Actually the house was right in the middle of the city, not in the woods, but that sounds nice–very Ingalls-Wilder-ish.
A while back I posted a photo of a house with Alice Leeuwenhoek standing in front of it on Thanksgiving 1907. The address on the back was 126 Balch Street, which didn’t seem to conform to current addresses. I asked a lot of questions about it. Uncle Don explained that were some buildings behind the houses on the street.
126 Balch Street, Kalamazoo, Michigan
Then I heard from Jill-O, a librarian in Kalamazoo. (P.S. You will love her blog so go check it out!)
Here are the results of her research in a 1908 insurance street map of Kalamazoo:
Jill-O says:
It looks like the numbers are in the same location as today. There are a couple of outbuildings behind 126, so either the house was torn down and rebuilt, or the one of the outbuildings was used.
Here is the house that is on the street, numbered 126, today.
Let’s look at the pic and think back to 1907. In the photo you can see an outbuilding behind the house, so it’s unlikely that it’s off the street, behind another building. But if it was 126, wouldn’t the outbuilding be poking out on the other side? And wouldn’t the house be larger? As to the second question, maybe not. The house shows one room and behind it another room, so maybe from the photo we can’t see the depth of the house. As to the first question, what if the photo is reversed? I don’t know too much about the process of taking photos or developing them in those days, and maybe the photo is reversed.
OR. What if this is an outbuilding and that building off to the left is a house on the street from another angle?
The more answers I find, the more questions I have. I think my husband is right: I ask way too many questions.
This map is invaluable to me because so many of my relatives lived in this neighborhood. I am going to use it to plug in the addresses on the census reports–yippee!!!
Thank you, Jill-O!
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