazing.
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes
Interviewer: You spent your summers down at Ottawa Beach?
�17
Mrs. Lockwood: Yes, always.
Interviewer:
summer?
Did you, when you were a child, did your family go anywhere for the
Mrs. Lockwood: Every summer. Father ran the hotel down there and [we] went to the
hotel for our meals and we had a very, very happy summer. Mother had a good time. She
just had to look after us, but no meals to look after.
Interviewer: How did you get down to Holland and Ottawa Beach?
Mrs. Lockwood: We drove down and for a long time took the train. This train would
leave at five-thirty in the afternoon and then we’d come up at eight-thirty in the morning
and then do all sorts of things. Interurban across the Lake from Ottawa Beach, stop in
Macatawa. We’d come up in the morning and spend the day and we’d go down at night
and have a beautiful time. But we hardly wait to get back to the beach.
Interviewer: What happened to that hotel?
Mrs. Lockwood: It was burned.
Interviewer:
Was your father still, managing it when it burned?
Mrs. Lockwood: No, father was dead and my brother had taken over. It burned in the
spring. I don’t think they ever knew what happened to the hotel. It was completely
burned. There was no one on the property at all.
Interviewer:
Was it in the winter when it burned?
Mrs. Lockwood: In the springtime.
Interviewer: Oh.
Mrs. Lockwood: Burned to the ground. It was a lovely hotel, with great big porches and
you could walk up on the porches and have dances very night. Everybody came from all
the cottages and went to dances and it was a very happy life. They don’t live that way
anymore. There’s a motel, nothing like the Ottawa Beach Hotel or Macatawa Hotel
anymore.
And I like Point West very much, but I had a gay life down there, at Ottawa Beach Hotel.
Interviewer:
Where did the guests that stayed at the hotel come from?
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh, from all different places. There was a great many people from
Chicago, a great many people from Cincinnati, and a great many people came from St.
�18
Louis. They would spend the entire summer there. A many people from Grand Rapids
went down there and stayed.
Interviewer:
They would spend the entire summer right at the hotel?
Mrs. Lockwood: In the summer, two or three weeks. And the season was only about six
weeks. We’d open in the latter part of June and close around Labor Day but no business
after August. July was a big month down there. Very, very gay and very nice people
came there in the summer… came summer after summer.
Interviewer: What did people, do in the winter time for their fun, summertime they’d go
down to the Ottawa Beach hotel but in the winter time what would they do for…
Mrs. Lockwood: I think they froze. .In the winter time, I don’t know. I had a very happy
time. We tobogganed or had bobsleds on Washington Street. They’d shut that street off
entirely. Nobody could get across it. We’d roll from the hill down to the, what street is it?
Interviewer: Lafayette?
Mrs. Lockwood: Not Lafayette.
Interviewer: State Street? Jefferson?
Mrs. Lockwood: Jefferson. We’d go right down to Jefferson. Arthur Vandenberg use to
ride the bobsleds_________ and down we’d go. And then we’d have to come up the hill
pulling the bobsleds. That wasn’t so much fun. But the going down was great fun.
Interviewer: Where did Arthur Vandenberg live? Did he live near-by?
Mrs. Lockwood: Just down Washington Street, about the fifth house down, just below
Prospect.
Interviewer: You grew up with him?
Mrs. Lockwood: We grew up there. And he was very good with the youngsters. And of
course, when I grew older he was just my age but when I was a child he was about five
years older. And he’d help us with our bobsleds and he was very kind to all of us. Mr.
Senator Vandenberg and my husband were great friends. But, in the winter time there
were, there was no Gay Avenue here at all. This has been added since I was a girl. It was
on Mr. Gay’s property. And they cut the street through and then of course, the property
was sold off. But this was all closed off and we start right from the head of the street and
at Madison to the corner anyway. And they, they’d close off Lafayette and Prospect;
we’d go right to the bottom of the hill on these big bobsleds.
Interviewer:
use it?
Who would use the hill, mainly children or would the adults sometimes
�19
Mrs. Lockwood: Oh no, no adults.
Interviewer:
They just did it for the children?
Mrs. Lockwood: Just for the youngsters. And we’d slide all day long. Now what my
father and mother did in the winter I just don’t know. I think probably they were bored to
death. Of course they had horses and they drove in the winter time and when the cars
came in they drove, drive an automobile in the ruts and a car would come towards you or
they’d have to back up the car to let you through.
Interviewer:
Who, who had to back up?
Mrs. Lockwood: One of the cars would have to back up.
Interviewer:
Oh, yes.
Mrs. Lockwood: Because you’d be in a rut driving in the middle of the street. The streets
weren’t cleaned at all in those days. You just took them as they were.
Interviewer: Before the car came in did they, how did they travel in the winter time,
with horses? Did they have sleighs?
Mrs. Lockwood: In sleighs. Yes, they all had sleighs. Father and Mother had a sleigh.
And I had a sleigh for my ponies. But they were no trouble because horses went all over
the street but in the winter you’d get in a rut and then someone would be in a rut. I was on
Madison Avenue one day and a car came towards me and he very kindly backed up to
Fulton Avenue, and let me out because I was right in the rut I couldn’t get out.
Interviewer: What would happen when a horse drawn sleigh would meet a car? Who
would have to move?
Mrs. Lockwood: The horses would be terrified. My ponies would stand up. They were
just terrified of the automobiles. I’d think they were going to run away but they never did.
It wasn’t very long before the automobiles were very popular. Is this all recorded?
Interviewer:
I hope so. Well, I think that’s all, I think we’ve covered quite a bit. Can
you think of anything that, if you were doing the interview you’d ask about?
Mrs. Lockwood: I can’t think of anything interesting, anything that would interest you.
Interviewer:
Well, try me out.
Mrs. Lockwood: I had a very happy time, very good time. No, I don’t believe there’s
anything else.
�20
Interviewer:
OK. Fine. Let’s see if we………
INDEX
A
O
Aldrich, Euphrasia Ledyard (Grandmother) · 2, 15
Aldrich, Moses (Grandfather) · 2
Ottawa Beach · 17, 18, 19
B
Barnhart, Mr. and Mrs. · 4
Batchhelder, Ira · 6
Bissell Family · 3
Blake, Kate (Aunt) · 8
Bryan, William Jennings · 12
C
Central High School · 8, 9
F
P
Pantlind, James Boyd (Father) · 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12,
13, 14, 18, 19
Pantlind, Jessie Louise Aldrich (Mother) · 2, 7, 12, 19
R
Ramona Park · 11
Reed’s Lake · 11, 14
Robinson, Benjamin · 17
Roosevelt, President Theodore (Teddy) · 11, 12
Rose Family · 11
S
Fox Family · 4, 5
Smith, Mrs. Richard · 8
Stanton, Margie · 11
H
Hanchett, Mrs. · 12
T
K
Taft, President · 12
The Cattery · 12
Thompson Family · 14
Keeler, Isaac · 9
V
L
Ledyard, William B. (Great-Grandfather) · 2
Longworth, Mrs. · 12
M
Morton House · 6, 11
Vandenberg, Arthur · 19
W
Waters Family · 3, 4
Wonderly, Mrs. J.H. (Aunt) · 8
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6e567dc0399a707c4465d92e23029b6c.mp3
71df701fb205d20b9365bc1c773dd162
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Grand Rapids Oral Histories
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Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Local histories
Memoirs
Michigan--History
Oral histories (document genre)
Description
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Taped and transcribed interviews conducted in the early 1970s primarily of the children and grandchildren of many of the founders of Grand Rapids, Michigan; many of whom were residents of the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Interviews were collected to develop a significant collection of oral resources that would supplement other primary and secondary local history materials. Initially funded as a private project, Grand Valley State College (now University) assumed responsibility for continuing the project until 1977.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/452">Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)</a>
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RHC-23
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1971 - 1977
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RHC-23_5-6Lockwood
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Lockwood, Katherine
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Katherine Pantlind was born on December 25, 1888 in Grand Rapids. Her father owned and operated the Pantlind Hotel. She married Closson Lockwood in 1909 and met Teddy Roosevelt. She died on March 16, 1976.
Subject
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Michigan--History
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Grand Rapids (Mich.)
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Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Grand Valley State University
Women
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1971
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fb56c5bd09a68e280bf460b0097f516b.pdf
1998319d88a3709b35213b5ed1dff526
PDF Text
Text
1
Grand Valley State University Special Collections
Kent County Oral History collections, RHC-23
Mr. Lowell Blomstrom
Interviewed on 4 August 1977
Edited and indexed by Don Bryant, 2010- bryant@wellswooster.com
Tape #56 (1:06:10)
Biographical Information
Mr. Lowell Blomstrom was born on 22 March 1893 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was the son
of Carl Herman Blomstrom and Anna A. Berglund. Mr. Blomstrom died on 4 July 1979 in East
Grand Rapids, Michigan. He married Signe M. (surname not found) about 1922. Mrs.
Blomstrom was born in 1890 in Michigan and died in Grand Rapids on 21 February 1959. Both
Lowell and Signe were buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Grand Rapids.
Carl H. Blomstrom was born in April 1867 in Lisbon, Ottawa County, Michigan. He was the son
of Carl G. Blomstrom and Elizabeth ―Elles‖ Carlson. Carl died in 1923. He married Anna A.
Berglund on 17 September 1890 in Muskegon, Michigan. Anna was born in December 1865 in
Sweden and died in 1923. Both Carl and Anna were buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Grand
Rapids.
___________
Interviewer: Lowell Blomstrom, 559 Lakeside Dr., S.E. Grand Rapids, Michigan; on the 4th day
of August, 1977.
Mr. Blomstrom and his father have been pioneers in the automobile industry for perhaps close to
seventy-five years. I‘ve asked Mr. Blomstrom to tell us a little bit about his background and why
don‘t you just start talking and tell me about your, where you were born and how long, you did
say you born in Grand Rapids? Is that correct?
Mr. Blomstrom: Oh yeah, yeah.
Interviewer: May I ask you what year?
Mr. Blomstrom: Ninety-three, eighteen ninety-three.
Interviewer: How long did you stay here?
Mr. Blomstrom: We moved to Marquette in eighteen ninety-seven, just about the time the
Spanish-American War started. And, oh did you have that on?
Interviewer: That‘s alright.
�2
Mr. Blomstrom: And father built his second automobile there. His first was built in Grand
Rapids. I have no record of that; I have pictures of course of the one in Marquette. That was
started in eighteen ninety-eight and finished in nineteen hundred. And then in nineteen one we
moved to Detroit where he started the Blomstrom Motor Company. To build the Queen car.
And...
Interviewer: May I, let me go back to Marquette for just a minute. What was the car called that
he built in Marquette?
Mr. Blomstrom: There was no name assigned to it.
Interviewer: No name assigned to it?
Mr. Blomstrom: No it was just the one car.
Interviewer: How many, how many were built?
Mr. Blomstrom: Just the one.
Interviewer: Just one
Mr. Blomstrom: Like that yeah.
Interviewer: And then you went to Detroit in nineteen one?
Mr. Blomstrom: Went to Detroit in nineteen one and he got backing from some millionaires in
Marquette. They financed it and, and they built about almost 2 thousand Queens one cylinder
first, just a few, a handful of them the first year. Then he went to a two cylinder post flat engine,
you know what we call a pancake engine. And then he made a four cylinder in nineteen six and
prices were of course quite high for those days, the four cylinder was twenty-two fifty ($2,250),
the car like the similar to the one in Grand Rapids Museum was twelve hundred dollars. And the
first original one like that one up there on that picture that was seven hundred and fifty dollars,
pardon me, seven hundred, fifty dollars. And he had trouble with his partners and he left in
nineteen six and started the Blomstrom Thirty, it was called. Thirty was horsepower based on the
formula they had at those days, the old SAE formula which we don‘t use today. England still
uses it. And they built the Blomstrom car; that was the runabout, they made a touring car. And
that was quite a car for its day. And I have one of those.
Interviewer: What year was that?
Mr. Blomstrom: That was nineteen two when the company was formed, but the first year they
made small boats, fifteen and a half foot long, selling for a hundred dollars. It was an inboard
three-quarter horse motor. And they sold thousands of those. Then he started the car in nineteen
three, one cylinder, in nineteen four he switched to two cylinders, course he made those right
through to six. The company continued on after he left but in two years it was gone.
�3
Interviewer: How many cylinders does the car have that we have in the public museum?
Mr. Blomstrom: Two cylinders,
Interviewer: That‘s two cylinders
Mr. Blomstrom: Two cylinders yeah.
Interviewer: And you say what was that built?
Mr. Blomstrom: nineteen four.
Interviewer: nineteen four.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yes and the car continued on until nineteen eight. He left in nineteen six and
then the Detroit Deluxe was put in there and backers from Marquette got the people that
designed the Willis Overland, Willis hadn‘t bought into it was Overland, in Grand Rapids or in
Toledo. And that was beautiful car and eight thousand dollar car then which was tremendous,
most beautiful car you ever saw. But they didn‘t last long. And company was sold and that‘s
where the Studebaker comes in to build a car, one of their earliest cars not the earliest but one of
the earliest.
Interviewer: I see.
Mr. Blomstrom: You know South Bend?
Interviewer: Yes.
Mr. Blomstrom: They‘re the wagon people.
Interviewer: But your father did continue in the motor car business?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well then he, he built a Rex, a small car, I don‘t see it here on these pictures; it
was a front drive car, small, they were called, what did they call them? They didn‘t call them
compact cars, that was something later that Romney, Mr. Mason, who was the head of, later on,
American Motors. Why, I don‘t recall just exactly what they called them, cycle cars, they called
them cycle, they were real small. Well that lasted a while. Then he went to Camden, New Jersey,
Grenloch just outside of Camden and built this Frontmobile. See that car here? That was a front
drive car. And in my opinion they‘re all going to go to it within the next ten years, every last car
will be a front drive, in my opinion. And then of course the war came on and they were rationed.
Everybody was rationed. General Motors, Ford and everybody. And of course you had to base on
the number of cars made in nineteen thirteen; see the war started in fourteen in Europe; it started
in sixteen for us. And the big company got zero material based there was no car built in thirteen
see, Frontmobile. And so he went to work and he made two-wheel or two front drive and four
wheel drive trucks for the government for the ordinance till their money ran out. They had a
�4
beautiful building on the Horseshoe Pike going from Philadelphia-Camden to Atlantic City. Still
there, the building and they, the money ran out so that faded out of the picture. Then he quit
making cars and he didn‘t live very long; he died quite young, fifty-six. And his name was Carl
Herman Blomstrom; in Swedish Carl of course is Charles in this country he was known as
Charlie or CHB, CH they called him in the...
Interviewer: When was he in Adrian? You mentioned before we began…
Mr. Blomstrom: Well Adrian the Lion Car was built from nineteen eight to nineteen eleven when
fire destroyed the building.
Interviewer: That was in Adrian?
Mr. Blomstrom: That was in Adrian.
Interviewer: The Lion car?
Mr. Blomstrom: yeah it was named after the Old Lion Fence Company. They were bought out
they moved to Philadelphia or where they were near the source of steel wire see. They were all
wire fences you know. And so the company that was [Fred] Postal and [Austin Elbert] Morey
who had a big cigar plant in Florida and they owned the Griswold Hotel in Detroit. Father knew
them real well. And they were directors and quite a few Adrian people were in on it, directors.
So they wanted him to design a car and come out there and build it. It was a beautiful car, there
is only one in existence in a museum out near Rushmore you know where the, in the mountain
out there in where is it the Dakotas? Somewhere? The only one in existence.
Interviewer: Yeah I know what you mean.
Mr. Blomstrom: Near Rushmore-Rapid City, South Dakota I believe it is.
