The Nankin Township Historical Society

Sometimes these posts write themselves. Unlike The Detroit News new carrier card , that I found last time at John King Books and returned to the owner, Fayetta Crowley Thurber won't be receiving this 1916 return notice for the Aivanti Chartres book Marie Tarnowska from the lending library at Dennen's Book Shop which she took to Gratiot Beach in Port Huron for the summer. The store was located at 19 East Grand River at the foot of Woodward and was a new and rare bookstore. Detroit Free Press , December 9, 1917 The store also sold stationary and party decorations and did engravings along with the circulating library. Detroit Free Press , May 1, 1917 Fayetta Crowley married Donald Thurber, son of the private secretary to President Grover Cleveland, and was well-connected socially being a friend of opera singer Enrico Caruso. Detroit Free Press , April 30, 1911 While the card spells it out the ne wspaper traces her stay with the Lafayette Crowley family (her parents) in Port H...

To get any sort of information out of me you have to suffer the ignominy of ME. Which means you get the process with the product. I can't help it. This is why I can never get anything done! While I was on my Halloween kick (I'm not off it yet!) I requested a copy of this book The Sin-Eater's Hallowe'en by Francis Nielson from MELCat despite the bad reviews it received as a foolhardy polemic. Which was politics, at the time (1924), just as it is now and in time immemorial. Clee-shay (That's phonetics, not some haughty word to guess at)! So I requested it to scan for posterity's sake because I feel like that's my job since universities and institutions are corrupt and tyrannical. As soon as I received the book I noticed the two ex-libris bookplates and knew there was a reason for my request. Things will pursue you when you pursue them. Just don't do it with people. Run away as fast you can and you might be saved from them and yourself. But I digress. Be...

Since I think Donald Trump is a liberal you probably don't want my views on the New Deal. Or as the poet E. E. Cummings called it the "Nude eel". Which is saying a lot since Cummings was a communist during WWI. In 1931 he traveled to the Soviet Union and witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Soviet State. His contempt for FDR and his socialist policies were shared by many poets and writers of that era and they excoriated the President, oft openly referring to him as a cripple. Livonia Township Democrats were obviously on board with the New Deal since it was their party platform and they likely won in a landslide as the Democrats held large majorities in Congress. The flyer likely dates to the 1930s when the New Deal was implemented.

Detroit Free Press , February 10, 1901 I'm tired so I'm going to keep this one brief or else it will never get written. The trouble at the Hicks School in Nankin began when Miss Millie Sawslayer decided that the little red schoolhouse should paint over the lower panes of glass to keep the students from staring out the window during class. Director Hicks and moderator Martin Harrison agreed. Unfortunately, Treasurer Samuel Bills did not and neither did his children. They grew tired of going to the place they considered a prison and their father stopped taking them to school. Word got around and soon there were only 2 children attending class. One being the adopted daughter of Director Hicks and "that Flarriety boy". The three Hammond boys were supposed to be there but they were busy skipping class and hanging out in a makeshift shanty that they constructed on their father's farm. Their punishment was going to school! The feud between the board members went on fo...

Detroit Free Press , June 30, 1905 Being anti-spanking and very much pro-cookie I felt that this was somewhat historical though not something that you'd likely see in a book concerning Nankin farmers. In this newspaper clipping from 1905 we learn that Nankin farmer John Rieman (or Nieman) was arrested for beating his 12-year-old son for stealing a cookie. The irony of the story is that the boy's friend had taken it and the son was merely protecting his friend's honor and paid the price for it. Rieman, of Wayne (yes, Wayne was located within Nankin Twp), was fined $10. Detroit Free Press , July 2, 1905

I'm committed to the Nankin cause but not $25 committed. Which is how much this 1932 press photo of the Rawsonville Hotel is going for on eBay. The back states that it was located 5 miles from Ypsilanti on the Huron River and was the residence of the Clarence Bennett. The property had been owned by Mrs. Bennett's father Edwin Barlow. Henry Ford also seemingly had a stake in the old hotel having converted a front upper room into a ballroom for children participating in old-time dances. No newspaper is listed on the print.

