Richard Dunson. July 1990
Richard Dunson son of Carl Dunson of Dunson Jungle Gardens. Interview was done in July 1990.
The original interview was done by Ed Morgan and Sharon.
Transcription was done by Kathryn Marks
Richard Dunson was the son of Carl Dunson who had Dunson's Jungle Gardens on the property that later became Frank and Rita Christensen's property and even later the Howard Christensen Nature Center.
Richard: …….there was a log dam, they’d throw sawn logs in behind that to go to the Rogue River and down the Rogue River to the saw mill, I don’t know where they went in the Rogue River you know because I wasn’t around then. There’s that cabin I’m talking about. There’s pine you’re talking about.
Ed: Who planted those? You and …..
Richard: Johnny Wilder. Johnny Wilder was a professor at a university.
Sharon: At Michigan State?
Richard: Yea, I think Michigan State.
Ed: Is that W I L D?
Richard: W I L D E R
Sharon: And what type of pine did you plant? One was Red Pine and what was the other?
Richard: The main planting was White Spruce. There’s Blackfield Spruce, Red Pine, Hemlock.
Sharon: I’d love to go back there with you sometime. The Red Pine are so tall, they’re probably 5-6 stories tall and they’re trimmed up a ways and when you take the kids out there it’s just row after row of them and they’re so tickled they like to run up and down the rows of trees. It’s one of the neat places for them.
Richard: I planted those and the first year I had Gladioli’s planted between them. (Laughing) So you can’t cultivate them anyway you know so (laughing) you can’t weed out the brush so I planted a row of Gladioli’s down each one of them. Gladioli’s, stuff grew in that sand, it’s amazing being it’s as dry as it is, but…
Did you know, (pause), you’re not from Kent City are ya?
Ed: Yea.
Richard: You are from Kent City. Where abouts?
Ed: I was raised on north of 17 Mile Rd. on Sparta Rd. between 17 and 18 Mile Rd.
Richard: Did you ever hear of an old timer by the name of Red Caster?
Ed: Yea, I’ve heard people refer to him.
Richard: Well that was my Dad’s caretaker. (Pause) That’s Red Caster and his wife right there.
Ed: They lived in Kent City didn’t they?
Richard: No. They lived right out there at the cabin.
Ed: Now this is the cabin in the background?
Richard: No, that was my cabin. That’s this place here. I gotta put on my glasses, it’s been a ways since I been back there. Let me look again. No, that was my cabin, now these two people here I don’t recognize but this is Red and his wife. (Pause) Now they weren’t married when he was taking care of my Dad’s place. (Pause) There’s the gal that sold it to Frank Christensen, Dad’s second wife. That’s my Dad right there, that’s Red right down there on the point in front of Christiansen’s place.
Sharon: See the dock would have been straight across from here where we take the kids.
Richard: Yup. We were talking about that big turtle that’s down there. Take jugs and put a wire around them about that long with a big hook and some kind of meat and just throw the jugs out in the lake and then the next day go looking for the jugs. When the big snapping turtle gets hooked they take it up on shore. (Laughing)
Sharon: Had him for dinner?
Richard: You bet.
Ed: Have you ever ate turtle meat?
Sharon: I was tricked into it once.
Richard: Best meat you can eat.
Sharon: Tasted like chicken to me.
Richard: Yea.
Sharon: But I knew the turtle that I was eating and that made me very upset. He had been a pet for a whole school year.
Richard: Yea, they’re a strange thing but that’s what they do when they get hooked. They drag that jug up into the lily pads and try to drag it out then you just go around looking for the jugs.
Sharon: Well we feed them fish food and sometimes we take bread to feed them and he comes up out of the water and takes a gulp here and there and the kids are just thrilled. His name is Jaws. (Laughing)
Ed: They figure it’s about 40 years old.
Sharon: Yea, they estimate.
Richard: Yes, he comes to the top and floats out to the back. There’s a lot of ‘em in there like that.
Richard: Are there still Golden Shiners?
Sharon: What’s a Golden Shiner?
Richard: It’s a minnow.
Sharon: There are a lot of minnows in the lake, but I don’t know what kind they are. There’s a lot of Cat Fish.
Richard: Yes there’s always been Cat Fish. My Dad stocked that with Sun Fish and Small Mouthed Bass and Perch. The Perch and Small Mouthed Bass froze out. The Sun Fish didn’t make it.
Sharon: Do they have a spot on them? I saw a couple of fish out there one day that had like a light spot on them. It’s the first thing I noticed when they were coming through the water on their back.
Richard: I caught a Sun Fish in there one time that was 14” long.
Sharon: Wow.
Richard: At that time The Grand Rapids Press had a morning paper called The Grand Rapids Herald and they were sponsoring a pan fish contest and I got that Sun Fish entered and won fifty bucks with it. On a 14” Sunfish? (Laughing) So I was really proud of him, so I put him on a stringer and tied him up and Jaws got him. (Laughing). And I went down that night to get my Sunfish and all I had was a skeleton and a head, the turtle had ate it up. I used to take, go down there on the point there, throw a couple crusts of bread in the water and use what they call an umbrella net, like an umbrella, upside down you know with a pole, throw it out there and get a quart of Golden Shiners in one shot. (Laughing)
Sharon: Did you use him for bait?