Interviewer: South Dakota.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah I think so. I‘ve never been out there but I understand they have the only
one in existence. And I‘ve located 7 Queen cars of that 2 cylinder variety less similar to the one
in Grand Rapids museum and I‘ve got one of them of course. That‘s I found that down near
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in a farm yard. It‘d been out there for 50 years and the chickens were
roosting on it when I saw it at night, just at dusk you know. A fellow told me about it and I
inquired. I got it. It was fully restored; it was in the antique tours a couple years. My cousin, who
restored it, drove it in there.
Interviewer: I see. What, where do you keep it?
Mr. Blomstrom: Where did I keep it?
Interviewer: Where do you keep it?
�5
Mr. Blomstrom: Oh it‘s in the museum.
Interviewer: Oh that‘s the one in the museum?
Mr. Blomstrom: Yes, that‘s the red one in the museum. He restored it, did a beautiful job. He
won prizes at Ford, Dearborn, Milwaukee and Fremont had their centennial you know.
Interviewer: How many Queen cars were built?
Mr. Blomstrom: Close to two thousand, around two thousand. That‘s pretty good for those days.
Course Olds was the big producer you know. That was before Ford really got going, you know.
Olds was the big producer up until nineteen six, seven when Ford come out with the forerunner
of the Model-T.
Interviewer: Now the Queens were all built in Detroit, it that correct?
Mr. Blomstrom: Oh yes, yeah all from Detroit; yeah, on the west side. At the foot of Clark
Avenue right by the river. Because he leased the old Clark Dry Dock for his boats you know.
Right across the street; that there was the river.
Interviewer: What did he do after he went out of the car business?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well he and I designed a steering gear reversible, irreversible steering gear for
Ford Model-T‘s and we sold thousands of them. I had the patents and I signed to the company.
And I still have one in the basement in my store room down there. And you know the Ford was
throw it out of your hand, they‘d tip over on you the Model-T‘s. I‘ve seen them tip over. You
couldn‘t have no control, no resistance see? It was too direct. And we made, we sold thousands
of them; had a company make them for us. And we had a lock on it and it would tilt up you
know so it would get in and out easy. Then it had a Yale lock on it so you lock your steering you
couldn‘t steer, it someone broke in. Well they were all open cars in those days. Pretty near all
open cars, very few closed cars. Well I don‘t know what else
Interviewer: What did people do for protection, who rode around in those early cars didn‘t have
any tops?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well, we‘d stop of course, uh we have umbrellas still we got to a place where
we could under a tree or something which was a foolish thing to do probably in a thunderstorm.
But we had umbrellas with we had raincoats of course, dusters you know like Cravanet or what
do you call it, brown duster. Had gauntlet gloves you know went way up the elbows. But we‘d
stop at a farmhouse and go in. Usually our coil which was on the dash got wet so it had we‘d
take it in the stove and borrow their oven and light it up to dry it out cause it couldn‘t run without
the coil. So we‘d go in and we had a lot of punctures. We usually drove up to the Sparta where
my grandfather lived on the farm he was a blacksmith and it would take us two days, better part
of two days you know we only made six miles an hour. We‘d stop at Lansing or one of the
�6
Williamston out here overnight you know. Come in the next not the full day but. Take us pretty
near two days. They made father made it once one day. He left at four o‘clock in the morning
and got to Grand Rapids at three in the afternoon. The roads were, there were no roads you
know, no paved roads. The first pavement in Michigan as I recall, outside of cities, was the four
miles from Howell this way. It was a tavern there called the Four Mile House. That was the first
pavement between Detroit and Grand Rapids. That‘s Howell, Michigan coming this way four
miles; and all the rest were muddy when it rained of course they were all terrible. No they, we
had a lot of fun in those days, although we ran into a lot of troubles. Mostly tire troubles,
sometimes the tires would go twenty-five miles, sometimes three hundred, no more.
Interviewer: No more than that?
Mr. Blomstrom: No they‘d blow out. They were clincher tires you know, hooked in not straight
side like yours and mine today. They were, were clincher tires and they would get rim cuts you
know. And then they‘d get cut on the ruts on the road when they dry you know it‘s just like
emery rubbing on the tires. They‘d blow out most of the time. We had punctures of course. We
carried our own patching, rubber patching stuff; what we call cement patch, gasoline patch you
know. We cleaned them with gasoline; cut it off with the shears, a piece out of its sheet you
know rubber? Then paste it on.
Interviewer: By what year were highways as we know them today, becoming more a part of the
landscape?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well it‘s hard; I‘d have records of it of course. The first piece of pavement in
the world is claimed, was put in front of Heinz, he was a road commissioner in Wayne County,
near Detroit, which includes Detroit. He had a farm outside, near Dearborn there, and he put a
mile of concrete pavement in front of his house, the farm house, that was the first piece of
concrete road as I understand it in the United States and probably the world.
Interviewer: When was this?
Mr. Blomstrom: About nineteen…well I don‘t know exactly. That was in I would say about
nineteen ten around in there. Then the city of Detroit ordered two one mile between Six and
Seven Mile Road on Woodward Avenue. And that was ten feet wide. And they had tollgates then
you know; the farmers had to pay a toll. We had to pay a toll there was one at Six Mile, there
was one at Eight Mile, Nine Mile, one at Birmingham, what‘s Birmingham now; and then one
out by Pontiac and towards Orchard Lake. So that first mile road that was put between Six and
Seven Mile on Woodward, Palmer Park if you‘re familiar, starts at Six, and this went to Seven. It
was 10 feet wide, if you met a farmer with a load of hay coming in or something you had to get
off. Two couldn‘t pass on ten feet. So the next year they made it twelve, and the next year after
that fourteen, then you could just about pass. It was a progression of two feet per several years.
And that was the first mile pavement in the World as far as I know. And then of course it started
to come in, there wasn‘t any, I don‘t, I would say close to the first World War before there was
�7
any amount of mileage and paved roads. Course we had what I call macadam roads you know,
that‘s gravel you know. And it was all just like some of the country roads today you know,
they‘re dirt roads. There was no pavement to speak. Just that four mile from Howell this way
was the first pavement other that the cities. Leaving Detroit, when we first started coming up to
Sparta, was a plank road. And finally that got so bad that they tore it all up. That would be on
Grand River Avenue going out to Farmington. (Doorbell rings) Pardon me.
Interviewer: There now we can resume.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well I guess we completed the roads about, didn‘t we as far as you‘re
interested.
Interviewer: Yes. Let me ask you a question. When did you become associated with your father?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well I was never actually in any of the plants that he was interested in. I
associated with him in the helping designing.
Interviewer: I see.
Mr. Blomstrom: And even when I was quite young I got out some patents you know in that way
and I helped in his figuring. Cause he, he went to grade school up here by the Marmrelund
[Lutheran] Church you know where it is? [Kent City]
Interviewer: I know where it is, yes.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well, my grandparents were charter members there in eighteen sixty-five. They
met in homes you know, first. That was the first building that they had, the wooden one, it‘s a
brick building now, was built in seventy-two I believe.
Interviewer: Do you remember a family up there by the name of Bloomer?
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah I know where they were; the Bloomer Hill which was a real hill to climb.
We used to go up and father would drive and my brother and I would each have a stick of wood
and we‘d block the wheels. Could only go a little at a time.
Interviewer: That‘s my Mother‘s family.
Mr. Blomstrom: Is that right? You know the old Bloomer Hill? Course it‘s cut down now.
Interviewer: Yeah, I don‘t really know it.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well it was a steep hill, a terribly steep hill; they took off the top and filled in
the bottom down there where Kline, not Kline, what‘s his name? I know them, the family; I
know most of the family.
Interviewer: Klenk?
�8
Mr. Blomstrom: Klenk yeah. They‘re down in the hollow, by the Bloomer Hill.
Interviewer: I see. Well my grandfather and my grandfather‘s brother kept the farm until his
death in nineteen twenty-three. His name was Abel Bloomer.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well I don‘t know any of them. I just know the association with the Bloomer
Hill.
Interviewer: Do you remember the hamlet of Lisbon?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well my father was born there
Interviewer: He really was?
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah on the other side, he was born in Ottawa County you know that‘s the
dividing line. That‘s Ottawa Kent. And he was born there, they didn‘t have any records but he
was because my grandfather had a blacksmith‘s shop there. It was called the BlomstromGrumback. John Grumback who was the head of the printing company at one time, he was his
first cousin you know. His Grumback‘s father and my grandfather Blomstrom were partners
there. They made wagons and did steel work, forging you know.
Interviewer: How many people lived in Lisbon in those days?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well I have a book on it that published in 1879. It was the biggest town around
there except Grand Rapids, of course. It was bigger than Sparta, [which] was called Nashville
you know originally.
Interviewer: No I never knew that.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well the creek is the creek going through there over to the Rogue River you
know. And the Rogue of course runs into the Grand here near Belmont. And so this was called
Nashville. He [J. E. Nash] was the first settler there. I have pictures of his home.
Interviewer: Were you born in Grand Rapids?
Mr. Blomstrom: On the west side. Near that St. Adelbert Church, a block away, in that Polish
settlement. That‘s quite Polish. It was the old church. This is a new one. This was built in
nineteen eight. The other one faced south, this one faces west on Davis I think is the cross street.
Near McReynolds, I don‘t know. Yeah the house I was born in was the corner of Davis and
McReynolds and Third Street. You see the freeway goes through there now; it took all of the
south side of Third Street there. The house I was born in is still standing over there, on the
corner.
Interviewer: Oh really?
Mr. Blomstrom: And they moved it around the corner and built a bigger house on the corner.
�9
Interviewer: What‘s the address?
Mr. Blomstrom: I don‘t know.
Interviewer: You don‘t know.
Mr. Blomstrom: It‘s still there. I drove by there a couple of years ago and I saw the house
Interviewer: Did you get up into the northern part of the county quite a lot to see your
grandfather?
Mr. Blomstrom: Oh yeah we used to go up there every year from nineteen three on, every year
we‘d go up there. Father would leave a car for us, he‘d take a tester along so he‘d drive back see?
And he‘d leave a car for my brother and I, we drove it, it was the only car; people would come
from hundreds of miles to see the car you know. Up at grandfather‘s they had heard of the car
you know, it was quite a rarity. You didn‘t see cars; well there were only eighty-two cars in the
state of Michigan, when I started driving, in the whole state.
Interviewer: when was that?
Mr. Blomstrom: Nineteen three, yeah, there was only eighty-two...
Interviewer: You were about ten years old when you started to drive.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah , yeah I was ten. I‘ve been driving ever since, never been without a car.
Interviewer: What did you, what were your business associations later on?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well, of course I helped father but I didn‘t work for the companies. I got some
of the patents. He only had eighth grade, he took an ICS; you know International
Correspondence Schools? At Scranton, Pennsylvania? He took drafting, I have some of his
drawings; they‘re beautiful drawings. He took correspondence courses in engineering; he‘s got a
diploma, which I have, in mechanical engineering of the ICS schools. And he was a prolific
inventor you know what I mean? One of these fellows who comes to work every morning and
has a new idea; never stops to make a nickel you know. And, well Henry Ford is the same thing.
I don‘t give him credit for the Ford motor at all. I give it to Jim Couzens and he ran the office
you know, the money, the Senator you know later on.
Interviewer: What sort of schooling did you have?
Mr. Blomstrom: High school
Interviewer: Where was that?
Mr. Blomstrom: Western High in Detroit. There were only three high schools in Detroit. Eastern,
Western, and Central. Western burnt down there‘s over thirty now, I know a few years ago there
�10
was twenty-six, probably thirty now. There was only three, Eastern, Western, and Central. The
Western burnt down twenty some years ago; there‘s a big new building there, much bigger of
course. The building that I was in was built around nineteen hundred. I was there from nineteen
six to nineteen ten, when I graduated. And I was going to MIT in Boston. And the principal got
me free entrance without an examination because I was fairly good in mathematics- high school
mathematics and college algebra too. And that‘s really what‘s helped me in most of my jobs.
Interviewer: Did you go on to MIT?
Mr. Blomstrom: No I had what they called some kidney ailment and they said I wouldn‘t live.
One time the doctor said a week and here I am almost 85 years old, but all the doctors are gone.
And well they didn‘t know. I grew up like a weed you know. I was six foot five only weighed a
hundred and forty pounds. You know just a hardly a shadow. And I played tennis, of course
those days we were, everybody called us sissies you know playing ping-pong out on the grass
you know. And when the city wouldn‘t give us a, had any courts, public courts those days, they
gave us a space in Clark‘s park. We had a roll it and stripe it on a clay court. They gave us a
space for clay on the green court. And so it was, we were the forerunners. My partner and I who
later became treasurer of Detroit Edison Company, he died 3 years ago, we were partners. We
played doubles so much you know in those days. I played up by the net because I was tall and
could reach a lot of them, stop them from going back. I couldn‘t run, he could run, he was fast
like old Borg in Sweden now you know. And this other fellow what‘s his name? I don‘t know.
And I couldn‘t run. So we played doubles quite a lot. He had his house full of cups. He was
champion of the west side and also head of the Detroit Edison Tennis Club for years and years.
He was good. I wasn‘t. I was better at playing baseball. I used to play baseball. Not
professionally but, and I don‘t know how it was I was so thin but I had a swing, a long swing.
Boy that ball would go.
Interviewer: Were those grass courts in those days?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well we had one grass and one clay court. The city put down the clay. I guess
you‘d call it clay, it was white roll. But they put up the posts. We had to furnish the net and stripe
it. We used to have our own machine for striping. And we had to furnish the nets and keep it up.
They gave us a spot in the park. There‘s hundreds and thousands of them in Detroit now public
you know. The only ones that were public were a couple at Belle Isle and two at Waterworks
Park. We used to go there and play; I‘d drive a bunch of kids over there. But now there‘re
thousands of them. Well you‘re asking me a lot of questions about myself. I thought this was
about my father.
Interviewer: Well I‘m interested in both of you. I wanted to go on to you back to you for a
moment. You became associated with some businesses.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well the first thing I did was after I was six years after I left high school and
they said don‘t go to college, I was going to MIT as I said, principal got me in there. Ordinarily
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they, those days, you had to take an examination; he got me in, without an examination. And for
six years I did nothing. I‘d walk. I‘d walk downtown and back twice every day. That was ten
miles. Finally I got so I could walk ten to fifteen miles a days. I was thin but apparently I grew
too fast and I was six foot five and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. Occasionally when I‘d
take the car, I had a car father gave me. But I didn‘t do anything there for six years. Then I got a
job in a small company as a timekeeper. We had those calculagraph clocks you know you punch
a card in out on the job. And I got to running all the machines there when they were idle I‘d see
the machine idle I‘d go and run it. I had that privilege, I knew the owners, and because I‘d
learned how to run practically every machine that father had you know. He had quite a machine
shop there. And you can see some of the pictures here I think, I don‘t know there might be some
here.
Interviewer: Yes there are, I see some.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah there‘s lots. I have lots more besides what‘s on the wall here. In the den,
and I could run anything-gear cutter, building machine or lathe or any machine because after
school I‘d go down there and see an idle machine and I‘d go run it. And I got so I could run and I
could figure of course. The average workman, a toolmaker, or anybody working in the shop
didn‘t know mathematics. They got through grade school and had to go to work. It was a
necessity they had to. They didn‘t go to, very few people went to high school. They went up to
the eighth grade like my father did.
And of course he had the ICS course but he was an inventor. Prolific inventor I call him. Henry
Ford was the same thing. But I spent an hour with Henry Ford a year before he died. It was on
his problem of bearings out there. Of course I was with the Bearing Company then -FederalMogul. It was Federal Bearing and Bushing originally, they merged with Muzzy Lyon Company
to form Federal-Mogul, which is in existence today. It‘s a big company. A very big company.
Interviewer: How long were you with them?