I bought this Milestone 2 poetry Magazine at a Livonia estate sale this week. Milestone was the literary publication of Wayne (State) University and this second issue dates to 1949. While I don't recognize most of the names, Dudley Randall was both a nationally known poet and the librarian for the Wayne County General Hospital at Eloise via the Wayne County Library System. The poem featured is The Southern Road which was a revised version of the completed poem from 1948 that h as a handful or two of word differences between the two.  I don't know if Randall edited the poem for later collected works editions or earlier but this link features it in its likely final form in 2009. Neither version particularly enchants me but the block print in the magazine is an added bonus.

My mania with newspapers probably started when I delivered The Detroit News for almost 10 years as a kid. I read the newspaper everyday with my big fat orange cat Bobcat and he even walked my route with me sometimes. Anyway, I picked up this New Detroit News carrier card of Scott Eastman at John King Books on Tuesday. The address, 2086 19th Street, seems to correspond to Wyandotte. Which is ironic because I'm likely going there tomorrow for an estate sale plus I am going to post some ephemera from there later. Not to mention that I have a large pile of newspaper from Wyandotte dating to the early quarter of the 1900s which I have sorely neglected. Ho hum. Well, I tracked down Scott and am sending the card to him. I'll have only owned it for less than a day but it's the right thing to do. He said that the card dates to 1974-75 when he was a carrier.

While national politics lead us away from our lives and towards war, local politics generally fortify us despite the divisions in philosophy, or so we'd like to think. Which is why I've long been enamored with local history over national and global histories. All are important but the local is severely undervalued and largely ignored. "Oh, Ypsi girls are very fine girls, With codfish balls they comb their curls." Gundella's connections to Marcello Truzzi, EMU professor and sc holar, have piqued my interest in Ypsilanti and the university in its many permutations.  While looking for information on the Michigan State Normal College News from the late 1800s I found this interesting spat between coeds from that institution and "Michigan Men" from 1940. An article in the Michigan Daily , a student newspaper, claiming that the girls of Normal College weren't as pretty as they used to be sent a throng of coeds to Angell Hall in a bus to protest the ...

Finally, another local bookplate. This one courtesy of the free book shelves in the atrium at John King Books downtown. I spent $1.80 inside and found 5 free books with ex-libris bookplates outside, with only two being the same. Cool beans. This one dates to 1965 and is from Madonna College Library (now University) and was donated by Sister Many Theresilla. It was found in the book :The Word Dwells Among Us: A Forward to the Biblical Books by William E. Lynch, C. M. The stamp is an added bonus of the freebie.

Detroit Free Press , June 5, 1959 Nothing spices up a summer carnival like a little nude dancing from some southern gals. Or so thought two members of the Wayne County rackets squad (tennis? I guess that I should have read this better since one was a cop and the other a prosecutor) who treated 16 teenage boys to the show at the Harris-Kehrer post of the VFW in Inkster. Which sounds like a grooming ritual of sorts and one father, after hearing of the episode from his son, thought so, too, and c alled the cops. The men, Alfred A. Goldfarb, assistant prosecutor, and Harry Sparks, deputy sheriff, I'm assuming, were sent to DeHoCo (or did they claim that it was a sting?) along with the dancers and others involved in the illegal activity. The arrested dancers and their accomplices are listed as Nellie B. Jones, Gastonia, North Carolina, Dorothy Gentry, Maryville, Tennessee, Lucy Jude, Stirrat, West Virginia and Robert E. Miller, Tampa, Florida were all sent to the Detroit House of Corr...

Well, this patch from WCGH somehow got past me on eBay and sold for $10.50 on Halloween. I'm not sure which uniform it was worn on but it would seem to be for security or police. 

The Buffalo Commercial , February 2, 1878 The history of the Wayne County Asylum at Eloise was beleaguered with incidents of cured but not cured . That is, patients who were released as mentally fit only to commit acts of violence against others or self-immolation. Mrs. Jane Howard, a wife of a Dover, Michigan physician D. M. Howard, seemingly had an ideal station in life but it was for naught. For whatever reasons she was incarcerated at the Wayne Asylum on multiple occasions. A month there in late 1877, which, weaved into the new years didn't cure her hurts. She fatally jumped down a well on her husband's farm near Adrian on the last day of January, 1878. She was 36-years-old.