Richard: They’re best for Bass fishing. They have a golden gloss of some kind on them that’s why they call ‘em golden, they’re not really gold but just about the color of old gold, the bigger ones. I’d take ‘em over to Spring Creek or Lake where there was a lot of Bass. Spring Lake
Ed: You know that tree that’s build right up out of the porch?
Sharon: Yea, he was telling me about that. Said he was up on the roof and, you tell them.
Richard: One of the reasons why I sold that land at that time because I was up there repairing this chimney and some guys come up the creek on the other side and was shooting and I was cutting the limbs, the leaves off that thing hanging right beside my head. They didn’t want to leave very bad until I got pretty persistent.
Ed: Now the state land, you sold to the State, right?
Richard: Right.
Ed: And then they just came in with a bulldozer and ….
Richard: Yea, knocked it all down, knocked the barn down. I had a barn halfway from that cabin to Red Pine Dr. along that muck field. There’s several acres of muck down there they used to farm and raise carrots on. And that’s where the old barn was. I kept a couple of horses over there. And there was another house, an old type house that was set just a little ways from this, where Red Pine Dr. (Inaudible). That’s where the caretakers for Dr. Miller stayed, I don’t remember their name, but he did have a man and his wife lived there that was clearing that muck land working around there helping him.
Ed: Now behind this house to the south and little bit east wasn’t there another house?
Richard: Yes.
Ed: Is that the one you’re talking about?
Richard: Yes
Ed: Wasn’t that bigger than this?
Richard: Ah, it might have been, yes. It could have been a little bigger, but not much. This place here was only actually three rooms, a room like this and a bedroom and a kitchen. It was really only a bedroom and kitchen. That other one had four rooms. Basically it wasn’t a lot bigger, it was there.
Ed: Now this property here was on Dr. Miller’s from Kent City. He had caretakers and stuff for his place and Dunson where Mrs. Christennsen is, that was Dunson, he had caretakers for his place.
Richard: That’s right, that’s what it was. It was Red Caster that you were talking about and they lived right there and took care of it.
Sharon: So you bought it from Dr. Miller?
Richard: No. Dr. Miller’s widow sold it to Johnny Wilder.
Sharon: Oh, that’s right.
Richard: He was a professor and sold about half of it.
Sharon: Go ahead and say it again, we got the tape going. (Laughing)
Richard: Well, the first time he took his wife up there with him and he opened the kitchen door a big old fat field mouse run across the kitchen floor and she slammed the door and went and got in the car and never went back. She was a city gal. (Laughing)
Ed: Is this Johnny Wilder and his wife?
Richard: Yes, I believe it is. And that was Anne my stepmother right there. But she didn’t want no part of that. It was too wild for her. (Laughing)
Ed: But then, did Johnny, did he continue to keep it for a while right? A few years?
Richard: Just a couple of years
Ed: Then he sold it to you, ok.
Richard: That would be my Dad’s cottage where I lived for a little bit. It was good, I enjoyed it. I rejuvenated the cabin, fixed it all up then I had to go in the Army. When I come back it was like starting all over again you might say. I was gone five years.
Sharon: What did you think of Maude Weaver when you met her?
Richard: Well, she was the salt of the earth.
Sharon: (Laughing) Nice way to put it.
Richard: Yea, she really was. Now my Dad was more acquainted with her than I was. In fact, he negotiated the deal that was his business. He organized the Grand Rapids City Land Contract Co. way back in ’26. He done real estate most his life.
Ed: What other deal did you have to do with her?
Richard: I bought the 40 acres adjoining the old Totten ranch it was my intention to try to buy the ranch. 640 acres unbroken. At that time she told me that she would sell it to me because I would do the same as her husband had done with it. In fact, I had started fencing it, but the fencing had to wait for a while.
Sharon: Wait, what year was that?
Richard: It was, I’m sure ’41. August 5, 1941. I had the fence built there across to the ranch and then they sold it to the state and they shoved it all up in a pile.
Ed: What type of fence was it barbed wire?
Richard: It was barbed wire. Five circuits of barbed wire. Which was good cattle fence at that time.
Ed: What did um, Maude Weaver’s Dad was Todd right?
Richard: Yup.
Ed: What did he do around the ranch?
Richard: He raised cows, they run cattle, to my knowledge, see this was all even before I come to Grand Rapids or Michigan to live. I can’t tell you much about anything except like when my Dad first bought it I went out there with him to see it and went back to Ohio to live my Mother. I came to Michigan to live with my Dad in ’37, of course from that time on I knew everything that took place out there. He’d already established the east gardens down in front of Mrs. Christennsen’s place and that’s just the way it got built. A lot of handwork, I mean a lot of handwork.
Sharon: I can’t imagine finding anybody that would do that today. That amount of physical labor.
Richard: Well, no, that was my Dad’s recreation. He worked in the office all week and every time he’d get a chance he’d go out there and like I said, he had a green thumb, if he put it in the ground it grew. All those, well you can’t tell it now, in fact the last time I seen ‘em it was all grown up with brush. Those little gardens used to be sand pads all the way around it with weeds. That’s why Red was there. And I was there. It was a shame to let it go but Frank wasn’t a man who could do physical work like that.