Mr. Blomstrom: Thirty-seven years. I went in as Chief Tool Engineer, Tool Designer, whatever
you want to call it. And then I got to be Chief Engineer including the machinery, designing, tool
fixtures and jigs and everything like that. And also the product engineering I had both. Now it‘s
split up it‘s so big. And then I got to be Chief Engineer and then I, the last ten years, I was
consulting to the president on manufacturing and engineering. Consulting engineer.
Interviewer: Did you live in Detroit during all this period?
Mr. Blomstrom: I lived in Detroit forty years from nineteen one to nineteen forty-one. We put up
a plant in Greenville which is still there and that‘s where we put metals on the moving strip,
while it‘s moving. And those were my babies. I engineered those. It took a lot of aspirin but I got
them working. And there‘s nine of them now; five in Greenville and four in St. Johns. And
they‘re a hundred and eighty feet long. Couldn‘t powder or babbitt on moving steel, freeze the
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babbitt of course the copper lead it goes thru ovens. It‘s a hundred and eighty feet long from a
coil of steel to a fine metal ready for the press room, form it into bearings. It‘s a very fine
process. We make our own powder. That is we I said I‘m not with them now but I
mean…Federal-Mogul makes their own powder. And St. Johns and we atomized molten metal
you know, make it molten metal make powder out of it.
Interviewer: Did you retire after you worked for Federal-Mogul you said you were willing—
Mr. Blomstrom: Well, when I was sixty-five they don‘t want you anymore like General Motors,
they kick you out. That‘s the customary retirement; they‘re talking about changing it now to
sixty-eight or something else.
Interviewer: Did you come back to Grand Rapids at that time or?
Mr. Blomstrom: I came back here in fifty-five. I bought a house on Maryland. I sold that when
my wife passed away. She‘s been gone—we have no children—she‘s been gone nineteen years
now. And I leased this when it wasn‘t even half finished through this building. There were no
walls, just a framework. And they were working on the brickwork outside. I‘ve been here, one of
the first here, eight years now I‘ve been, eight or nine I guess. No, I had a house over on
Maryland near, between Michigan and Fulton.
Interviewer: Yes. Tell me more about your father, tell me more about his later years.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah, I was going to tell you, you asked me about what I was doing. Well then,
I worked for this little shop and got around to be the inspector there. They made tool work and
some production work. And then I went with Paige Motor Car Company it was called—it wasn‘t
called the Graham-Paige then, the Graham brothers hadn‘t bought it then—it was called PaigeDetroit [Motor Car Company]. It was near where we lived on the West Side. I went in there, and
I‘d never take a drawing lesson in my life, but I told them I was an expert gauge designer. They
wanted a gauge designer. So I got to be their chief gauge designer. I think I was about twenty-six
years old or something like that. And I got along fine. From there I went to—well I was still with
Paige when they built that big plant out on Warren near the Lincoln Motor Plant which is now
Detroit Edison shops you know, that big building on Livernois and Warren. And, Paige was a
mile further out. I don‘t know what it is now, probably Chrysler Plant or something. Well I got to
be assistant tool engineer there. We had thirty-eight in the department. I was first chief checker
then I got to be assistant to the Master Mechanic. He‘s the headman of tool engineering today,
Master Mechanic. I got to be assistant Master Mechanic.
Interviewer: Excuse me interrupting, about when was this?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well it was around the war, just after the war, the First World War
Interviewer: First World War
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Mr. Blomstrom: Well I‘m getting a little ahead of my story. In the First World War I went from
Paige to Lincoln Motor Car Company. They hadn‘t made a car yet, they were making their first
one. You know they made the Liberty engine, the airplane engine. They made the biggest
quantity around six thousand of ‗em. And Ford made some, Marmon made some, Cadillac made
some, Hinkley made some. But Lincoln Motor made the bulk, there were six thousand about.
Probably all the rest were about four thousand. Not a one got across to Europe you know, they
were all on the coast when the war ended.
Interviewer: I see
Mr. Blomstrom: And honest, you could buy up for a song you know. A twelve-cylinder. ----Six
separate cylinders, each one bolted. They were made of steel. And I was chief gauge inspector
there under the head of all inspection. I wasn‘t the chief in the department, I was chief gauge
inspector. So I got a lot of—And then from there I went to Paige. The war stopped you know in
November, eighteen wasn‘t it? I believe we were only in two years. The war had been on since
fourteen of course. And then I went with Paige. So it was after the war that I was there as an
assistant tool engineer for… during the Depression of twenty-one there were thirty-eight of us in
the department and during the Depression there was only three of us, the boss, myself, and the
clerk. It was a sharp drop-off just like a cliff you know. But it started coming back, in eighteen
months it was normal. But everybody was laid off except a few key people you know. But
Lincoln wanted to keep me. Mr. [ Henry M.] Leland whose, was, started as one of the founders
of the Cadillac Motor Car Company, he left to start the Lincoln. They were building the car in
the —secret room. He gave me permission to go in there. I had a key. They were building the
first car during the war there. I saw the first Lincoln. And while it was being built, as a matter-offact, I was one of the privileged to go in there. And when the war ended there you know there
was a false, on Thursday you know there was a false alarm, but we didn‘t know it was a false
alarm, that the war was ended. The following Monday it was the real thing! And Mr. Leland, I
said, I‘m leaving, I‘m leaving, there‘s nothing here to do. We just played checkers and chess you
know with thirty-six of us in that whole plant including the office. We‘d come in ten o‘clock and
go out to lunch and then we‘d come back, play some more checkers or chess and go home at
three o‘clock. We did that from November to March, so I got tired of playing checkers and chess.
So I told him. ―No‖ he says, ―we got a good job for you. We‘re going to build a car in August, by
August.‖ I said, ―Mr. Leland you can‘t tool up. It‘s going to take you a year and a half to two
years to tool up.‖ Machinery wasn‘t good for that you know, what they had for the airplane
engine. So, well I was right of course, he couldn‘t start in August, this was March see. So I left.
He begged me to come back. In the meantime you know, Ford took it over. He had a little
trouble with Wilfred Leland‘s son, Henry Leland‘s son. Leland was very nice to me; he begged
me to come back. I says no, I‘m not coming back. And then Ford got hold of me—records I
suppose there, and he kept pestering me for two or three years to .... He had me all signed up to
be at Highland Park then you know, in the head of their gauge department. In the meantime of
course, during the war there, the Bureau of Standards wanted me in Washington, which would
�14
have been good experience. But my mother was ill, my father had passed away you know. So I
didn‘t go. Well, they said, we‘ll send you to Franklin Arsenal in, near Philadelphia. I says no, I
can‘t leave Mother. Well he said, we‘ll get you closer, Rock Island Arsenal where you‘re in the
Mississippi. I said no. So they passed it up. But Ford kept writing me for years, I never went out
there.
Interviewer: What did you do after..?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well, then I went with the Bearing Company.
Interviewer: I see.
Mr. Blomstrom: I been there, I was there until I retired. That was Federal Bearing and Bushing.
They merged in, that was twenty-one. In twenty-four they merged with Muzzy-Lyons to form
Federal-Mogul. Federal was the trade name of the Federal Bronze and Mogul was the Babbitt of
Muzzy-Lyons. So they took their two trademarks and formed a corporation, Federal-Mogul.
Interviewer: In what year did your father die?
Mr. Blomstrom: Twenty-three. Mother died, he died in early spring and Mother died in the fall.
Interviewer: I see. Had he been active up to the end?
Mr. Blomstrom: Yes, yes, he was active. He was always figuring out something new you know.
Interviewer: Well, do you have some other memories about the cars that your father-there‘s one
picture there you said was shown in New York?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well that‘s these two here. That picture‘s taken at the show; that‘s the chassis
and the touring car. This is the runabout. I had one of these. Front drive car. Course they‘re quite
new. There‘ve been front cars made before; old [J. Walter] Christie made a front drive racer, the
fastest car in the world those days until Barney Oldfield came around with a Blitzen Benz.
Interviewer: What year were those cars made?
Mr. Blomstrom: Those cars?
Interviewer: Yes.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well I think that‘s in nineteen seventeen when it‘s in the show. We started
that—well I didn‘t go down there; I was home. I wasn‘t doing anything for six years. I would say
it was around sixteen or seventeen.
Interviewer: Was that show in New York in the armory?
Mr. Blomstrom: I think it was what they called a National Armory, isn‘t it, something like that?
�15
Interviewer: Well I‘ve heard they used to have shows there.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah, that‘s right, I think so. I‘m not that certain about it, but I would think so.
They had a couple places there they showed ‗em. I wasn‘t down there, Father of course was
there. He‘d show the Queen car he started in Chicago at the old auditorium. He‘d stay at the
Congress Hotel. The owner of the Congress Hotel and the auditorium there was this one
millionaire [in] Marquette that financed the Queen. Of course we‘d go over to Chicago we‘d
have free hotel rooms and dinners and everything was free.
Interviewer: What was his name?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well that was the Kaufman family. They were very wealthy.
Interviewer: Did they live in Marquette?
Mr. Blomstrom: Some of them did. Of course one of the family, the one that financed Father,
was the oldest one. They married wealthy. They were smart, they married wealthy people. Louie
Kaufman, one of the brothers, was in New York. He was head of the second largest bank in the
United States. What was the—what is the second largest bank? I don‘t know if it is today.
Interviewer: I can‘t answer your question.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well, City Bank is one of them now I guess. But he was head of, he was
interested in the General Motors too. He made a lot of money besides, Louie. I met him, I met
him years ago. There were several brothers, four that I knew. And they all ended up pretty
wealthy you know.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Mr. Blomstrom: They made a lot of money in copper you know. And married a lot of… Well, I
could write a book if I‘d been around to it years ago. The editor of the Detroit Free Press, he‘s
not living now, needless to say, Mr. Blomstrom, he says, you ought to write a book he says, you
know more about the automobile business that anybody I‘ve ever talked to. Well I grew up with
it and I have a good memory you know, and through Father‘s associations.
Interviewer: Clearly.
Mr. Blomstrom: And I met a lot of the people later on when I was with the Bearing Company.
Did I say I met Mr. Ford, spent an hour with him, I got along fine with him. But he gets along
fine with outsiders, but he‘s tough on the people who work for him. Very tough. He‘s a one man
show you know. Edsel of course was my age exactly. If he‘d been living he‘d be close to eightyfive now. He was very small; he‘d only come to my shoulder you know. Ford was quite tall; he
bent over in the last few years. But I got along fine with Henry Ford
Interviewer: Did you know Edsel Ford too?
�16
Mr. Blomstrom: No, I never met him personally. I saw him lots of times. And I‘ve seen the sons,
his three sons, of course, lots of times when they were kids with knee pants. They‘d walk down
Washington Boulevard and there‘d be a guard in front and back you know. When they went to
school they‘d have to have guards you know, their school Yale or wherever they went. There
was Henry the second, and Benson, and William…Clay, see. They were all their middle names.
Well Clay was. You see, Mrs. Edsel Ford was a niece of J.L. Hudson the store man you know
Interviewer: Yes.
Mr. Blomstrom: And she was a Clay, her name was Clay, so that‘s where they get the Clay.
William Clay, and of course the younger son married one of the Firestone. You know old Henry
is their grandfather. [Harvey] Firestone and [John] Burroughs you know, the botanist or
whatever he was, and [Warren G.] Harding and they went camping. I have a picture here
somewhere. That‘s the first station wagon I ever saw. Ford made one just for that trip you know.
They‘d go camping, six or seven of them you know. Ford would always pay the expense. And
Edson, Edison, Thomas Edison, was one of that group.
Interviewer: You said Burroughs, but don‘t you mean Burbank?
Mr. Blomstrom: No no, I mean Burroughs.
Interviewer: Oh Burroughs.
Mr. Blomstrom: Burbank was the—
Interviewer: You know what you‘re talking about.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah. He was an elderly man, quite short. I have his picture here with Ford.
And Harding was president, then they invited him. Thomas Edison. Ford would do that every
year. And he got very close to Firestone. I think that‘s the reason why Edsel‘s youngest boy
married a Firestone. He owns a football team don‘t he? The Lions?
Interviewer: Yes, I believe so.
Mr. Blomstrom: That‘s the youngest. Then there was girl in the family too, Josephine I think‘s
her name. I don‘t know exactly. I think so. She married a Ford so she didn‘t have to change her
name.
Interviewer: Another Ford family as I recall.
Mr. Blomstrom: It‘s the Ford-Alkali, Michigan Alkali, or Wyandotte Chemicals now. They were
very wealthy people. That‘s the Ford of Libbey-Owens-Ford family Toledo, the plate glass
people.
Interviewer: I see.
�17
Mr. Blomstrom: It‘s not the Ford automobile people. No connection. No connection. And that
Ford building in Detroit‘s the same way. That‘s not the Ford automobile man, that‘s the FordAlkali, I call ‗em Alkali because it was the Michigan Alkali in Wyandotte you know. Now it‘s
Wyandotte Chemicals. They make products for making glass, they supplied the elements.
There‘s a famous Ford family in Toledo, Pittsburgh plate glass and Libbey-Owens-Ford family.
That‘s a different family entirely. See Father made the cars before Ford. Well of course he made
that one. He made one here in Grand Rapids in ninety-two, but I‘ve never checked with the
newspapers if it‘s in there. He was working with the Perkins Machine shop on Front Street. They
just tore that building down, of course they‘ve been gone for years, when they made the freeway
through there. Front Street is jogged there somewheres. Then he went to Marquette in ninetyseven. Well he was quite a smart duck considering he didn‘t have any education. He had both
feet on the ground like Kettering, ―Boss‖ Kettering, Charles Kettering. He was a great fellow; I
used to go and visit him. He had both feet on the ground. They‘re so interested in developing
new things that they never stop to make any money. That is a beautiful drawing isn‘t it? I don‘t
know what I‘m going to do with that.
Interviewer: It says, The Lion Forty Power Plant.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well, that was the old SAE rating. England still uses that rating. What you do,
you square the bore, if it‘s a five inch cylinder you square it, that‘s five times five is twenty-five,
multiply by the number of cylinders four, that‘d be a hundred, divided by two and a half, that‘s
where you get forty see.
Interviewer: I see.
Mr. Blomstrom: Get it?
Interviewer: I get it.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well they still use that in England, we don‘t, we use the brake horsepower. Test
it on a brake dynamometer. Actual horsepower of course, they take off the water pump and the
generator. Actually, the horsepower‘s not what they say it is because they take off some things
that take horsepower, your water pump and your generator and that stuff. But it‘s brake
horsepower, actually torque. Testing torque. That‘s what brake horsepower is, testing torque.
Foot pounds. Well the horsepower is 33,000 foot pounds.
Interviewer: I keep thinking of things about that car in the museum. I went to see it; I think it was
yesterday afternoon, because it‘s locked up in a room there.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah, they had it on display two years in a glass – in the entrance to that
looking at the stars stuff. It was beautiful there. But they, they got this room, and it‘s all cluttered
up. It‘s typical of nineteen hundred. It‘s an old blacksmith shop or something.
Interviewer: How fast would that car go?
�18
Mr. Blomstrom: Thirty-five miles an hour.
Interviewer: Oh really?
Mr. Blomstrom: That‘s about all it would do.
Interviewer: Well that‘s pretty fast.
Mr. Blomstrom: We had motor, we had bicycle police, traffic cops in Detroit, on Belle Isle. They
couldn‘t catch me. They couldn‘t pedal. What they‘d do, they‘d cross the Island and catch me on
the other side. That‘s the way they‘d put their bicycles; they‘d get another cop, and they‘d put
their bicycles on the ground, and I‘d have to go out on the grass, which is not permitted. They‘d
take me over to the station, there‘s a station on Belle Isle. Been there ever since I can remember.
