My Day in Court(house) - May 14

My first day of retirement included a couple of rituals.  My morning exercise, of course, but after breakfast the first order of business was to stow all my business suits in a downstairs closet!  Among the mirthful remarks by boss Tom Moore at my retirement reception (the gentle roast part) was that they couldn't get me out of a suit, even when it was 90+ degrees in the summer.  Suit = uniform, and the military certainly acquainted me with that protocol!  But no more of that -- at least, not on a daily basis.

Among the activities that will consume time during the coming months is membership on our city's Historic District Study Committee which was commissioned by the City Council.  Nine of us (including two employees of the City of Big Rapids) meet regularly to hammer out details on a proposal to establish an historic district in Big Rapids.  A task I've volunteered to do is locate the homes within the boundaries of our proposed historic district on old Sanborn Fire Insurance maps.  Big Rapids was visited by the Sanborn company in 1884, 1892, 1899, 1908, 1914 and 1924 (and more recently as well), and I've plotted the properties as they appear in the old maps.

Our house is in the proposed district -- it appeared in the 1906 book: Big Rapids, Water Power City, along with the local contractor, Andrew White, who built this place as his own residence.

 Here's a detail from the 1908 Sanborn Fire Insurance map of our neighborhood.  Our house is shown in the lower right hand corner, the corner of Oak Street and South Stewart Avenue:

 
Several coats of paint obscure the original dark color of the house, but a good deal of the original siding is on the place.  We've lived here fifteen years.

Today (May 14) our group visited the Recorder of Deeds in the Mecosta County Courthouse as our group will be gathering lists of persons who have owned the homes we've been assigned to research.  Fortunately the abstract of our property, extending back to the 1850's, was given to us by the people from whom we bought this house.

The Court House is located just two blocks north of us on South Stewart Avenue.  The 19th century building, demolished in the 1960's I believe, was quite a sight to behold:

 

Preserving historic structures is what we hope to accomplish, and here are several members of our intrepid group.  

Ann, Jane, Mary and Lynn are shown here mulling over the orientation we had just received to understand the arrangement of the Recorder's materials.  Those deed books in the background are quite formidable -- glad weight training is part of my morning exercise repertoire!