Sharon: It must have taken a tremendous amount to just to keep it up. Just to keep up the gardens.
Richard: Oh it did. That’s why he had to have somebody there all the time to help him.
Sharon: Did he grow edible?
Richard: Oh yea, we always had strawberries and a vegetable garden right down by ah, that point down there.
Ed: See this is a strawberry plant, that’s what that is. And that’s off from the driveway going back to Mrs. Christensen’s. That’s that water that trench along there.
Richard: There it is, there’s when I come home.
Sharon: From the Army?
Richard: Yup. That canvas says on September 20, or on August 23rd, I never got out until the 10th of September. I don’t know where it was, oh, that’s when we left out, we got out about the 10th of September. Let me see if I got any pictures here of that.
Ed: Did he sell any of the stuff from back there like the plants or any of the vegetables? Or …
Richard: My Dad had a nursery license because stuff was out growing their place and he had to dispose of it. First he gave it to friends you know, then it got so there were so many he did get a nursery license so he could sell it to people, individuals and they’d come out and look around. It wasn’t really a business. He had to have a license or he couldn’t sell, he couldn’t imagine that. (Long Pause) If I’m looking at this right, that’s a picture going back to the lake. These pictures are all right down in front of Mrs. Christensen’s cabin.
Ed: What is this, a beaver dam or something?
Richard: That was actually halfway between this place and Spring Lake. The beaver had a colony in there. They would come down and build the dam across where the old log dam used to be. That got water up, it came clear to the lake. So there was a man that had a cabin in the bank down along Spring Creek between this cabin and Red Pine Dr. that he and his wife and two boys lived in. Just right in the bank and he was trying to farm muck land on the other side, the south side, or rather west side of Red Pine Dr. The beaver was flooding that down in there too and he got into trouble with the DNR because he was trying to destroy the dam because it was flooding out his muck land. It was quite a problem and he finally gave up and I don’t know what happened to that little room.
Sharon: Do you know there’s right about where you said this beaver dam was there’s still remnants of a beaver dam there, back in there, you can see it?
Richard: That was just their house up on the bank. The beaver dam was down below in the creek a little farther.
Sharon: Well, you could see part of it. It looked like it was on the bank.
Richard: They might have dug the dam again up in there half way in between.
Sharon: It looks like, I don’t think anything is in it now.
Richard: No.
Sharon: It is abandoned but it is there. In the winter I take the kids back there and you can just see it.
Ed: That’s what they called it, Dunson’s
Richard: Yea, that’s the name people gave it.
Sharon: It is neat.
All voices inaudible.
Richard: Huh, that’s what I used to clear that land with. That old oil fueled tow truck. That’s what I made roads back through there with. I’m trying to see if I had anymore pictures of that…..
Sharon: This is the best type of book to keep your pictures in for safety. You use any of the newer ones with that sticky stuff on ‘em and it ruins the pictures.
Richard: This is all back there.
Ed: Fence back there?
Richard: No I just told, Sharon, right?
Sharon: Uh huh.
Richard: I told her that’s where we stayed in the summertime.
Sharon: Oh, on Myer’s?
Richard: There it is. Date of May 1925. That was at Myer’s, Little Myer’sLake.
Sharon: Oh, it looks like it was a row of cabins.
Richard: There was. There was 1 ,2, 3, five cabins along that road going to the pavilion. There used to be a pavilion on the big lake, they had one of the first ah, what do you call it, a slide that went into the water?
Ed: Oh yea, a water slide?
Richard: Yea, they had one of the first around. See this was all private then and all. They had a pavilion there and an ice house.
Sharon: Is this you?
Richard: Probably is. That’s my first airplane ride.
Sharon: That is an incredible picture.
Richard: Yup.
Sharon: That’s beautiful.
Richard: I’m ah, this stump fence right here, (pause) that might’ve been the one I told you about shooting my first rooster pheasant right along that fence. It went straight back from this property we’re talking about to the Goodall farm.
Sharon: Alright, does the Goodall family still have property there?
Ed: I think they do.
Richard: They wouldn’t sell to the state. Now the original man and maybe the sons ended up the same way, they’d just have no part of that.
Ed: I think the people around Division and the all way to the end of that property up in there, I think that is the name.
Richard: They might have sold part of it. But I don’t know if Little Clear Lake and Big Clear Lake is in the game preserve or not. Is that part of the game preserve?
Ed: Yea, the lakes are, but there’s property on the east side that has stayed private.
Richard: Yup, that’s the good old Goodall farm. They used to farm it just like everybody else. It’s pretty light sand but, let me see if I can find any more of these…….now these are pictures of the cabin right down there in front, family pictures. (Pause)
Sharon: Do you remember the tags that he used to tag his trees with? (Pause)
Richard: No. every tree that ever grew out of the ground
Sharon: I found a little tree that was dead. It was only about this tall but it had a tag on it, a metal tag stating what type it was and I wondered if it could have possibly been something he put in. It was a real flexible metal, it wasn’t real strong.