And get another policeman and they‘d cross the Island midway, and I‘d go way around the tip of
the island. And they‘d catch me on the other side of the island. They had their bicycles on the
road, the roads weren‘t very wide. And of course in order to go by them I‘d have to go out on the
grass, and of course they stood about each side there. So then they‘d take me over to the police
station on Belle Island, been one there ever since—still there as far as I know. Of course then I
would tell Dad. He says forget it, which I did. He knew all the judges I guess. They used to come
down and borrow the boats on Friday, go up to the flats. I knew every judge because they‘d
come down there on a Friday afternoon after court and get one of those boats and go up to the
flats. A whole bunch of judges.
Interviewer: Where were the flats located?
Mr. Blomstrom: That‘s the beginning of the St. Clair River. It‘s at the north end of Lake St.
Clair. You went through St. Clair River. The flats is the first part. It‘s swampy and islands, so
dozens of islands there. There‘s that big Indian island there, the Walpole. It‘s across from that
park where the boat used to go up to ___ park. That‘s below Algonac, see. Algonac is where Gar
[Garfield] Wood is. We built the propellers for Gar Wood‘s, all his speed boats. He had the
world‘s record until now; we‘ve gone way beyond it. This fellow out in Lake Washington in
Seattle has gone, what is it, over two hundred miles an hour I guess. Of course they‘re really not
boats anymore, they‘re practically out of the water, they‘re hydroplanes! They have steps in
them. But we built them for Gar Wood and well, he had the world‘s record, a hundred and
twenty-six miles. We built all the propellers and most of the --- tugboats we built the propellers.
We sold that to Michigan Wheel; I say we, it‘s Federal-Mogul. Michigan Wheel still makes a
Federal equipoise propeller, which we had a patent on. Most of the --- tugboats used to buy them
from us, I don‘t know if they‘re buying them from Michigan now. Michigan‘s right here in town.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mr. Blomstrom: Its part of a, I don‘t know if some corporation has bought them out.
Interviewer: Yeah. It used to be that Mr. Evenson was president of it. Charles.
�19
Mr. Blomstrom: I don‘t know. I met a lot of them when they were considering about, something
about a machine they were building for to machine the propellers, the production. Course they
use it for making patterns, I know. But they were going to make a machine to do the production,
which according to me is not according to ―Hoyle‖. It‘s not necessary. You know the pitch, the
pitch is the one turn is a pitch, like a thread. The ones we made for Gar Wood were only
seventeen inches in diameter but was twenty inch pitch. They had two of them, one going this
way and one going opposite so his boat wouldn‘t tip over, see. Like the English[man]… Kaye
Don tipped over. I watched him, I saw his boat tip right over. He got in the wave of a Gar Wood
boat that was leaving, and his propeller come out of the water, there was no resistance. And the
torque of that just took his boat, which was very light, and tipped it right over and he went in the
drink. I saw it. I was only five hundred feet away from it when it happened. Well Gar Wood was
smart, he put two propellers on, going in the opposite direction, so you didn‘t get that chance of
tipping over if the wheels went out of the water. He was smart, smart old duck. He died, didn‘t
he, a little while ago? I think so.
Interviewer: I don‘t know.
Mr. Blomstrom: He was very old. I knew him, met him. Course they had the Gar Wood... they
made that dump truck, hydraulic dump truck. We made a lot of parts for them. I knew all the
brothers. There was a bunch of brothers! There were about pretty near as many of them as the
Fisher brothers. They were seven I guess. I knew a couple of them, Ed the youngest.
Interviewer: I think you ought to write that book.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well, a lot of people have said that. I think Mr. Frankfurter said it too, and some
of the other people. I did write a book on bearings for the company. Millions of those were sent
out. It‘s a very small book. It‘s been in most of the libraries now around the country. Some
people wanted a thousand. The Ordinance Department, where is that, Fort Benning in Georgia
where they had the Ordinance? Well a major came up from there one day, I didn‘t know he was
coming, and the office wanted to see Mr. Blomstrom. The girl says, there‘s a major from Fort
Benning here. He wanted a thousand of those little books. They were just small, about Reader‘s
Digest, you could just stick it in your pocket. It was run serially in an automobile magazine for
eight months. So we give him a thousand, it didn‘t cost much. They‘re in most of the
universities, they wrote, they sent. Course now they put out a hardcover, but this was just soft
cover. But it was about probably the first small bearing book on servicing, you know taking care
of bearings, automobile engine bearings, not ball or roller bearings. So that‘s the only writing.
It‘s difficult for me to write, but I suppose I should. It‘s too late now, I guess.
Interviewer: You could always dictate it.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah, I bought a machine, I have a machine. I bought it for that purpose. I
haven‘t used it but once I guess, twice, but not for that purpose. I bought a machine, nothing as
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elaborate as your machine here. It‘s just a simple…has about the same kind of a microphone I
guess. Micro—what do you call it?
Interviewer: No, it‘s a microphone, yes.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yes, I have that. Some of them have it built right into the case. I see some of the
new ones advertised. Yeah, I have one.
Interviewer: How do you keep busy these days?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well I‘m rummaging see, getting stuff here. I‘m going to dispose of a lot of
books and things. I don‘t know what I‘m going to do with all these pictures; of course Mr.
Frankfurter would like them. I don‘t if he ever saw this; I don‘t think I had that at the museum.
These others I had at the museum for a couple years, until they moved the Queen car where it is
now.
Interviewer: I see. You said your cousin restored that car?
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah, I think a second or third cousin.
Interviewer: Who‘s he?
Mr. Blomstrom: His name is Bloomstrom, they put too many o‘s in it. He lives in Sparta,
Michigan. He works here in Grand Rapids. He works in the furniture business - woodwork. He‘s
a young fellow, compared to me of course, he‘s about half my age. But he‘s restored a lot of
cars, for himself and for others. He does a beautiful job.
Interviewer: But you were the one who actually found it?
Mr. Blomstrom: Oh yes. Well, one of our people at the—we have a, Federal-Mogul had a plant
at Lancaster, that‘s the Amish town you know.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mr. Blomstrom: He says there‘s a Queen car over here. And this fellow had an old car, one very
rare car. Everybody down there has an old car. Every town has people who recondition old cars...
a Lancaster and Valley Forge and around Pennsylvania. So he says there‘s a Queen car over
here. Well, I says, can you find out when it‘s convenient to see it? Yeah. I‘d been looking for
one; I‘d located seven you know, which is pretty good for being that old. They run from—there‘s
this nineteen six four cylinder in Detroit, he won‘t sell it to me. He has the largest collection of
old cars in the world. The magazines say he has six hundred, he told me he has a thousand. I
believe it because they‘re in sheds. If you put up in a straight line or in a U they‘d be eight
hundred feet long and he‘s got five deep standing on the ends. So he says bring down a suit, you
know get a suit, a coverall suit. So I stopped at Sears Roebuck in Highland Park there and bought
one. The only time I ever used it, I gave it to a customer. And he says I‘ve got one of your
�21
father‘s cars. I says what is it? He says it‘s a four cylinder nineteen six Queen. Looked like a
Packard you know. There‘s a four cylinder up there and to the left, at the top, see it looks like a
Packard. Now maybe, I don‘t know who swiped who, but, they were swiping designs those days
as they are today. And everybody you‘d show that car too would say that‘s a Packard, and it was
a Queen, four cylinder. Well anyway. I got off the track.
Interviewer: Well, you were going to go look at these cars.
Mr. Blomstrom: Yeah, well, I bought that and on the way over there, he says, Mr.—we call him
Barney Pullerd, P-U-L-L-E-R-D, I guess he‘s still living. He has the largest collection of old cars
in the world. The last time he called me up here, two years ago, about seven, eight years ago he
says when you gonna write that story about your father for me? Cause he wants it you know.
Well, I says, I haven‘t got around to it. He says, I‘m gonna put up a building now, he says, and
I‘m going to show all my cars in a museum and charge like all the others are doing, Florida and
out west. I don‘t know if he‘s done it, I haven‘t talked to him for seven, eight years. He has, the
oldest car is a German eighteen ninety-seven, and all his cars are real old, I mean none of this
new stuff, twenty, thirty years, they‘re all old. From eighteen ninety-seven, I would say, to
nineteen twenty probably. He has almost every car imaginable. He‘s still looking for a Lion car. I
haven‘t told him I located one in this museum out by Rushmore. He‘s probably found out. He‘s
advertised in every…he says, that was the finest car your father built, he says, that would outrun
any car even a Stutz in those days.
Interviewer: How many Lions were built?
Mr. Blomstrom: Well I don‘t know exactly. I would say it‘s between a thousand and fifteen
hundred.
Interviewer: I see.
Mr. Blomstrom: You see, the Queen cars there were only ten a week made. It was all hand work
practically. He bought the bodies and a lot of the other axels. The axels were made by WestonMott in Flint, you know that‘s Mott, you heard-Interviewer: Yes, sure.
Mr. Blomstrom: Mott. The General Motors had more stock than anybody else outside of the
Dupont family. I met him; I saved the life of his financial secretary twice by giving him blood
you know. I had a hemolytic strep and it took me three years to come back on that. I lost seventy
pounds, I was in Harper Hospital. I gave blood side-by-side in bed to this fellow twice and saved
him. They looked all the records of the hospitals over Michigan and I was the only one who
could save this boy‘s life. You got to give him blood serum within twelve months when you
fought it off. They found my name and they got me to give him some blood and in a week he
was on his way to Arizona, and riding horseback in two weeks. The next year he got pneumonia
�22
and I gave him some more blood cause the same thing happened. I met Charlie Mott there, he
was tall as I was, six foot five. I thought he‘d give me a million bucks, but he never did. Well,
the Queen car had Weston-Mott axels front and rear; they were made in Flint. They moved from
Elmira, New York, I believe it is, somewheres in New York State, to Flint. That‘s how he got
there. And of course, General Motors bought the plant and he got stock, and he never sold his
share, he kept it, so now it‘s being sold. Well he was getting there at one time an awful lot,
several million dollars in dividends every year when it used to be two dollars or something.
Yeah, he had more stock I think than any individual, but the Dupont family probably had more
as a family.
Interviewer: Did you like Mott personally?
Mr. Blomstrom: I only met him as his secretary, financial secretary. I seen him lots of times, but
I never met him. I used to go up to Chevrolet and Buick, of course we made bearings, some of
them, for them. Not so much Buick, but one time we made forty percent of the Chevrolet until
they make their own now I guess down in Dayton Ohio, Moraine Products. I knew two of the
Chevrolet brothers, you know there were three: Gaston, Arthur, and Louie. The last time I talked
to Louie, he was assembling front drives on those twelve cars that Edsel ordered for Harry Miller
for the Indianapolis track. He wanted me to design the bearings for him, I did, which I did, they
were special. See they go up to seventy-two hundred rpm, those four cylinder Millers. Harry
Miller came to my office and he had Preston Tucker with him. He introduced me to him. Of
course the big thing, they say he designed the Tucker car. He didn‘t design that any more than I
did. He was an expediter that‘s all he was, he was no engineer, Tucker. I knew him quite well.
And I got to meet Harry Miller. We made bearings…There was five cars that were got down to
the Indianapolis track, but they had other front end troubles, steering gear trouble, none of them
finished the Ford cars. The old man didn‘t know about it I guess. They assembled them in a
building down on, West Lafayette there, about a mile from town. I was down there quite often.
Preston Tucker was a handsome fellow. He died quite young, in the forties wasn‘t it? Low
forties?
Interviewer: I think so.
Mr. Blomstrom: I talked to him over there in Chicago. They showed the car there in that big
building that Dodge ran during the war making engines. He was quite a talker. They raised a lot
of money but a lot of people lost a lot of money too. They sold a lot of stock. Anybody who
wanted to handle the car, dealer had to put down four thousand dollars I believe, something like
that. Don‘t quote me too much on that. What are you going to do with this?
Interviewer: This will go to the, well I‘m sure the museum wants a copy of it, and a copy will go
to the Grand Valley State Colleges.
Mr. Blomstrom: Are they interested in this?
�23
Interviewer: They have an oral history department.
Mr. Blomstrom: I see.
Interviewer: So, you‘ll be talking for the next few hundred years.
Mr. Blomstrom: The Swedes in Detroit, what they call the Detroit Council, Swedish Council
Incorporated, I know fifty percent of them, of course I could have been a charter member if I‘d a
stayed in Detroit. They just wrote a book last year as a project for the centennial, or was it
bicentennial isn‘t it? I have a copy here. They have quite a write-up about my father in there, and
they mention me too, and my father-in-law, he‘s right on the first page. He was one of the
founders of the Mamrelund church up here.
Interviewer: What‘s the name of the book?
Mr. Blomstrom: They Made a Difference.
Interviewer: They Made a Difference. Who published it, do you know?
Mr. Blomstrom: Aaronson, but I buy it through the friend of mine who‘s the secretary of the
Detroit Swedish Council, Signe Carlstrom I know her.
Interviewer: I presume that the local library would have a copy.
Mr. Blomstrom: I don‘t know. I bought several of the books to give to my nephews and nieces.
Of course what I was going to tell you was that it was a special project because of the king‘s visit
here. He was here last summer.
Interviwer: Yeah.
Mr. Blomstrom: Karl Gustof. Every Swedish king has got Karl Gustof in their name. That was
my grandfather‘s name, Karl Gustof Blomstrom. So they gave him several books, so my name
and my father‘s name and a lot of my relatives are in that palace in Stockholm. Well, they just
happened to put my name in, they got my father‘s write-up. In fact, this fellow that retired just
last year, the vice-chairman of General Motors Oscar Lundeen wrote it with – Jones, who was
the head of the big advertising agency there in Bloomfield Village, Bloomfield Center. Jones. I
don‘t know him, of course I know Oscar Lundeen real well. I‘ve known him since he was that
high; I knew his parents. I knew the three boys. One of them designed that Union Trust Building
downtown, Earl Lundeen.
Interviewer: Which building is that?
Mr. Blomstrom: The Union Bank and Trust.
Interviewer: Union Bank. The new building?
�24
Mr. Blomstrom: Well yeah, it‘s quite new. I don‘t know about the little building alongside, that‘s
named after the chairman isn‘t it? Frye Building.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mr. Blomstrom: But that‘s designed by Earl Lundeen. He and another fellow have a corporation
in New York City. That‘s Oscar‘s brother. There was three boys; I knew them all. There was
Edward, the youngest, Earl, and Oscar.
Interviewer: They were all in Detroit I take it?
Mr. Blomstrom: Oh yeah. Their father was the superintendent of the Detroit Screw Works and
then he went later, when he retired he went into real estate. But the boys have all done good.
Three boys. Well Oscar of course is a millionaire. He wrote this, and they start off with my
father, see, way back when designing the Queen car and building it.
Interviewer: Well we‘ve talked for about an hour I think, and I think maybe it‘s about time for
me to go home.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well if you want some more, just feel free to call up and come out.
Interviewer: I‘ll tell you, I‘ll play it back and see if I can-Mr. Blomstrom: I think it‘s too much of myself and not my father.
Interviewer: Maybe I can find that book and then read about your father and then come back and
ask you some more questions.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well it‘s just a page or two in there about him. It‘s on the first page. Of course,
they asked me last year to write about my father, but I was very miserable, I‘d been in the
hospital and I didn‘t write. They don‘t need to write to me about it anyway, all they got to do is
go the library, which they must have done because they got stuff there that I sent to the library,
word for word!
Interviewer: Thank you very, very much. I appreciate this. It‘s been a very interesting hour.
Mr. Blomstrom: Well I bore people to death talking automobiles.
Interviewer: No, not at all.
Mr. Blomstrom: I wish I was a good writer, I could write a book. I knew most of the early
people. The only one I didn‘t know was R.E. Olds, Ransom E. Olds. I know the history of the
company and all that. You see, he made the first car in Michigan, R.E. Olds, Ransom E. Olds.
That‘s his initials, R.E. O. for the REO you know.
Interviewer: Yes.