Detroit Free Press , February 24, 1875 I know that I've come across another story of an insane man writing million dollar checks but since I can't find the mention either on my Portraits of Eloise blog or FB page it'll remain a mere rumor. Though there is a mention of John Bradley who believed that he had been transported to Heaven and offered a cop $200,000, if he wrote to a certain address, for his release. He was sent to the Wayne Asylum There's also, John Vanderwillie , an insane young man who was a master escape artist who offered $3.5 mill ion to the attendants at Emergecy Hospital for his freedom to no avail. He also was expected to be sent to the asylum at Wayne. But no matter. George Wison was another sort. He attempted to pass off $20,000 to $30,000 checks between Chicago and Detroit and locations hither and thither. A tall Canadian man who was believed to be a miner Wilson believed that the Treasury had deposited large sums of money in his bank account. Be...

Detroit Free Press , July 16, 1898 John Vanderwillie was the richest man in the world according to his own faulty faculties. He could escape from any bindings but not from the Emergency hospital where he was being held until he was sent to the asylum. Even an offer of $3.5 million from his vast fabricated fortune couldn't secure his release.

Velvet Peanut Butter jars like the one shown here, circa 1948, aren't readily available but I had a chance to buy one a few years back for $20 but was too cheap to do so. Then it was gone. I did manage to snag a smaller sized version a year or two later but the classic 2 pounder is quite rare. I'll get one eventually.

Detroit Free Press , July 17, 1959 Thanks to the snow, its shoveling and the lack of newspaper search results I present you this little photo caption. While the Free Press is mostly an entertainment rag with faulty information and spelling, it did have a decent heart at certain durations of its long existence. Namely to the sick and poor. The Sunbeam Club (c. 1917) was set up for sick children to communicate with other such children through the newspaper. Whereby they would obtain addresses of those who inter ested the reader and they would become pen pals.  The Free Press Fresh Air Camp (c. 1906) was a service that persisted even longer and gave sick children the opportunity to go to a camp for 10 days or so to regain their health. Obviously there was one at Sylvan Lake but the location may have changed over the years. I don't really want to delve into for obvious reasons of time. At one point I started collecting articles from the Sunbeam Club but despite the troves of inform...

I'm tired and in no mood to research. Here's a bookplate from a softcover book that reminds me of a James Thurber drawing. Which probably means that it is a James Thurber drawing. Any James Thurber enthusiasts out there? I actually have a book by Thurber with either a bookplate in it or a trade stamp. Either way, it's from Sociology Today: Problems and Prospects by Robert K. Merton, Leonard Bloom and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr.

While I didn't get the Flower Girl Perfume bottle I did get my dram of poison. Who needs beauty when death has outstretched arms pointing in thy direction, eh? This sample bottle of tincture iodine was the property of Sam's Cut-Rate Drugstore of Downtown Detroit. A fact that I didn't notice until now because the handling of various bottles of chemicals started burning my fingers so I handed it off to the estate sale people for safe keeping and washed my hands. If I had to gu ess I'd say that it's from the 1930s but I'm known to be wrong on a regular basis. It's a decent consolation prize.

I've never seen this postcard from J. L. Hudson's before so when I saw 7 or 8 of them at the estate sale the other day I grabbed them all. After coming to my senses I put back half and settled on 4. Let somebody else have a few. I'll sell at least two of them and make back most of the $17 I spent at the sale. Not to mention that the money used came from a few textbooks that I sold so it was all free to begin with. That's always been my modus operendi concerning antiques or else I couldn't justify spending the money on stuff that I don't really NEED no matter how amazing it is. The card speaks for itself. I want to say that it's from the early 1900s but that's a complete stab in the dark. It's almost definitely not later than the 1920s.

I also picked up a 1930 Building Code Ordinance booklet from the Village of Plymouth at the estate sale this morning. It's fairly straightforward with no photographs and only a few small charts and illustrations. A bit worn and creased but still well-worth the dollar paid. I shall scan and post the booklet in its entirety some year soon.