Richard: No, I’ve seen those but it could have been something he bought someplace, ya know, because my Dad ah, my step mother was from Nova Scotia and they’d go home, back to her home you know every once in a while and every time they’d come back they’d have trunks full of Evergreens. (Laughing) They got planted all over.
(Long pause)
Ed: Are any of those Rattlers?
Richard: No, no. That’s a Blue Racer.
Ed: But that’s the place for them.
Richard: Ya,ya it’s ah….
Sharon: How big is he?
Richard: He’s pretty big.
Ed: Here, that’s an amazing picture.
Sharon: Oh ya. OOH ya.
Richard: We always had Beagles out there, we raised them you know. In fact I come home from the service and Roy Buzzard used to be the Game Warden up in that district and the first Sunday I was home out to the cabin Roy come in and he had a box of shot gun shells for me. Because after WWII you couldn’t buy hardly any. He picked them up a two here and a half a dozen there and had them for me when I come out. You could always tell where I was cause there’d be about 15 hounds baying. (Laughing)
Sharon: I saw a Blue Racer about that size out at the Nature Center ah, this spring. He even raced at us.
Richard: Yup.
Sharon: We were in the arboretum and we saw him and we all stopped to watch him and he just raced right toward us. You know the kids jumped back and he turned around and went the other way.
Richard: You know in 1937 or 38 I had the largest Massasauga on record for about 30 days. It was 29 ½ inches long and it had nine rattles. I don’t remember the diameter, I know he was 29 ½ inches long. I used to dig peat moss down there by the lake for a friend of my Dad’s that had a bait shop in Grand Rapids and we’d get two or three burlap bags of peat moss and we’d dig it out for him. We had quite a pocket you know, a hole, and I was standing in this hole parting the peat moss out and I kept hearing this buzzing sound, it sounded like a buzzing noise. They don’t actually rattle. I didn’t pay no attention to it and I threw a stick up on the bank and I hear it again and I got fast on something and a root broke that I was under and I kind of lost my balance and I fell back and as I did that old rattler laid right out across the water and run up laying there on the bank. I ah, thought I’d killed him you know with a pitch fork, I hit him a few times and took him up where my Dad’s caretaker was at that time and tossed him out in front of him where he was mowing grass and he took off, started crawling away. We put him in a crock with screen over it we had him in there for quite a while and then my Dad took him up to this bait shop and they had him in there for I don’t know how long in an old aquarium and a cop came in there one day and was going to show them how to handle snakes and stuck his hand in there and got bit and they had to get rid of it. A year or so later I got one that my Dad and I dug out of those pine trees we were talking about. I was walking through, see I raised those for Christmas trees, I cut hundreds out of that field and when I was walking through there in late October with my mower to see what I was going to do you know and I heard this rattler and he went in a gopher hole so I took a pine nut and jammed it in the hole and went and told my Dad and my Dad said well we’ll go over and get him. So we went over and dug him out and put him in the same crock and he ended up down to the museum at John Ball Park and that was the last I heard of that. But it had nine little, seven I think it was little rattlers while it was in that crock. That’s why it was probably in that gopher hole using it for a nest. They were just about that long, tiny little heads on them ya know.
Sharon: One of our guides found a rattler back in those pines about a year ago.
Richard: Yup.
Sharon: She brought it in. I wouldn’t handle it. (Laughing) She brought it in just to prove to everybody she had found one.
Richard: Well, there ah, there’s quite a few Massasauga’s in that area. There’s a lot of swamp land around there and they’re not common, but they were there.
Ed: Was this taken back there?
Richard: No. That’s taken by 7 Mile Creek in the Upper Peninsula, and ah when I went deer hunting the first year I was going into the service. Built that right in the bank up there to live in while I was up there deer hunting. That’s up in the Beaver Basin. If you see a picture in there I can tell you what, where it is, the location and everything.
Sharon: Is this the pines again?
Ed: Is this the pines, where you planted all those pines?
Recording stops.
Richard: that’s the old logging dam that goes around up to, well that’s some in there, I don’t know how these got mixed in with the rest of them. It doesn’t matter to me, I knew what they were and that’s all that mattered.
Sharon: You know the chinking that are between the logs in a log cabin?
Richard: Yes.
Sharon: Did you put that in?
Richard: I did that cabin yes.
Sharon: What’s it made out of?
Richard: That was wood fiber, that’s ah, I got it from a paint company in Grand Rapids. I was going to try it you know and it really worked wonderful. It turned out real white which is what we wanted.
Sharon: What did you mix it with?
Richard: Just water.
Sharon: So it’s just like pulp?
Richard: It’s just like pulp, no, more it was just like plaster of paris when I put it in. It mixes up like that and then I sealed it with some kind of a sealer.
Sharon: It looked real nice and smooth, that’s why I wondered what it……
Richard: See Dr. Miller put those, that was actually a pruit, they weren’t logs.
Sharon: They weren’t?
Richard: Nope. They were split, put on end and caught between the two, at the halves and you see it made it look like a log cabin but it was actually put in against a frame building.
Sharon: Oh, look how perfect that is.
Ed: You see a lot of that like up in the UP.
Richard: Yup, well it’s a good way to build, makes a good setting. But he left the bark and the knots on it. So when I started to fix it up again and I shaved the knots down and peeled it and it came out a nice tan log color you know. And then I caulked it with that wood fiber and it really worked beautiful.
Ed: Now is this the house on the lake?
Richard: Yes, that’s the right down on the front goes right down to the lake. That’s Mrs. Christensen’s place.
Ed: And this is where the cabin was?
Richard: Yup.
Ed: Can you tell her about the first time you came up there and what there was for a road?
Richard: I already did that.
Ed: Oh did ya? (Laugh)
Sharon: You can tell me again.
Richard: Well, it was a two track run from 17 Mile Rd. to 20 Mile Rd. I don’t know what’s beyond 20 Mile Rd. At that time it was just a two track sand trail. Some limbs would be across the road and if you was driving a car up there sometimes you’d have to stop and throw a log off the road. That’s all there was at that time.
Sharon: Was there much evidence of the lumbering era that had taken place up there?
Richard: Well, it had been timbered off years and years before but the old pine fences still existed, especially over around by the Goodall farm. There were several pine stump fences there. Beautiful.
Sharon: What about just the stumps from the cut trees?
Richard: Well they begin to deteriorate right away. One that was right there where my Dad’s cabin was built which is now Mrs. Christensen’s, there was a stump there that’d be probably be at least six foot in diameter that I can recall. And it was cut up 3, 4, 5 foot from the ground. And there were pine stumps all around scattered throughout. The oak would come in and start to reforest the area.
Ed: Do you remember seeing much of the old logging trail? I mean the old logging railroad over around Spring Creek?
Richard: Now to my knowledge, my Dad showed me a place that was supposed to have been a railroad siding one time, but I don’t remember it.
Ed: Do you remember any talk of sawmills being different places around in there or rollaways?
Richard: No. All I know is as I told you they used to cut the timber around there and throw it into Spring Creek behind this earthen dam in the spring of the year when the Rogue River was high and they’d cut that loose to go into the river and down to the sawmill where ever the sawmill was. That’s when I came up here, of course it was just the remains of that old earthen dam there that was cut out by the beaver coming in and built a dam across there and backed up a nice little lake right there in front of that cabin with all kinds of fish in it. And then they went from there on down halfway between the cabin and the Rogue River to the other side of Red Pine Dr. and they put in another dam and flooded the man’s muck land out, they actually drove him out cause he couldn’t keep up with ‘em. They’d just flood his land every spring and he couldn’t keep his crop in.
Sharon: You know where the Spring Creek crosses Red Pine?
Richard: Yes.
Sharon: One of our people spotted a beaver swimming in there this spring.
Richard: Oh yes, is it calm, it used to be calm.
Sharon: We had thought they had moved quite a bit further down because the dam up near your cabin was abandoned, we didn’t know how long it had been abandoned.
Richard: They travel up and down the creek all the time.
Sharon: We were kind of tickled plus we had otters back there. Did you ever see any otters? We had an otter last winter.
Richard: I don’t recall seeing otter, but we’d see a lot of mink. I trapped mink and muskrats in that creek, lots of ‘em.
Sharon: There’s muskrat and mink in the lake. We saw, we seen, or I did personally this last winter and fall.
Richard: Oh yes. See mink is a fish eater and ah, it’s a good area. That’s a good place for them.
Ed: What in the world is that? (Laughing)
Richard: Ok. That’s the last, that’s Port Jefferson Ohio, that’s a 1928 Chrysler. That’s where they had the motorcycle, the national motorcycle hill climb at Port Jefferson Ohio and my Mother’s brother drove that Chrysler up to the top of that hill. (Laughing) You know, he got a big round of applause and everybody is a hollering and a whooping around and he drove that car until it stopped and when he started back down he couldn’t stop it and darned near went in the Great Miami River. (Laughing)
Sharon: Oh wow.
Richard: That’s what that was.
Ed: Now those roads up in there, you say when you first went up in there it was like a two track and stuff, can you remember when they started getting names? When they really started, well of course, they wouldn’t have called it Red Pine Dr. until after they planted the trees.
Richard: That’s right. They planted the trees I think in ’35.
Ed: Before that did they really refer to it as a name?
Richard: It was just a two track.
Ed: When you first went up there did that lake have a name at that time?
Richard: They used to call it Mud Lake because there was no bottom to it and it never did really have a name.
Sharon: I’ve seen where it was referred to as Lost Lake, does that sound familiar at all?
Richard: Yes.
Sharon: Another, just another name?
Richard: Yup. See it was back there by itself, nothing around it.
Ed: Now when you first went back in there was there any sign of any buildings or nothing?
Richard: There was no buildings, there was only one building in the entire area, two of ‘em, there was one on the corner of 20 Mile Rd. and Red Pine, the southwest corner. That was there and then Ernie Uhrbrock owned a log cabin that joined this nature center property, he was right out on this trail. That’s the only buildings that was in the area to my knowledge.
Ed: The 40 and the 80 that you said you bought between you and Totten were those Uhrbrock properties?
Richard: No, no. That was Dr. Miller’s. I don’t know who owned them before Dr. Miller bought that. But Maude Weaver owned the 40 acres that I got that joined the old Totten ranch. I got that from her. That’s how I was making arrangements to try to purchase that other land because that’s what I wanted to do was raise cattle.
Ed: Did you ever raise any cattle over there?
Richard: Not until I got out to Crockery Lake and after (wife’s name) and I got married we had ah, just pets, two ah, old Herefords for raising for beef and I had the saddle horses you know. They were nice ones I wanted to keep so I kept them and got two more and they were better than the first two. (Laugh) I had ‘em all four for raising calves, but I never did. All I had when I was there I had the calves and I had some horses. I had a pair of Sorrel Welsh ponies that I put in a harness you know. I had a black mare and a buckskin and a gelding that were real good horses. In fact, I used to hunt deer with that gelding just for pleasure. He used to take off down those old scrubs chasing deer just like a hound dog chasing a rabbit. (Laughing)
Ed: Now the barn you used, that’s where the old mule log barn that you built with somebody?
Richard: That was behind Mrs. Christensen’s place between this cabin on Spring Lake and my Dad’s cabin.
Ed: So that foundation in there, the old…
Richard: That’s a stone foundation.
Ed: They hauled the stone from…..
Richard: From 20 Mile Rd. out of the gravel pit.
Ed: What made you want to build, for the time you were building that it’s kind of an old fashioned way. And see it causes lots of stories about what that was you know. People think it’s from hundreds of years ago. What made you want to do it with stone?
Richard: Because my Dad liked to lay stone.
(Laughing)
Sharon: That simple huh?
Richard: It’s just one of those things, he was a perfectionist and what happened Grand had already left there, Red Caster had already left and was replaced by a man by the name of Uhrbrock. They bought a horse to cultivate the trees out there in the fields you know and where ever they wanted to pull up roots and stuff. Well, they started to build this log barn, but the horse died before they really got it finished so they didn’t finish the barn. (Laughing) Well, I come up there and I wanted a couple saddle horses and my Dad said “well, why don’t you finish the barn”? So I did. But shortly after I got the top on it was too heavy for the old logs that were, it was a basement type, a bank barn you know. What I put on was too heavy to support so we said no problem we’ll lay it up with stone. And that’s what we did. We put that stone foundation in there. I don’t know that there’s any pictures of that or not.
Ed: Yea.
Richard: There should be pictures of that barn because we were quite proud of that.
(Pause)
Richard: Yea, that’s it. See now, you’re looking at it before we put the ah, stone under it.
Ed: Oh.
Richard: See, this down in here around this door all rotted out on it.
Ed: Oh, I wondered about that.
Richard: That’s when my Dad said “Well, you haul the stone over and I’ll lay it up.” And we put the foundation under the top half of sawn logs. Yea, that was it.
Ed: The foundation is all still back there.
Richard: Oh yea.
Ed: Because it’s stone you know it’s caused a lot of stories about you know.
Richard: That was just a portion of it. I kept four horses in there.
Ed: I’ll tell you when, before, you know before I talked to you, um, there were a lot of stories and rumors and all kinds of stuff but then after I talked to you and straightened some stuff out, I told her before I kind of wished I wouldn’t have. (Laughing)
Richard: How’s that?
Ed: Well, the stories are kind of more, better you know. Most all of the stories go back to logging days you know, “this was probably a hotel” and “this was a logging ah, this and a logging that”.
Richard: To my knowledge, there was never anything in that area. Now I tell you about this man that had his log cabin built in the bank down there trying to farm the land, well, when I went in the service Ernie Erhbrock lived on one side of us and his brother Harry lived on the other side of us. I think they’re both, I know Ernie is passed away and probably Harry too. Well while I was gone Ernie’s cabin burnt down so they go over and cut the logs down along the creek by my place. (Laughing) Harry drug them out with his horse and built Ernie’s cabin back up again.
Ed: The Urhbrocks are still notorious that way up there.
Richard: Yea, I guess so.
(Laughing)
Ed: But they were good people.
Richard: Yes, they were good people, but my Dad said “Well, they’re the natives, they belong here.” That’s the way it was.
Sharon: Was there ever any talk of Indians in the area?
Richard: There’s a little group that traveled up and down the Rogue River.
Ed: Did you ever find any relics?
Richard: I found a few arrowheads.
Ed: Where would your Dad buy all of these plants and stuff, where would he pick them up besides hauling them back from vacation trips?
Richard: Different nurseries.
Ed: Would he have to go all the way to Grand Rapids.
Richard: Well, we lived in Grand Rapids.
Ed: I mean some of the stuff um, wouldn’t it have been hard to get back then?
Richard: Yes. Well, a lot of it he got through his family, Johnny Wilder.
Ed: Oh, that’s right.
Richard: Because he made contacts to get this from different points you know to plant for the college. What do you call them? It was their job to develop nursery stock. Whether they had a surplus then they’d grant Dad permission to purchase the surplus stock.
Sharon: You can apple orchard
Richard: Oh, that, there was an apple tree just as you start into Mrs. Christensen’s property on ah, on the right side going in. It was originally a Northern Spy, had Yellow Delicious and Golden Delicious on it.
Sharon: He grafted the different types together?
Richard: He grafted the two different types on this one tree and people would walk in there and see these three different kinds of apples on the same tree and thought it was a gag of some kind.
Ed: What kind of apples were they? It was a Northern Spy….
Richard: It was originally a Northern Spy and then he put a Red Delicious on it.
Ed: And a yellow?
Richard: And I think a Yellow Delicious. One of those two Delicious didn’t do as good as the other one, but at one time it did have an apple on it. See, they’re just grafts, that’s why I say my Dad, if he stuck it in the ground it grew. I think if he stuck a fence post in the ground it’d start to take root. (Laughing)
Sharon: Uh huh.
Ed: We’re not going to keep you up too long or tire you out, if we do tell us to get out.
(Laughing)
Richard: Alright, no, no. You just bring back a lot of memories to me, believe me you do.
Ed: Um, you got any other stories of some grafting and stuff he did?
Richard: Do you know what a Koster Blue Spruce is?
Ed: No, other than I think you mentioned it before, it’s got a real white…
Richard: There’s one right outside here. Can you see it? Go in the bathroom there and look out the bathroom window. Doesn’t that got the white tips on it?
Ed: Yea.
Richard: I think it’s a Koster Blue Spruce. It’s one of the, it’s a grafted tree. They started them from White Spruce and they put a graft in this White spruce and make a Koster Blue Spruce out of the pruned variety of Blue Spruce. Now I think I’m right, I’m not sure. But, my Dad used to grow them from cuttings. He’d just go along, a certain time of year, he’d go along and clip off them little white tips and I would have to make seed bed the way to specifications.
Sharon: (Laughing)
Ed: Where would he make the seed bed?
Richard: Down right in front of Mrs. Christensen’s cabin there in that muck ground.
Ed: He’d just pick a spot of ground to do it in?
Richard: He’d just pick out a spot of ground 10 ft. wide by 10 ft. long or something like that.
Ed: He didn’t dig it like a cold frame or nothing?
Richard: Yes, more or less like a cold frame. I believe he did he did put some stuff in to hold, a layer of sand and then a thin layer of muck I guess or something and another layer of sand and he’d tamp that all down and lay boards down and stick the little cuttings along the sides of the boards. I guess the boards were to keep the weeds down until they got started and he would actually drove spruce cuttings
Sharon: You don’t remember the time of year he took the cuttings?
Richard: No.
Ed: Did he put a or anything out
Richard: I if he did he didn’t say anything about it. Like I say if he stuck it in the ground it’d grow. He would grow them, now he might plant a thousand of them little cuttings and he’d only get 50 of them to grow to root to make a tree and he’d say hey, that’s 50 trees. (Laughing)
Sharon: Uh huh.
Richard: And I told Sharon, ah, about these ah, Fire that’s a bush like a hedge grows or something, well they couldn’t grow it down at Michigan State so one weekend Johnny Wilder came up and said “Here throw it on the brush pile, it just won’t work, won’t grow.” Dad took ‘em down and stuck ‘em in the muck and it was growing like weeds. I I don’t know
Sharon: I’ll have to try to find a picture of those and see if there are any still growing in the area.
Richard: I doubt if there’s any there.
Sharon: No?
Richard: No. They were planted in those beds along the road going in. That’s all growed up with brush now as far as I know. (Pause) Can I get over this so I can walk along it, I’d like to walk out here with you guys and I can tell you just what was where and what was in it.
Ed: Yea.
Sharon: That’d be great.
Ed: When we do finally do that, Mrs. Christensen wants me to
Richard: She does?
Ed: Yea, when we can finally get you back there and walk around with us, she’d like you to stop at the house for coffee and
Richard: Well, I’d be glad to do it.
Ed: She’d like to visit with you guys.
Richard: That’s be fine.
Ed: She’s been having trouble too. She’s driving way over to the chiropractor by the UAW hall on the East Beltline times a week for therapy on her back. She goes downs Alpine and across Leonard.
Sharon: Why doesn’t she come right out….
Ed: I don’t know, I felt like trying to tell her, you know, a better way to go…
Richard: You know, East Beltline is all tore up now, it’s getting to be a mess and parts of Leonard is, well that’s on the other side of town, it seems like every time we go into Grand Rapids we run into something that’s tore up now.
Sharon: That’s right, a friend did tell me that.
Woman: Would like a glass of lemonade?
Sharon: Yea, that would be nice.
Richard: Yea, give me one too.
Ed: There’s so many questions to ask now I don’t know which to ask first.
Richard: Just ask me anything. I’ll tell you to the best of my knowledge because I appreciate somebody having the interest.
Ed: Well now, I’ve learned that your Dad collected about anything, plants, antiques, stones.
Richard: Oh yes.
Ed: How much more stone, what all was stone around there that he had collected in different places and built stuff with?
Richard: Just about every stone in that property was collected. There was no stone in that area.
Ed: Oh really.
Richard: Except over in the gravel pit. You had to get stone from the gravel pit. There was nothing on the land. See that’s all sand in there, sand or muck. And all of those stones were carried in from all over.
Ed: Now the foundation to Mrs. Christensen’s, the side of Mrs. Christensen’s house, is stuff from him.
Richard: Oh yes.
Ed: But then there was some sort of a thing on the side of, what was this thing?
Richard: It was a little tile top table.
Ed: That’s all it was?
Richard: Yea, that was just a chimney tile, that was the stem of it, and he made….
Ed: A mosaic type.
Richard: Right. That’s exactly what it was, mosaic tile. He inlayed with cement and made a top to put on that piece of tile. Now that’s a good picture there. See there was steps going down the bridge right across here and there was a lot of trees right down in behind right in this area where he used to raise those cuttings. The shade, don’t ask me I don’t know if that was the right place, it worked.
Ed: See, this is the big stump that he was talking about where his Mom, where Mrs. Christensen’s house is now. When you first started going back there, those big stumps like that could you tell, was there evidence of fire on them from where the big fires went across?
Richard: Yes, there was charred stumps in that area. There was charred stumps in there when I burned off 40 acres too. (Chuckling)
Sharon: Did you do that on purpose?
Richard: No.
Sharon: How’d that happen?
Richard: Well, there’s right behind, do you know where, is there a well behind the nature center, a flowing well?
Sharon: There’s one in front of it.
Richard: Well, I say behind it, but I mean…
Sharon: It’s where that pond is I was telling you about.
Richard: Yes. Well that just used to be a mud pit there. I got a permit to burn that off and was going to plant potatoes in it. Well, a friend of mine came up to help me and we was going to burn it off to get the growed up weeds and brush you know. We raked back 25-30 ft. all the way around it you know. We got the leaves cleaned off and touched her off. We had a heck of a fire going there and all of a sudden a whirl, what we call a twister, come in and picked up some of that burning stuff and threw it out in the woods and a way she went. The fire burned off half of that 40 acres there on the corner that originally belonged to Ernie Urhbrock. Red Caster owned the 40, at that time after he got married, by my Dad’s place he owned the 40 along 20 Mile Rd. between the lake and 20 Mile Rd., it burned about half of that. But they all liked it. They said that’s good, got rid of all of that underbrush in there, the people that owned the property didn’t care but I did. It scared me to death. (Laughing) That’s when Fisk fire tower was still there.
Ed: Yea.
Richard: Well, it just happened that the buddy of mine had already dumped his car when he came out there to help me and as soon as it got away I said “get to the fire tower and tell them.” Before he got to the fire tower the trucks was on the way. They’d already spotted it and sent the trucks out, but it still burned 40 acres, but nobody else cared. They were glad it was burned off.
Sharon: I interviewed the wife of the man that used to be up in the fire tower.
Richard: You did?
Sharon: Yup. She was in a nursing home in Cedar Springs and I interviewed her and…
Richard: What was his name?
Sharon: I’ll have to think a minute, it’ll come to me.
Richard: I might recognize it if I heard it. Yea, I used to go up there and jabber…
Sharon: It’s on the tip of my tongue, I just can’t say it.
Ed: Why was it so important to your Dad to have garden beds, ah, with water channels, why did he want water channels?
Richard: See this was all swamp ground down in here. So he’d take the channels to get the muck to build up the flower beds and vegetable beds and the places where he raised the trees. It raised the ground higher and still had the same type of soil, see. He’d start a channel down through there and throw it up in there then level it off and that gave him high ground to plant on. Of course the channels would get used, ducks would swim up and down through them channels.
Ed: What sort of equipment did you have back there to work with besides you mentioned you had that truck, a shovel, hands….
Richard: That’s it.
Sharon: A wheelbarrow.
Richard: That’s it, a wheelbarrow, that’s right.
Ed: (Laughing) There wasn’t much other equipment?
Richard: No.
Ed: Now, did your Dad ever use a dredge type thing back there or was that after his time?
Richard: We tried using a hitch scrapper with that pole truck, but that didn’t work out too good cause you couldn’t maneuver around enough. You had to stay, keep the truck on the hard ground you know and it would buck over on the other ground, it just didn’t work. Doing it by hand you could put it right where you wanted it.
Ed: Now, when Sharon and I, did she tell you that we have to do a presentation on this August 28?
Richard: Yea, she told me.
Ed: If we want to take and start saying you know that nature study is nothing new here, it’s been going on for close to 75 years, because what, you bought it in about 1922, 23?
Richard: I think 1925 around in there. Mid twenties I’d say.
Ed: Now he wasn’t just, to back that up, you know to back up a statement like that, that nature study has been going on back here for like 75 years, he wasn’t just back there planting this for a hobby and stuff was he? Like you mentioned the college professor. What other people were coming there and like maybe studying what was going on and helping with it?
Richard: It was just a hobby of my Dad’s to start out and like I told Sharon, it got to the point that he was getting more trees than he could handle you know. He wanted to plant more and he had to get rid of something he had so he started digging them up and giving them to friends you know and finally it just…..
Ed: But, pretty soon, he must have had quite a following of friends and stuff that were coming out there to see what he….
Richard: Oh yes. There was somebody out there all the time. In fact, in that area right down in front of the cabin he imported frogs from Louisiana. They called them jumbo bull frogs. I guess they were like big, great big frogs and they put them in there and they didn’t know what happened except that when my Dad was in South America my step mother would take friends out there with her you know, and a guy spotted, the frogs did cross with the native frogs, so there was bull frogs down around the channel, great big ones. But this guy wanted, one of these guys was out…..
End of tape.