�25
Mr. Blomstrom: He quit the business you know. He was going to have cattle up north here. He
bought a ranch up here, or it‘s called a ranch. But his cronies in Lansing got him back to start the
REO. Of course it sold out long ago; the family isn‘t in it anymore. General Motors, of course—
no it‘s not, it was White, they were independent weren‘t they? There‘s White Motors and then
Diamond T Motors, and then now I guess it‘s gone. It was a good car, a big heavy car like the
old Pierce Arrow and the Locomobile. They were built like a locomobile, locomotive, heavy you
know, big heavy cars.
Interviewer: Ok.
A
G
American Motors · 3
General Motors · 3, 12, 16, 22, 24, 26
Grumback, John · 8
B
Belle Isle · 11, 19
Blomstrom Motor Company · 2
Blomstrom Thirty · 2
Blomstrom, Carl G. (Grandfather) · 6, 8, 9, 24
Blomstrom, Carl Herman (Father) · 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11,
12, 14, 15, 22, 24, 25
Bloomer Hill · 7, 8
K
Kaufman Family · 16
Kettering, Charles · 18
L
Detroit Swedish Council · 24
Dupont Family · 22, 23
Leland, Henry M. · 14
Libbey-Owens-Ford Family · 17, 18
Lincoln Motor Car Company · 13, 14
Lion car · 4, 18, 22
Lundeen Family · 24, 25
E
M
Edison, Thomas · 10, 13, 17
Miller, Harry · 23
Mott, Charlie · 22, 23
D
F
Federal-Mogul Company · 12, 15, 19, 21
Ford Motor Company · 3, 5, 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, 23
Ford, Edsel · 16, 17, 23
Ford, Henry · 10, 11
Frontmobile · 3
O
Old Lion Fence Company · 4
P
Paige Motor Car Company · 13
Pullerd, Barney · 22
�26
Q
T
Queen car · 2, 4, 5, 15, 21, 22, 23, 25
Tucker, Preston · 23
R
W
Rex (car) · 3
Weston-Mott · 22, 23
Wood, Garfield · 19, 20
Wyandotte Chemicals · 17
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5974db0100116cc68e025d1077512441.mp3
c8bc4c4fcba754dc9dc84b7d455f4032
Dublin Core
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Title
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Grand Rapids Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Local histories
Memoirs
Michigan--History
Oral histories (document genre)
Description
An account of the resource
Taped and transcribed interviews conducted in the early 1970s primarily of the children and grandchildren of many of the founders of Grand Rapids, Michigan; many of whom were residents of the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Interviews were collected to develop a significant collection of oral resources that would supplement other primary and secondary local history materials. Initially funded as a private project, Grand Valley State College (now University) assumed responsibility for continuing the project until 1977.
Creator
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Various
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/452">Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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application/pdf; audio/mp3
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eng
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RHC-23
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1971 - 1977
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RHC-23_56Blomstrom
Title
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Blomstrom, Lowell
Creator
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Blomstrom, Lowell
Description
An account of the resource
Lowell Blomstrom was born on March 22, 1893 in Grand Rapids. His father was an inventor and pioneer in the automobile industry. In 1904 Carl Blomstrom introduced the Queen Automobile produced in Detroit by the Blomstrom Motor Company. Lowell Blomstrom also worked in the automobile industry. He died in 1979.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Michigan--History
Local histories
Memoirs
Oral histories (document genre)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Personal narratives
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Grand Valley State University
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eng
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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Text
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application/pdf
audio/mp3
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Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)
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1977
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/cce4fd468b90d1cc20ebe196f5384581.pdf
7458ebb0199cafd172e0d47ca039207e
PDF Text
Text
1
Grand Valley State University Special Collections
Kent County Oral History collection, RHC-23
Mrs. Ford McLachlan
Interviewed in 1974
Edited and indexed by Don Bryant, 2010-bryant@wellswooster.com
Tape #54 (1:02:34)
Biographical Information
Mrs. McLachlan was born Veronica Elizabeth Josephine Jungbaecker on 1 August 1883 in
Grand Rapids, Michigan. The family name is pronounced ―Youngbaker.‖ She was the daughter
of John Jungbaecker and Johanna Frances Keister. The parents were married in the Netherlands
about 1872. John Jungbaecker died 20 November 1923 in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the age of
77. Johanna died in Grand Rapids 5 May 1936 in Grand Rapids at the age of 87. Both of Mrs.
McLachlan’s parents were buried in Mt. Calvary Cemetery.
Veronica was married 20 February 1920 in Grand Rapids to Ford H. McLachlan. Ford was born
in Grand Rapids in August 1887, the son of John Norman and Harriett E. (Hooker) McLachlan
who were married in Grand Rapids on 27 April 1882. John McLachlan was born in Canada April
1860 and died in Grand Rapids on 11 September 1944 at the age of 84. Harriet was born in
Michigan in 1859 and died in Grand Rapids on 24 April 1943. John and Harriet were buried in
Fulton Street Cemetery in Grand Rapids.
Ford McLachlan died in Grand Rapids on 14 January 1943. Veronica died in Grand Rapids on
21 December 1988. Both were buried in Mt. Calvary Cemetery.
___________
Interviewer: You said you and your sisters would go there [Crescent Mill] collecting.
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, when Dad used to do work for them before he built that house, you see…
Interviewer: I see.
Mrs. McLachlan: And the Voigt family lived on the West Side.
Interviewer: I see, before they built the Voigt House they lived over on the West Side.
Mrs. McLachlan: Near the mill you see. The mill was on the corner. [She is talking to another
person here]
Interviewer: And he worked for them. Before the building, what kind of work did he do before
building? Always building or just carpentry?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, when he was a young man and after he left school he took up carpentry
work. When he was eighteen, he went into the army, of course, that was compulsory over in
�2
Germany. When he was through with the army, he emigrated into Holland. His father had
preceded him, because his farther was living in Middleburg. Dad was working in Vlissingen? on
a big railway station, depots they call them here. And that’s where he met my mother was in
Holland.
Interviewer: Yes, And when did they come to this country?
Mrs. McLachlan: In eighteen seventy-three.
Interviewer: Yes,
Mrs. McLachlan: They settled in Grand Haven, and my older sister Mary was born there. Then
after a year or so there, Dad said there were no prospects here so I am going to move on to the
bigger city. Of course, he heard Grand Rapids was a bigger city than Grand Haven.
Interviewer: Did he come to this part of the country mainly because of his wife’s Holland
connection? How did they happen to come to Michigan?
Mrs. McLachlan: I will tell you what, when my mother was ten years old, of course her father
died, and she had a little brother seven. They had gone into another city to collect some money;
you know how they did that years ago - they didn’t mail it. You had to go and collect it. Some
little inheritance, maybe it was—I never knew. They contracted, there was an epidemic in the
city, and they both contracted this disease and they came home and they both died.
Interviewer: Oh, my.
Mrs. McLachlan: Her mother meanwhile had met a Hollander from Grand Haven, who was
traveling over there. He was a widower, a Mr. Ball, and he wanted to marry my grandmother, so
she said alright and so she came to this country and she left my mother there alone with the
grandparents.
Interviewer: Oh, I see, so she had a natural want to come over here.
Mrs. McLachlan: When she came here, she hadn’t seen her mother in fifteen years.
Interviewer: Then, your father came up to Grand Rapids because there was more work here.
Mrs. McLachlan: He thought there would be. He was working on boat down there; you know
finishing up the cabins and that.
Interviewer: So he was a skilled finish carpenter.
Mrs. McLachlan: Oh yes, of course that was German legendary know how. Even Ralph Voigt
said that in his letter, in his article in the ―Wonderland‖. When they came to Grand Rapids the
population was only sixteen thousand five-hundred here in eighteen seventy-four. I read that in
the paper a year or so ago, so I kept track of all that.
�3
Interviewer: Not a big city, but it seemed like a big city for this part of the country then.
Mrs. McLachlan: And there were Indians here on the island in the Grand River and Campau, if
you read the story of Campau.
Interviewer: They used to get paid off every year. They paid off the Indians every year. Your
father then became a builder as soon as he got here.
Mrs. McLachlan: Now right away, he worked as a carpenter, and I think when I was born in
eighteen eighty-three, he just started his business.
Interviewer: My, are you ninety-one years old?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, I will be ninety-two in a few months.
Interviewer: You’re remarkable.
Mrs. McLachlan: I don’t know.
Interviewer: You don’t know, I’ve seen some people ten or fifteen years younger that didn’t look
as good.
Mrs. McLachlan: That’s a good age too in the seventies, of course, I think that is young, because
I was active in my seventies and eighties. Just my eyesight now that has… I can read the finest
print; I could until just a few weeks ago but now I am using (?), but sometimes I am better off
not using it.
Interviewer: What did your father do when he (?)
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, he was a carpenter for about ten years after he came here. See the
language barrier was what held him up. He learned the English language. Then he told my
mother I am going into business and she said, ―I will tell you something.‖ (Dad was awfully
quiet) ―Dad if you are going into business, you are going to have to start talking.‖ She said he
never stopped after that.
Interviewer: Did you speak English at home?
Mrs. McLachlan: Always, I still don’t see how they learned to read and write. I just don’t know.
Interviewer: As far as you’re concerned, when you were growing up you spoke English at home.
Mrs. McLachlan: I never remember them speaking German except when some of their German
friends came over.
Interviewer: And they didn’t teach you German either?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, we went to a German school.
�4
Interviewer: You did?
Mrs. McLachlan: We went to German Parochial School. And they kept up these old languages,
like the Polish school taught Polish, they wanted their children... Well some of them they had to
because they couldn’t communicate with their children unless they knew how to talk Polish or
German or something. My folks they started to learn right away. Anyway my father was the
progressive one in our family.
Interviewer: Because he went into business for himself. When he went into business for himself,
did he go into it as a builder?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, a contractor and builder. Well, you saw, this is one of the last billheads
and it is all yellow with age. The first decade of this century,
Interviewer: That’s right, it would be nineteen ten and on up.
Mrs. McLachlan: And he retired in nineteen eleven. Oh, quite a while ago, Mrs. [Barbara]
Roelofs, when I talked with her which was three or four years ago, or three, anyway it was
before Ralph Voigt died, because I went over to the Voigt House because he invited me over
there…
Interviewer: Oh, did he?
Mrs. McLachlan: …after that article came out in the ―Wonderland‖. What he said to the reporter
from the Press was, he said, ―They don’t build houses like this anymore. This was built by
artists.‖ Well, I just couldn’t resist the next day, I called him up and told him who I was and said
I am the last member of this family, of my father’s. I told him that and I couldn’t help but call
him up. He said, ―I want you to come over and see this house. If anybody’s entitled to see it you
are.‖ We had pictures, Ralph’s father had given my dad two pictures, oh they were about this
size; one was of the outside of the house and one of the beautiful stairway. And my mother had
them framed in little gold frames. And they hung in our dining room there was a sort of a niche
toward the living room where my father’s safe was. And she had hung them over the safe. And I
can remember looking at those pictures a hundred times. When they sold the old house and built
the new one, I don’t know what became of all these old pictures. I didn’t help my mother move
and I never knew what became of them. Unless they were put in a dresser in the attic at the new
house, but I never went up there.
Interviewer: Was the stairway special and did your father do that himself?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, he didn’t work at all, he never worked at the trade after he went into his
business.
Interviewer: I see, just a contractor, then?
�5
Mrs. McLachlan: He had some of the finest carpenters, craftsmen I would call them. One of
them was Ralph Lypse, he was good on stairways and mantelpieces and stuff like that.
Interviewer: And he carved them himself, that man carved the round…
Mrs. McLachlan: No they didn’t do any carving. That was all done in the factories by expert
carvers. Our factory that got out this work.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: I was too young to tell who got out all this interior finish. The Ocker and Ford
Company were the ones that did it. And my father was the president of that company for twenty
years.
Interviewer: I see.
Mrs. McLachlan: He started that company, he and Mr. Clark bought the land, built the factory
and had the stocked subscribed for.
Interviewer: I see.
Mrs. McLachlan: That was in the early eighties, before eighteen eighty-six because he went to
Germany in eighty-six, when my sister Anna was born. Anyway.
Interviewer: What was the name of the company again? Ocker and Ford.
Mrs. McLachlan: On Fourth Street, and the Voigts lived right there in our corner of Mount
Vernon, You know where Front Street is, all these people had their homes right along near the
factories where they worked because they had no transportation.
Interviewer: You had better be there.
Mrs. McLachlan: You had horses and buggies and the streetcar, that was all; and my dad bought
his first horse and buggy at that time and then, of course as the family grew so does the vehicle.
We had a two-seated cutter and a double-seated phaetons with the fringe on top. And then he had
two single buggies. We always had two horses as long as I can remember until the day he retired
and then he had a horse yet. Even after he had bought his cars, we had two cars later on and he
learned to drive he still had a horse. He was getting older, sixty five you know and he was
coming around the corner of Monroe and Bridge Street and he was going to cross the bridge and
he put his foot on the accelerator to get around the corner and a policeman stopped him and said
you are going too fast. But I wanted to get around the corner, the policeman told him you have to
slow down when you go around the corner,.
Interviewer: ...instead speeding up?
�6
Mrs. McLachlan: He was the funniest guy, full of life you know, wonderful sense of humor.
This lady wanted me to make up a list of the different homes that he built in the [thirties?].
These are old, I wrote these, this has been revised, there are a lot of things I didn’t think of until
later. That was my first copy; then I wrote this one over. Did I tell you he built the house that
Jack built out at Reed’s Lake?
Interviewer: No, I didn’t know that.
Mrs. McLachlan: That was sold, that was William Jack that owned the American Boxboard
Company.
Interviewer: Yes, yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: He had a awfully hard time getting started because he had no capital, he went
to the Goodspeeds, John. And he didn’t want any part of it. See, he didn’t know who to go to, of
course the Goodspeeds were in the real estate business and they made all kinds of money. And
later on in thirty-six when I worked for Harrison Goodspeed, just temporarily you know, to catch
up on some of the work. Mr. Perkins, who was a state bank examiner, was John Goodspeed’s
bookkeeper. He worked half days, that’s the way they were hired, but I was on full time. And
then Harrison, when I worked for him, I found out from their statements that Harrison had threehundred thousand dollars in that company and his father had five-hundred thousand dollars. You
see, they kept putting in money after it got going. They practically owned the thing.
Interviewer: Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Mrs. McLachlan: Of course the Jacks were quite well to do. I knew William Jack because, I’d
forgotten that my dad had built that house, that was when he was semi-retired and my brother
was taking care of it and his foremen. Mr. Jack came up to see me when I was working in the
Metz Building for Mr. Dykhouse lumber. He said to me, ―Are you Miss Jungbaecker? And I
said, ―Yes, I am.‖ He said, ―I’m Mr. Jack and I wanted to tell you that your brother wasn’t taking
care of his work out to the house.‖ ―Well‖, I said, ―the foremen are there, and Dad has good
foremen.‖ You see, Dad just financing the thing, he wasn’t really wasn’t active anymore and
wasn’t inspecting anymore. ―Well,‖ I said, ―I will go home tonight and tell my father.‖ But they
finished the job and …it’s a very beautiful home. I guess I was never in it.
Interviewer: Were you ever in Dr. Hake’s house?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, but that was sold to Judge Raymond Starr,
Interviewer: Raymond Starr, you said, yes!
Mrs. McLachlan: I don’t know who bought it when he retired and was in the nursing home, he
was at Olds Manor. Then his wife Minnie was out to Pilgrim Manor, not Pilgrim Manor the other
one the Porter Hills and she died. And I don’t know if this Judge Raymond Starr was, he was the
�7
last one. That’s right. Then there was the Wenzel Cuckerski home. Then there was the Bernhard
May home, the brother of Meyer May of the May Company downtown. Bernhard was from New
York, married a New York girl, he came back here to Grand Rapids with his wife and he wanted
to build a home so they got a hold of my dad and they built that house, and I’ve never seen it.
But his wife didn’t like it here so she wanted to move back to New York.
Interviewer: So they went back to New York, and sold the house.
Mrs. McLachlan: Sold the house to a Mr. Godfrey.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: He went through there and said, ―Who was the contractor and builder?‖ He
said, ―Mr. Jungbaecker.‖ ―I want to get in touch with him because he knew his business and I
want to remodel a few things and change a few things.‖
Interviewer: Now, were those houses built after the Voigt House?
Mrs. McLachlan: I know the Voigt [house] was because she was a Voigt girl you know?
Interviewer: Yes. Mrs. Hake was Clara Voigt.
Mrs. McLachlan: And she was Ralph’s sister. And the Meyer [Bernhard?] May house? I was
quite young, because I remember him coming home to mother and saying what is a French
toilet?
Interviewer: Oh, oh.
Mrs. McLachlan: She said how would I know if you don’t. She said the plumbers and fitters will
know what it is.
Interviewer: They wanted a French toilet, huh?
Mrs. McLachlan: I never knew what that was at my age and my father didn’t know, and I got
down to Cuba in nineteen twenty-eight, I was in the Imperial hotel, three of us women and I
went to the bathroom and my gosh I must have pushed the wrong button or something and I got
all wet.
Interviewer: Oh, you had a bidet!
Mrs. McLachlan: So I found out what that was. I told them I got all wet and they said well that is
a French toilet. Well, my father never knew…
Interviewer: Were you in the Voigt House when it was being built? Were you around, then?
�8
Mrs. McLachlan: Ralph told me, he was going to Union High School when I was going to St.
Mary’s on the west side same street a couple of blocks away. And I use to see him as a kid, he
was a year older than I was. He told me that after school he went over there every night, every
afternoon after school and would talk to my father. All he could remember was that his name
was John. He said he had the plans up in the attic and he could find out. I said I can tell you what
his name was, and it is a hard one to remember and I spelled it out for him and he said yep, that’s
it. I said I suppose Ocker and Ford did the interior work and I said yes, my father was the
president over there and turned all the work over to them and I said yes he would. There was
something else here, the Bernhard May house. The C. A. Lindner home too, he was the manager
of Ocker and Ford Company when I worked there. I worked there, that was my first job. My
father put me in his office when I was sixteen years old. I worked there until I was about twentyfour and then they went into receivership. Mr. Dykhouse was one of the vice-presidents and so
was Mr. Robert Sherwood. Mr. Dykhouse and Dad and Mr. Sherwood were the receivers. Then
later on I went to work for Mr. Dykhouse when I was thirty years old. I have a long history of
my own life. The Maurice Shanahan home on Plainfield Avenue; I don’t know what Dad did up
there but I can remember him saying he was out in the yard and talking with Mr. Shanahan,
planning what they were going to do. But what he did there, I don’t remember. That’s the big
home, the Creston Mortuary bought this home way up on the hill and it was too hard getting up
there, so they built the mortuary down below. Why they kept the home for, I don’t know. But
Maurice Shanahan was with the Bissell Company. He was president of the Bissell Company for
years. We had a lot of good people, built the Evangeline Home.
Interviewer: I saw that, wasn’t that the predecessor to the Booth Memorial Hospital.
Mrs. McLachlan: That’s a lovely old building, the architecture was so much nicer than the
buildings are today. Take the buildings downtown they look like cracker boxes to me. Take the
old City Hall, that was architecture. Take the Voigt home, they call that a Queen Anne but I can’t
associate that with Queen Anne; I didn’t know they had homes built like that.
Interviewer: They can’t seem to be able to afford to do is any of that really elegant decorative
work on buildings nowadays. It looks very plain and functional.
Mrs. McLachlan: They used to do a lot more of something they call ????, not cheesecake, but
another name for it
Interviewer: I know, that jigsaw work, well it will come to me in the course
Mrs. McLachlan: Decoration on the…
Interviewer: Gingerbread.
�9
Mrs. McLachlan: Gingerbread and that’s right and that porch is so beautiful, that they had a
flooring of wood on that porch, and wondered how they could keep wood from, course they
used cypress for outdoors.
Interviewer: Is that what they used in that?
Mrs. McLachlan: Because that takes care water and stuff.
Interviewer: Do you remember how much it cost to build the Voigt House?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, I don’t.
Interviewer: I suppose at that time …
Mrs. McLachlan: It was a recession, in 1895 there was a terrific recession on.
Interviewer: That is interesting.
Mrs. McLachlan: Of course during that time, I can remember my mother saying… I was going to
have a white dress for my first communion, and Mary my older sister was going to make it for
me. You know we all made our own clothes in those days. There were no ready-made garments.
Interviewer: That’s right.
Mrs. McLachlan: And Mary was to make this white dress, and Mother said all your going to
have is a plain white dress. I said that’s alright who cares, I didn’t care about clothes. So I went
downtown a couple of days after that, with a girlfriend of mine from school. I went into the
Boston Store and saw this collaret with embroidery and a little lace and it would fit right over the
top of the dress and it was quite pretty. I said how much is that, she said that’s two dollars. And I
came home and told my mother about it, and I had never asked for anything. And I said to her,
Mother I saw a little collaret downtown that I thought it would look nice on this….I said that’s
alright it’s too much money and she said how much was it? And I said it was two dollars. She
stood and looked at me for the longest time, and then said you a are going to have that collaret, I
will give that money to you tomorrow and you go down and get that collaret.
Interviewer: When you went downtown in those days, you lived on the West side and you went
across Bridge Street?
Mrs. McLachlan: And then to the school and then across Bridge Street, turn north on Turner just
one block, really a block and a half and walk downtown over the Bridge Street Bridge and then
walk back home to the west side.
Interviewer: Did you know any other of the other Voigts, except Ralph.
Mrs. McLachlan: No, I knew Carl and Frank, and the oldest one was Frank and he was married
to a Miss Seyferth.
�10
Interviewer: Seyferth.
Mrs. McLachlan: Beautiful blonde woman, I used to see her so much on the west side they lived
on the west side too. And I even mentioned that to Carl, to Ralph, I remember your brother Frank
and his wife the blonde woman and he said wasn’t she beautiful and I said, I’ll say she was!
Interviewer: He was considerably older than Ralph, though Frank was, he was the oldest.
Mrs. McLachlan: You see there were three girls too in that family.
Interviewer: The girls were all in the middle and Frank and Carl and then the girls and then
Ralph. Ralph was the youngest.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, he was, he told me that.
Interviewer: And he never married.
Mrs. McLachlan: No, Carl did, then his wife died. When they got married the father said this is
it. You can never come back home.
Interviewer: Oh, really.
Mrs. McLachlan: He meant, if anything happened to them.
Interviewer: They would have to live away from home.
Mrs. McLachlan: And then (?) lost her husband.
Interviewer: But Clara did you go back home, after Dr. Hake died.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, she did.
Interviewer: Was that before her folks died?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, her father was dead. She came to our house and he (her dad, not Voigt
father). He was semi-retired but he would figure the jobs and that. She came over to the house
and said I want you to figure a plan I want to build a house. And dad said alright I’ll figure it for
you. And she came back and said oh, that’s way too high. Well, her father was the same way.
Dad said well if you want good work, that’s what I have to have, that much money. So she said
I’m going to forget about it. So the next year she came back again with another plan. And Dad
said didn’t you get anybody to build that house, yet? She said nope, I am not going to have
anybody else build it. I want you to figure this one.
Interviewer: So Mr. Voigt was close with his money too?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, well of course, I wouldn’t say they were tight. He was just that type that
would say, oh. Gosh when we would go and collect some small bill, when Dad did some work
�11
for him on the old home on the west side. Dad would warn us, ―Don’t say one word. Now he’s
going to say what’s the matter with this John, he is trying to rob me.‖ Just sit still and he will pay
it. So, I went there a couple of times and presented the bill. He’d look at it and frown and say,
―My goodness that man is trying to rob me.‖ I would sit there and look at him and not say a word
and finally he’d say, ―Okay go downstairs and get the money.‖
Interviewer: The office was downstairs in the old house on the west side?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, the Crescent Mill.
Interviewer: Oh I see you went to the mill to collect.
Mrs. McLachlan: His office was upstairs in the mill. The bookkeeper and the other office help
were downstairs.
Interviewer: Oh, I see.
Mrs. McLachlan: That was before Ralph was in charge. Ralph went to colleges in the East, he
went to Andover and either Harvard or Yale. He told me that he had two Masters, he had two
degrees, anyway.
Interviewer: And he came back and was actively engaged in the mill.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes.
Interviewer: Was Carl also in the Milling business with his father?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes.
Interviewer: Now his wife, did his wife die?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, very nice looking woman too, I remember her.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: I use to see her in the mill, I knew people in the office there. Miss Annette
Klanderman worked there a long time, she was lame. And a Miss Diver. I didn’t know her as
well as I knew her sister but I knew who she was. They were good looking girls.
Interviewer: Somebody told us Mr. Voigt didn’t like to spend money on electric light either.
Mrs. McLachlan: Didn’t he?
Interviewer: No, he used to tell them hang a bare bulb in the office and put all three desks around
that light bulb because they only could have one bulb for three people. Maybe that was just a
story.
�12
Mrs. McLachlan: (?) he was quite frugal like all the Germans are.
Interviewer: He wanted value for his money’s worth, obviously.
Mrs. McLachlan: …He came over with the Herpolsheimers. He started in the Herpolsheimer
building. I was in that store.
Interviewer: I see you put a note on this saying your father put the first escalator in
Herpolsheimer’s.
Mrs. McLachlan: That was in the first Herpolsheimer building. You see the old
HerpolsheimerError! Bookmark not defined. when he was with Voigt, was up there further
near where the ? drug store was later on, right in the middle of that next block between Ionia and
Ottawa. And I used to go in there and shop and they still have that name up on the building if
you go down East Fulton Street you can see it up there Herpolsheimer, Voigt-Herpolsheimer.
Interviewer: It is still up there? I would like to see that.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes. My nephew told me that. I’ve seen that name up there too a good many
times, but never gave it a thought. If I had known this was going to happen, I would have saved
those pictures that Mr. Voigt gave me.
Interviewer: Too bad you didn’t save the pictures of the interior of the house.
Mrs. McLachlan: Well it was just the stairway.
Interviewer: That is such a beautiful stairway.
Mrs. McLachlan: I can remember my dad coming home, I was twelve and my dad would come
home telling my mother, he used to talk about things once in a while and we kids would hear it.
He said, ―Mother, you know what the people are doing, they are laying the flooring in the Voigt
House. You know they have to walk around in their stocking feet. There might be nails and
cleats on the bottoms of their shoes. And that wood didn’t dare to be scratched.‖ It had this
parquet flooring, just the border around in the foyer. That was imported.
Interviewer: It was?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, it was.
Interviewer: Where did they get that from, Germany then?
Mrs. McLachlan: I imagine so. They came from Bavaria. He told me that.
Interviewer: But the rest of the wood, the regular oak for the flooring came from this country.
And you said cypress for the outside.
�13
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, that’s what they used to use for porches, because it holds water and
won’t break down. I would think in that length of time that they would have to put on new
flooring on that porch. It wouldn’t last that long.
Interviewer: Maybe, I don’t know. We’ll ask about that. It may be that’s the original flooring.
That building is so sound, it really doesn’t deteriorate.
Mrs. McLachlan: That’s the way things were built, years go.
Interviewer: Yes,
Mrs. McLachlan: Everybody built their homes that way. And in their basement they have walnut
beams.
Interviewer: The interior of the house has beautiful woodwork in it. And it is beautifully kept up.
Mrs. McLachlan: Is it oak?
Interviewer: Well, what interested me was in the drawing room, the library and the hall it is oak.
In the downstairs bedroom it looks to me like cherry, It is beautiful, beautiful wood, polished.
Mrs. McLachlan: What color is it?
Interviewer: The cherry in the bedroom is the regular red cherry color, beautiful and very close
grained like cherry, and it is the deep rich red.
Mrs. McLachlan: Cherry is wonderful.
Interviewer: And it is so close grained that you know it is not mahogany, No mahogany is a
wider grain. Looks to me like cherry wood and it looks so pretty how could they left it out
of…..You know they have oak in the Music Room and …
Mrs. McLachlan: Oak was a big thing in those days.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: Especially quarter-sawed oak.
Interviewer: Quarter-sawed oak.
Mrs. McLachlan: We had it in our home, too.
Interviewer: Do you know anything about that stenciling around the top in the library? Who did
that?
Mrs. McLachlan: I don’t even remember that.
�14
Interviewer: Well, there is some kind of stencil pattern up around the edge of the library.
Mrs. McLachlan: Didn’t they say one time, that one of the girls did that?
Interviewer: They did say the family did some in either the dining room or library.
Mrs. McLachlan: Oh, they have some in the dining room too.
Interviewer: There is some painted work up around the top of the dining room. Then there is
some wall paper, no, not paper, this looks like fabric on the walls.
Mrs. McLachlan: It is fabric, it is tapestry.
Interviewer: Yes, tapestry, there is furring strips behind it.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, they need that to hold it. But they’ve got the damask in the living room.
The walls are all covered in damask. The second living room was the music room.
Interviewer: Yes,
Mrs. McLachlan: And that had a piano in it -- an upright. The thing I missed in the home like
that would be a beautiful grandfather clock. Instead they have this big giant mirror, this huge
thing. On the other landing there were some plants, artificial plants of some kind.
Interviewer: There is a grandfather’s clock, but it is down in the hall.
Mrs. McLachlan: Where is it?
Interviewer: Now, is that the one you remember seeing?
Mrs. McLachlan: I don’t remember seeing a grandfather’s clock
Interviewer: There is one in the hall.
Mrs. McLachlan: See, there were so many things we saw that I probably forgot.
Interviewer: I think if you go with more than one or two people I think it is hard to see
everything.
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, there was just my niece and I.
Interviewer: Just you and your niece?
Mrs. McLachlan: Oh yes, we didn’t go on [a tour], it wasn’t open then yet…
Interviewer: You went before it was even open.
Mrs. McLachlan: He was still alive.
�15
Interviewer: Oh, I see.
Mrs. McLachlan: He was sick.
[END OF SECTION ONE]
[SECTION TWO]
Mrs. McLachlan: You will revise that?
Interviewer: No, it’s alright; I’ll just take off the part that had to do with the Voigt House off the
tape, if that’s alright.
Mrs. McLachlan: Is it off now?
Interviewer: It’s on.
Mrs. McLachlan: It is?
Interviewer: It won’t bother you, I hope. What we’ll just take the stuff to do with the Voigt
House off the tape. Sometimes if you just sit and talk, you learn more about. When did you go
with your niece to the house?
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, when I called him (Mr. Voigt), this was in the paper earlier about
nineteen seventy, in the Wonderland. And he wanted me to come over. Well, I have been having
trouble with my eyes and it hadn’t been operated on yet, I didn’t think about it until later and I
thought my nephew would go with me, Arthur, who died in January. He wanted to see it and all
that, but he, I couldn’t pin him down to an appointment. So in the fall, I said to my niece, not
Mrs. Buist, will you take me over to the Voigt House? And she said, I sure will. I called up and
this housekeeper answered and she said just a minute, I’ll call the nurse. I thought, gee a nurse,
and so she called the nurse, and she said ―Mr. Voigt has been in the hospital and he’s had had a
heart attack. He’s home now but I am here taking care of him.‖ I said ―Well, I’ll just have to
forget about it.‖ She said, ―No, no don’t say that‖ she said, ―I’ll talk to him about it and you call
me back Monday morning.‖ This was on a Saturday morning when I called him. So I said
alright. So I called her about eleven o’clock and she said, ―Mr. Voigt said you should come in
about two o’clock and I will take you through.‖ Between two and four, anyway. So we went over
there, she took us through and showed us a lot of things, I was intrigued with the dining room
quite a bit, and also that brass bed and that huge dresser in that one bedroom.
Interviewer: Isn’t that pretty?
Mrs. McLachlan: I didn’t even notice what kind of spread he had on there. I was so intrigued
with the bed and the dresser; I didn’t know what else was in the room at all.
Interviewer: Was he in the downstairs bedroom at that time?
�16
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, he was, but I didn’t see him.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: And so she took us through Dr. and Mrs. Hake’s room, and she called attention
to this beautiful secretary that the doctor had, and then we went down through the dining room
and the other rooms. I don’t remember what I was going to say. Yes, and another thing was in
the library, but I must have missed it, but I was always crazy about these big world globes, you
know. I always thought when I grew up I wanted one of those and a big dictionary, an
unabridged dictionary. I couldn’t remember seeing one there. I didn’t remember too much what
was in that room except the fireplace and this housekeeper was watching TV (television) and we
didn’t stand there long, but there was a beautiful bookcase there.
Interviewer: Yes, full of old books.
Mrs. McLachlan: There was another bookcase in another room somewhere that was filled with
books too.
Interviewer: After Mr. Voigt died, some of the furniture that was in there when you saw it was
taken by relatives, but all the old furniture was upstairs in the attic so they brought that down.
The furniture that is in there now, is the old furniture that was in the house when Mr. and Mrs.
Voigt were alive.
Mrs. McLachlan: They had a lot of Louis the Fifteenth, is it?
Interviewer: Yeah and they had some of the horsehair sofas, that sort of thing. And then some
beautiful imported stuff, I guess.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, they had two imported chairs they were carved, little straight back chairs,
you know.
Interviewer: That stuff went to the relatives.
Mrs. McLachlan: Those were very valuable I thought; and there was a music box underneath a
seat of one. And this nurse, she played it
Interviewer: She did?
Mrs. McLachlan: After she took us, I thought the house looked kind of cluttered, there was so
much furniture in those two little rooms, it looked to me like they shoved lots of stuff in there,
with….
Interviewer: Without taking anything else out.
�17
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, and without getting it arranged in a proper way. Well, that was my
impression anyway. But those two chairs intrigued me, and there was a beautiful big rocker that
was carved, a high backed rocker.
Interviewer: Is that the one with corn ears on top; that has the ears of corn on the top?
Mrs. McLachlan: I don’t remember that.
Interviewer: There is a beautiful high back rocker that has corn…
Mrs. McLachlan: Is that still there?
Interviewer: Yes, that’s still there.
Mrs. McLachlan: I was intrigued with those cotton curtains at the windows, with the wide lace.
Interviewer: Beautiful lace all….
Mrs. McLachlan: How could they wash those and keep them from…
Interviewer: I think probably they were washed by hand.
Mrs. McLachlan: Must have been.
Interviewer: The story we have is that there were two sets of curtains for each window.
Mrs. McLachlan: I thought it was two sets of shades?
Interviewer: Well now, the story to us was that there two sets of curtains to each window. So
when one was taken down to be washed they put the other set up. This meant that there wasn’t as
much wear on each set…
Mrs. McLachlan: No, probably not.
Interviewer: This meant that they were in good condition.
Mrs. McLachlan: Cotton, they must have been wonderful cotton.
Interviewer: I don’t know because I can’t tell cotton or linen in a case like that, but I think most
were cotton. A lot of that was handmade lace you know, the old Battenberg lace on some of
those beautiful curtains.
Mrs. McLachlan: They had a lot of beautiful things in there but today the people today don’t
appreciate those things. But, I lived in that period and I know they were an affluent society, when
you had lace curtains at your windows you were considered affluent.
Interviewer: Yes…You father must have been pretty affluent, wasn’t he himself…?
�18
Mrs. McLachlan: Pretty what?
Interviewer: You father must have been a pretty affluent himself, if he was a good builder.
Mrs. McLachlan: At one time, yes. He had quite a bit of money.
Interviewer: Yes, because…
Mrs. McLachlan: But you see there was no Social Security in those days, no nothing; and they
had to save their money and he had at all in real estate. It seemed to me that everything he sold,
he had quite a bit of real estate and a cottage down at Spring Lake which we loved.
Interviewer: How did you get out to the cottage?
Mrs. McLachlan: Not the Greyhound, but the interurban.
Interviewer: It was a railway then or a bus?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, it was a big bus, just like the Greyhounds, but bigger I think. They went on
this electric rail. I think the tracks were electric.
Interviewer: It was like electric a railway, I know there was an interurban between here and
Spring Lake.
Mrs. McLachlan: This was to Spring Lake and Muskegon.
Interviewer: Now when did your father pass on?
Mrs. McLachlan: In twenty, no, nineteen twenty-three.
Interviewer: So he retired in nineteen eleven.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes.
Interviewer: And lived about twelve years after that. Was your mother alive all those years?
Mrs. McLachlan: Oh, yes she died when she was eighty-eight, almost eighty-eight.
Interviewer: Oh, she stayed on.
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, I came from pretty good stock …
Interviewer: How many children in the family? You mentioned a couple.
Mrs. McLachlan: Nine, three of them died before I was born, they all died in one week,
diphtheria.
Interviewer: That’s when they had those terrible…
�19
Mrs. McLachlan: My little sister and the two next oldest sisters, so my mother raised three, six of
us I mean.
Interviewer: Do you know how many men worked on that house when your father was building
it? Any idea?
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, at that time, he had about thirty six men, but he had other jobs, too, you
know.
Interviewer: Not all of them were working on the Voigt House?
Mrs. McLachlan: I imagine about twelve, or maybe more? I wouldn’t know. He had two good
foremen the Dengler Brothers, Fred and John Dengler, his first foremen, when he first went into
business. He had others when they they started to retire.
Interviewer: The brick, for the outside of the building. Do you know where that came from?
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, I…
Interviewer: Some of that tile work is really beautiful.
Mrs. McLachlan: Tile work?
Interviewer: Well, that sort of decorative tile work.
Mrs. McLachlan: Is there some tile work? Ceramics is it?
Interviewer: Well, it looks to be…
Mrs. McLachlan: More shiny than ceramic?
Interviewer: Well. It looks to be the same color as the brick; there is some circular decorative
piece, I think, that is in the top of one…
Mrs. McLachlan: That is the mason work, then.
Interviewer: Yes. You don’t know how much a mason made in those days, do you?
Mrs. McLachlan: How much what?
Interviewer: What they paid a mason a day, a brick layer?
Mrs. McLachlan: I wouldn’t know what a bricklayer made. I wouldn’t know what my father’s
men made, but when I worked at Ocker and Fords, I know what those men made. They did all
this interior finish. The foreman on the three floors each made thirty cents an hour.
Interviewer: That was a great rate, wasn’t it?
�20
Mrs. McLachlan: Eighteen dollars a week, for sixty hours work. I made up the payroll, so I
remember. Of course, my dad later on…
Interviewer: You remember that. That was for a foreman, not just one of the men?
Mrs. McLachlan: Then the next scale down, would be sixteen fifty. And Charlie VanderVelde,
that started this Grand Rapids Camera Club, was one of the fine craftsmen, up on the third floor,
under Ralph Fosget, he made sixteen fifty a week. The next scale down was fifteen and the next
was thirteen fifty and then there was twelve and there was a ten fifty. And my uncle ran the
freight elevator and he was getting nine dollars a week.
Interviewer: How much of a family did he have?
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, there was Jenny, Anna, and Francis and of course John, by that time.
John was still going to school, I think. There were six children, there were seven children, the
older ones were working you see.
Interviewer: My goodness, that’s not much to bring up a whole family. How long did it take to
build a house in those days? How long from the time they started to dig until they finished it?
Mrs. McLachlan: I can imagine this house took a couple of years, wouldn’t you say so?
Interviewer: I have no idea how long it would take, I am just curious if you were aware of how
long it would take to do a job like that?
Mrs. McLachlan: The mason work, the whole front of the building is beautiful.
Interviewer: Oh yes, it is a very handsome building, and there is a lot of hand work in it.
Mrs. McLachlan: Would they call that an estate, if it is just on a big lot?
Interviewer: I doubt it, just a big house, maybe a townhouse.
Mrs. McLachlan: It might be a mansion; they’ve got a carriage house and all that. Miss Lindner
had a ten acre estate out on Reed’s Lake. The house wasn’t anything like the Voigt House, and
she had spent thirty-thousand dollars to build on this big living room, on the one room but it
included the furniture that she bought, carpets and drapes. It was my first job to check on it, I
was with her for ten years. That house was a more livable home than the Voigt home. What I
mean by that is, it had more of a woman’s touch, of course she lived there alone.
Interviewer: Did Mr. Voigt make most of the decisions about what was to go into the house?
Mrs. McLachlan: You mean the old man?
Interviewer: Did he get to decide or did Mother get to say what she wanted?
�21
Mrs. McLachlan: I wouldn’t know that, but I imagine he had a lot of ideas. You know this house
was copied from a chateau in France.
Interviewer: Yes, I heard.
Mrs. McLachlan: Not exactly but parts of it, I think it is more Victorian than it is Queen Anne,
don’t you think so?
Interviewer: I am not very up on architecture.
Mrs. McLachlan: I think so, but I am not either. As long as I have been with my father, and even
with all that and even in the lumber business so many years, I still don’t know that. I did know a
lot more about furniture because I was in the furniture business, too. I worked for Robert Irwin
Furniture Company for ten years.
Interviewer: Did you really?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes,
Interviewer: Did you know Mr. Irwin?
Mrs. McLachlan: Heavens yes, he would come over to my desk and talk to me.
Interviewer: He was a remarkable man.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, he was, he was in his eighties when he sold out there, you see. Sold the
factory; they sold the one on Fulton Street first. They still had the Royal on Bond Avenue where
he started. He started as a bookkeeper and so did Mr. Dykhouse. And they went into the lumber
business later on. Mr. Dykhouse worked for the Ball-Barnard-Putnam groceries, delivering
groceries. I was with him eight years.
Interviewer: You were a bookkeeper?
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, I was secretary, too, and also went into accounting.
Interviewer: Did you learn to use a typewriter or did you write everything by hand?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, I used a typewriter, I was sixteen years old I used a typewriter. But we
didn’t have any carbon copies.
Interviewer: What would you do, did you have to make two copies?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, we had a machine, well, it was a funny thing. It was a big machine with a
wheel on it. First of all it was a tissue paper book. And we put this, we had a tank with water in it
and a wringer. And we would wring out this, it was made of, what’s this stuff. Heavy stuff, but
pliable and you would put it thru the wringer. And we would put this wet thing in this tissue
�22
paper book and put this tissue paper over this wet, a kind of like cardboard, I’d call it and then
letter on top of that this way, you know upside down. And then we’d put another wet pad on top
of that and put another sheet of tissue paper, and I would have four or five letters, and then you
put them into this, all I can think of is this compress. You put it in there and then turn this wheel
and then press down. Sometimes it would smear and you would have to do the letter over again.
Interviewer: Oh, dear.
Mrs. McLachlan: Shortly after that there was a girl at the city hall, she was an Irish girl, Miss
O’Connor or something like that. I think that was the first thing, she used to make perfect copies,
you know. But, she had carbon paper then and she used to make perfect copies.
Interviewer: And that was a great thing.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes. And then I learned about carbon paper, it just came out. I was about
seventeen or eighteen, probably.
Interviewer: That would have been the turn of the century, wouldn’t it? The late eighteen
hundreds.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, I was seventeen years old at the turn of the century. I remember all the
factory whistles and church bells all ringing.
Interviewer: It was big excitement.
Mrs. McLachlan: It was just terrible.
Interviewer: Now, you’re about to live to see the bi-centennial of the United States.
Mrs. McLachlan: I hope I live that long.
Interviewer: Sure, you will, you’re in good health.
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, all but my eyesight. I had my eye operated on then, after, I went there
before yes.
Interviewer: I see here, you have something about Mrs. Charles Roelofs residence.
Mrs. McLachlan: No I haven’t she was very, very gracious on the phone, and she was to send
some lady over here with a tape recorder. And she never came.
Interviewer: Oh, I know who Mrs. [Barbara] Roelofs is, she is the Heritage Hill lady. She is the
one that was the head of the Heritage Hill.
Mrs. McLachlan: Mrs. Roelofs? Yes, didn’t you know her father?
�23
Interviewer: No, I don’t know her, I’ve always worked just at the Voigt House, and I’ve never
been an official. The name was familiar to me and I was just….
Mrs. McLachlan: She is Dr. Roelofs’ wife and then there is Dr. Pilling’s wife.
Interviewer: I have met Dr. Pilling’s wife, I’ve worked with her.
Mrs. McLachlan: I’ve saw her in the picture in the paper in the foyer of the Voigt home.
Interviewer: This one home that you mention is later known as the Edmund Wurzburg home, and
sold to the Franciscan Fathers, that is on Lake Drive, isn’t it?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, my father built that picture gallery for Mrs. Clark, Melvin Clark’s wife. Is
that the name?
Interviewer: Yes, Melvin Clark….
Mrs. McLachlan: I met him too when I was over at one office. He came in there and that was
before my father built that, yes. He said, ―You know what, Margaret my daughter,‖ (she was his
daughter Mrs. Edmund Wurzburg) ―wants me to buy her a car.‖
Interviewer: Oh,
Mrs. McLachlan: I said, ―Well, why don’t you?‖ He said, ―You mean that?‖ I said, ‖Yes, why
don’t you buy her a car?‖ I was in my twenties then. He said, ―I guess I will.‖
Interviewer: Oh, dear.
Mrs. McLachlan: Another one was the old Claredon Hotel, where Olds Manor is today? My
father built that.
Interviewer: He built that?
Mrs. McLachlan: The Claredon and then it was razed and Rowe brothers who owned the Valley
City Milling Company right next door, right across the canal. Or was there a canal? Not on the
east side, there wasn’t. They bought that and built the Rowe Hotel, because at that time there
were these furniture men were all coming to town and ..
Interviewer: Oh, for the exhibitions, yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, exhibitions they had to have more hotels. So they built the Rowe Hotel
and later on it was changed to the Olds Manor for the elderly and it was taken over by Fountain
Street Baptist Church first, and then I don’t know who is running that now. But they didn’t have
too much luck with it, Fountain Street Church.
Interviewer: No, they tried to run it as an old people’s home, didn’t they?
�24
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes,
Interviewer: It’s a commercial thing now, isn’t it?
Mrs. McLachlan: I guess, my brother in law was there for awhile, so was Judge Raymond Starr.
Interviewer: Is there a North Star Hotel, too?
Mrs. McLachlan: Over in Comstock Park, that wasn’t much of a hotel but for a small place like
Comstock Park, it was.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: And Mr. Teele, Joseph Teele ran it. I knew that family, the whole family, they
had the Watson House before they went out there. They owned the Watson House was on the
corner of Bridge Street and Lexington.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: And that old building, I don’t know if it is still there or not. I don’t get over to
the West side at all.
Interviewer: To get back and forth over there now….
Mrs. McLachlan: I have a niece over living in my sister’s house and she stayed right there,
bought it when my brother-in-law died, she and her husband bought it and she lives there all
alone now in that big house. And I haven’t been in that house in ten years, and she is right in the
city. We talk to each other over the phone.
Interviewer: well, it is probably just as hard for her to get back and forth as it is for you.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, she has a busy life, and doesn’t drive anymore. She’s seventy-five now. I
was raised over on the West side.
Interviewer: Now, were you, you mentioned you went to St. Mary’s when Ralph was going to
Union High School. Did he go to Union High before he went off to Andover then?
Mrs. McLachlan: Oh yes, Union High, they call it Union High, it was a high school at one time,
if there was elementary classes there I don’t know that.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: They called it Union High.
Interviewer: I remember reading about it.
�25
Mrs. McLachlan: It was located on Turner Street. So was St. Mary’s School. My father built St.
Mary’s School, the Convent and the Rectory. Then he built the Palmer and Buchanan Street
Schools for the Board of Education. But those have all been replaced, not St. Mary’s.
Interviewer: But the public schools have been.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, the man next door went to the original Palmer Street School.
Interviewer: The Palmer Street School and the Buchanan Street School.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, I got that on my list. I guess, I gave you the one that has Charles
Greenway’s name on it. No, this is the one I want you to have. You want to take this?
Interviewer: I would love to, if you don’t mind parting with it?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, I don’t need it for anything. I got these other two copies, which is that one?
The little one?
Interviewer: That is the little one, you’d better keep that.
Mrs. McLachlan: I added more to it, that’s why.
Interviewer: Yes, there is a lot more.
Mrs. McLachlan: Do you want to take it along?
Interviewer: I am afraid, do you have several copies there?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, I have several.
Interviewer: I would like to have that.
Mrs. McLachlan: That name is so hard to remember. It is pronounced Youngbaker
(Jungbaecker)? You know the Knape and Vogt Company? Well, the German name was Knapee.
From that original John Knape that got up that firm, that started that firm, his wife Dina was in
the same Whist Club that my mother was.
Interviewer: Oh, really.
Mrs. McLachlan: We knew all these people.
Interviewer: It was nice because Grand Rapids was smaller then.
Mrs. McLachlan: Of course it was, I went around collecting, too and I met so many businessmen,
lumbermen like Orin Ward. Orin A. Ward’s daughter married this Harrison Goodspeed. And this
old man Ward was one of the nicest men you could ever meet; he was so nice to me and I was
just a youngster in my teens then. Then there was old man [Frank] Chickering was in the lumber
�26
business. He was in the Tower Building right across from the Pantlind Hotel where the
Woolworths are today; and I used to go up to see him. I don’t know whether I collected, it must
have been that; or whether they bought things from our firm or what. This Mr. Chickering was so
nice.
Interviewer: Is that when you were with Ocker & Ford?
Mrs. McLachlan: That was my first office job, that’s where I learned all the office procedures.
Interviewer: All that you needed to know.
Mrs. McLachlan: Mr. Moore, was the bookkeeper, he came up from Widdicombe’s, and came
over there and was our bookkeeper. Mr. Lindner(?) was the manager, then there were a lot of
stockholders, Mr. [Clark H.] Gleason the lawyer. Old man Thayer, George W. Thayer was mayor
of Grand Rapids at one time. The old house on Ottawa Street that was his; that should have been
preserved.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: It was a one-story kind of stone house.
Interviewer: Oh, it’s always a shame to see those beautiful old places go, isn’t it?
Mrs. McLachlan: There is one on Front Street, too, it was all made of cobblestone or something.
Interviewer: Yes, yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: Then there was Mr. Sherwood, Robert Sherwood, was a nephew of the Mr.
Thayer, and he was one of the biggest fruit growers in Michigan. He had this big farm in
Watervliet.
Interviewer: Yes,
Mrs. McLachlan: He was vice-president of this firm. But that was before I went with them.
Interviewer: I see, your father was an officer of Ocker and Ford at one time?
Mrs. McLachlan: President
Interviewer: President of it.
Mrs. McLachlan: Twenty years.
Interviewer: Twenty years, that is a long time. Was he doing building and being president at the
same time? Both companies at the same time?
�27
Mrs. McLachlan: But you see he wasn’t active in that business, he just took his business over
there.
Interviewer: I see.
Mrs. McLachlan: That’s why he started this business because he was affiliated with his
contracting business.
Interviewer: It was to get all the finished carpentry done and finish all the millwork.
Mrs. McLachlan: But the factories got out all the mantels and stuff, and like that.
Interviewer: Was that mostly hand done or was it done on lathe?
Mrs. McLachlan: No, most ,well some of it might have been done on lathes, but they did a lot of
handwork.
Interviewer: A lot of handwork, hand rubbed and polished?
Mrs. McLachlan: This great big band saw, and [Alexander] Barbey was this little fellow, and I’d
go up there, and run up and down those stairs two or three times a day, you know a couple of
flights. I would go up there for some reason and Barbey would say, ―Want me to make you a
little chair, cut you out a little wooden chair?‖ He would put a little chunk of wood on that band
saw and in a few minutes, there would be a little chair. I wish I had saved all these things.
Interviewer: Oh, yes. When they put the parquet floor in, was that put in on the spot, when they
built the parquet floor, do you know? In the Voigt House?
Mrs. McLachlan: Did they what?
Interviewer: Did they fit the pieces as they laid it or was it already cut?
Mrs. McLachlan: I would think it came in a certain design.
Interviewer: I don’t know, I was just curious? Do you know anything about that?
Mrs. McLachlan: They used to call the first floor of the Power’s Theatre the ―parquet circle‖. I
often wondered why.
Interviewer: Maybe the floors? I don’t know either. I think it is nice we are preserving the Voigt
House, I think. It is certainly an example.
Mrs. McLachlan: There were other houses that were beautiful, too here in town.
Interviewer: Or prettier houses, but this is so complete though.
Mrs. McLachlan: You take that McInerney home...
�28
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: …and some of the others, the one that always like so much was on the corner
of Union and Cherry. It was a man by the name of Friant, a lumberman that built that. That was
always my favorite and right across the street was the Metz home – of the Metz Building. And
there was another one that Mr. Lemmon once lived in. It was her home, she was Mrs. Cramer
and then he married her after his wife died. Leavenworth was the head of the G R & I Railway
and that was right next to, on the corner is the Jonkhoff Funeral Home. Before that was Mr.
Straight, he was the manager of the Majestic Theatre anyway, whatever his name was; he built
that house. And right next door to this was the Cramer home and that was one of my pet ones.
Just the kind of house I would have liked, you know. And later on it was sold to the St. Andrew’s
Cathedral, to the parish I mean.
Interviewer: Yes, is that where the bishop lives now?
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes Bishop Kelly lived there.
Interviewer: That’s a beautiful house.
Mrs. McLachlan: Yes, it is.
Interviewer: Actually the Voigt House may not be the prettiest house in town, but it is
beautifully preserved and everything is in it.
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, they kept it like it was in those days.
Interviewer: Yes and when you go into it now and you can see what it looked like in nineteen
five, you know.
Mrs. McLachlan: Eighteen ninety-five.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: And they never even remodeled the bathrooms, and the old-fashioned tubs,
and the marble-topped lavatories. That’s what we had too, the marble topped lavatories too.
Interviewer: The downstairs bathroom has what looks like to me to be like a sitz bath in it.
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, I didn’t see that.
Interviewer: No, must have been off the bedroom …
Mrs. McLachlan: Off the bedroom.
Interviewer: Off the bedroom where he was, and you wouldn’t have seen that.
Mrs. McLachlan: I didn’t see the kitchen or the ballroom.
�29
Interviewer: Now the ballroom is not open to the public, that’s way upstairs, right.
Mrs. McLachlan: Well, I don’t blame them.
Interviewer: Well, I think the trouble is there is so much stored up there, you know, they found
dresses from way back.
Mrs. McLachlan: They kept everything.
Interviewer: It’s nice because you can see a picture of Mrs. Voigt; well we have the dress she is
wearing. You know, down there they will have a model will wear the dress she is wearing in the
picture. Oh, their beautiful.
Mrs. McLachlan: Are they that well preserved, they probably have closets up there.
Interviewer: Oh, beautiful wardrobes to keep them.
Mrs. McLachlan: Miss Lindner had them too.
Interviewer: Gorgeous handwork.
Mrs. McLachlan: The dressmakers did a lot of that, they were proud of their trade.
Interviewer: Did you make your first communion dress? You had to have a sewing machine for
that, didn’t you? You didn’t have to make it all by hand?
Mrs. McLachlan: My sister Mary made it. I was only twelve. She was nine years older.
Interviewer: She made it for you.
Mrs. McLachlan: She made this plain white dress. I had my picture taken. I got to thinking
about that collaret one night, oh two or three years ago, and wondered if it shows on the picture
and it does. I paid two dollars for it.
Interviewer: I would hope it shows. Two dollar collaret, well that’s a lot of money. When you
think the men worked the whole week for eighteen dollars, then a two dollar collaret is pretty
much.
Mrs. McLachlan: And a foreman, and when he hired this one young man, the Heller Brothers, of
Youngstown, Ohio used to throw a lot of work to us and Mr. Lindner would go down there and
he met this young man just come back from Europe, educated in Europe and he’d speak four
different languages. And he hired him to come up and do the drafting. Lay out the work and
everything; we had a drafting room in back of the office, all in one building. He paid him fifteen
dollars a week.
Interviewer: Oh, my.
�30
Mrs. McLachlan: With that kind of education, he was very well educated, and I kind of liked him
too, he would come over to the house. It was natural for him to take me out because he didn’t
know anybody else, you know. Very handsome looking, I have a picture of him in the drafting
room, he took mine and I took his.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: There were the men in the upper floor were interested in photography, so they
had the two top floors. The original Grand Rapids Camera Club. Later on I was in that too.
Interviewer: For goodness sakes.
Mrs. McLachlan: Later on I was on the board of directors.
Interviewer: So you used to take a lot of pictures yourself.
Mrs. McLachlan: I have just oodles of them, they’re seventy years old, just snap shot after snap
shot. I bought a camera when I was about eighteen or nineteen years old. And then, when we
bought the cottage, most of pictures were from down there.
Interviewer: That’s the trouble, when you are at home you forget to take pictures of everything
around you, don’t you, as it was.
Mrs. McLachlan: I had pictures of my new house, my bedroom and I had a brass bed there. I
don’t know what happened; I think I tore that up. Pictures of the inside upstairs and lot of them
of downstairs, pictures of the rooms downstairs but Arthur said don’t you give those pictures
away. Of course, he’s in some of them, he was young boy then.
Interviewer: They are very precious then and they sure are.
Mrs. McLachlan: Some of the old bathing suits I had.
Interviewer: Now, how long, did everybody work sixty hours a week then? They worked six
days a week, right, ten hours a day?
Mrs. McLachlan: Ten hour and ten minutes a day, so they could get out at five o’clock on
Saturday afternoons. And they just looked forward to that extra hour. Of course, they put it in
during the week, but they looked forward to getting off a little early.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. McLachlan: I was the same. I got there at quarter to seven in the morning.
Interviewer: Oh my goodness,
�31
Mrs. McLachlan: I gave out the clock tickets, we had a watchman’s clock, and my husband’s
uncle ran that watchman’s clock. He had an office in… the not the Pantlind but the Sweet’s
Hotel in the basement. The stairs were on the outside, and the offices were the coal office down
there…
INDEX
A
F
American Boxboard Company · 6
B
Ball-Barnard-Putnam Wholesale Grocery Company · 22
Barbey, Alexander · 28
Bissell Company · 8
Booth Memorial Hospital · 9
Boston Store · 10
Buchanan Street School · 26
Buist, Mrs. · 16
C
Chickering, Frank · 27
City Hall · 9
Claredon Hotel · 24
Clark, Mr. · 5
Clark, Mrs. Melvin · 24
Cramer, Mrs. · 29
Crescent Mill · 1, 11
Creston Mortuary · 8
D
Dengler Brothers (Fred and John) · 20
Diver, Miss · 12
Dykhouse, Mr. · 6, 8, 22
Fosget, Ralph · 20
Fountain Street Baptist Church · 24
Friant (home) · 29
G
G R & I Railway · 29
German Parochial School · 4
Gleason, Mr. Clark H. · 27
Goodspeed family · 6
Goodspeed, Harrison · 6, 27
Goodspeed, John · 6
Grand Rapids Camera Club · 20, 31
Greenway, Charles · 26
H
Hake, Dr. · 7, 11
Hake, Dr. and Mrs. · 16
Herpolsheimer family · 12
Herpolsheimer store · 12
Hooker, Harriett E. · 1
I
Irwin, Mr. Robert · 22
J
E
Evangeline Home · 8
Jack, Mr. (William) · 6
Jack, William · 6
Jonkhoff Funeral Home · 29
Jungbaecker, Anna · 5
Jungbaecker, John · 1
Jungbaecker, Mary · 2, 9, 31
�32
Jungbaecker, Veronica Elizabeth Josephine · 1
K
Keister, Johanna Frances · 1
Kelly, Bishop · 29
Klanderman, Miss Annette · 12
Knape and Vogt Company · 26
Knape, John · 26
L
Leavenworth, Mr. · 29
Lemmon, Mr. · 29
Lindner, C. A. · 8
Lindner, Miss · 21, 30
Lindner, Mr. · 27, 31
Lypse, Ralph · 5
M
Majestic Theatre · 29
May Company · 7
May, Bernhard · 7, 8
May, Meyer · 7
McInerney (home) · 29
McLachlan, Ford H. · 1
McLachlan, John Norman · 1
Metz (home) · 29
Metz Building · 6, 29
Perkins, Mr. · 6
Pilling, Dr. (wife) · 24
Power’s Theatre · 29
R
Reed’s Lake · 6, 21
Robert Irwin Furniture Company · 22
Roelofs, Dr. · 24
Roelofs, Mrs. [Barbara] · 4, 23
Roelofs, Mrs. Charles · 23
Rowe Hotel · 24
Royal Furniture Company · 22
S
Shanahan, Maurice · 8
Sherwood, Robert · 8, 27
St. Andrew’s Cathedral · 29
St. Mary’s School · 25, 26
Starr, Judge Raymond · 7, 25
Starr, Minnie · 7
Straight, Mr. (home) · 29
Sweet’s Hotel · 32
T
Teele, Joseph · 25
Thayer, George W. · 27
Tower Building · 27
N
U
North Star Hotel (Comstock Park) · 25
Union High School · 8, 25
O
V
O’Connor, Miss · 23
Ocker and Ford Company · 5, 8, 20, 27, 28
Olds Manor · 7, 24
Valley City Milling Company · 24
VanderVelde, Charlie · 20
Voigt family · 5, 10
Voigt House · 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 23, 28, 29
Voigt, Carl · 10, 12
Voigt, Clara · 7, 11
Voigt, Frank · 10
Voigt, Mr. and Mrs. C. A. · 17
Voigt, Mr. C. A. · 11, 12, 21
P
Palmer Street School · 26
Pantlind Hotel · 27
�33
Voigt, Mrs. · 30
Voigt, Ralph · 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 16, 17, 25
Voigt-Herpolsheimer store · 13
W
Ward, Orin A. · 27
Watson House · 25
Woolworths · 27
Wurzburg, Edmund (home) · 24
Wurzburg, Margaret (Clark) · 24
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/906c598f489cd2ee0e412016141fc2b0.mp3
93b67ddc1a8125ef218596d49900e890
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Grand Rapids Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Local histories
Memoirs
Michigan--History
Oral histories (document genre)
Description
An account of the resource
Taped and transcribed interviews conducted in the early 1970s primarily of the children and grandchildren of many of the founders of Grand Rapids, Michigan; many of whom were residents of the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Interviews were collected to develop a significant collection of oral resources that would supplement other primary and secondary local history materials. Initially funded as a private project, Grand Valley State College (now University) assumed responsibility for continuing the project until 1977.
Creator
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Various
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/452">Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf; audio/mp3
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text; Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-23
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1971 - 1977
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-23_54McLachlan
Title
A name given to the resource
McLachlan, Veronica
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
McLachlan, Veronica
Description
An account of the resource
Veronica Jungbaecker was born on August 1, 1883 in Grand Rapids. Her father, John Jungbaecker, was the building contractor for the Voigt House. She married Ford McLachlan in 1920. She worked at the Robert Irwin Furniture Company as a secretary/bookkeeper. Mrs. McLachlan died on December 21, 1988.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Michigan--History
Local histories
Memoirs
Oral histories (document genre)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Personal narratives
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Grand Valley State University
Women
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
audio/mp3
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1974
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives