ALDRICH-BEAN-WHITE
328 East Scott Street

1870-1890 Carpenter Vernacular
Home Tour 1996 & 2003

The Aldrich-Bean-White house belongs to Matt and Karole White. This house has had many residents and many changes over the years.  The earliest known owner of the property the house is on was Edmund Lampson.  He was the first permanent white settler of Grand Ledge and he owned large amounts of land on the south side of the river.

This house has been built in stages over the years.  The original part of the house probably was built around 1870.  The 1873 map of Grand Ledge shows a small rectangular house on this corner lot.  Edmund Lampson might have built it as a rental house--we know he never lived in this part of town).  If not built by him, then it was probably built by the next owner of the property, George  Loveless.  We know his daughter, Lydia, and her husband Joel McPeek lived in the house in 1880.  George Loveless came to Oneida Township in 1856.  He had a home on West Jefferson near the entrance to Fitzgerald Park.  He built a pottery about 1860 and made crocks and jugs and the like.  His obituary described him as a “congenial, jolly old man” but it seems like he was pretty feisty too.  He was born in 1802, so he was too old to go into the army when the Civil War broke out.  He dyed his hair and managed to enlist in the army anyway.  His daughter Lydia married Joel McPeek in 1862.  Joel was a barber in Grand Ledge for forty-four years. 

The Whites discovered old exterior walls inside the house during some work they were having done.  The original house was likely a small rectangular house where the dining room is today.  From the 1881 map of Grand Ledge we can see that the house has been changed already since the 1870 structure.  There is now a two-storey addition to the east. The Whites say that there is a section of very old roofing showing in their attic on the eastern side of the house. It shows evidence of a fire.  It seems likely that fire damaged the 1870s structure, and that these changes were made to the house when repairs were made.  In 1882 Loveless sold the house, and over a period of years the house had many owners.

In 1894 Merwin and Abbie Blanchard bought the house.  He was a veterinarian.  They were married in 1864 and came to Michigan about 1866.  Abbie died of heart disease in their home on Scott Street in December 1900, and Merwin sold the house in 1902 to Frank Elsie, who probably used it as a rental property.

In 1904, Elsie sold the property to Charles and Alice Aldrich.  Charles was part of the Aldrich family, pioneer settlers in Oneida Township.  Aldrich School was on their old homestead farm property.  Charles was born in 1861 in Oneida Township and married Alice Brunger in 1885.  They had two children, Ada and Harold.  Charles Aldrich worked for the Grand Ledge Chair Company for a total of thirty-eight years.  He left them briefly and was one of the founders of the Crawford Chair Company in 1905.  Several years later, there was a falling out among the founding partners of the Crawford Chair Company and Aldrich and another partner left.  His life seems to have been unsettled for several years after that.  Aldrich went to Lakeview Michigan to work for a furniture company there.  That company closed about a year later, and he went to Portland Michigan where he went into partnership with another man in a washing machine factory.  He left that partnership and went to work for another furniture factory in Portland.  For a brief time he came back to Grand Ledge and worked as a clerk in Schumaker’s store.  During the time he lived elsewhere, he continued to own his house on Scott Street, using it as a rental property.  We know of several of the tenants: R.A. Latting, a prominent local attorney, lived there; undertakers William and Ruah Strobel rented the house when they first moved to Grand Ledge.  The Aldriches seem to have been a very social family.  The Grand Ledge Independent reported on many visits by them back to Grand Ledge and many parties of Grand Ledge friends travelling over to Portland to visit them.

At one point in 1910, Charles did have the house up for sale.  In the newspaper ad he described it as a twelve-room house, with furnace heat, bathroom, electric lights, hot and cold water (“where needed”), a good barn, cement sidewalk, good lawn and shade, and large lot.  From his description we can assume that more improvements and modernizations had been made prior to this time.  We know that the house had had additions added to the front of the house where the old porch was, and upstairs there was a second story added to the one-story west wing.   The original stairway was in the present living room, near the kitchen, and came out upstairs in what is now a bedroom.  There was probably also one or more additions put on the back of the house as well, but we will probably never know for certain the exact layout of the house or the sequence of the changes.

After an absence of about four years, the Aldrich family moved back to town and Charles settled in again at the Grand Ledge Chair Company.  In the Fall of 1923, he took a leave of absence and he and Alice went to California to visit their children.  He was struck and killed by a car while in California.  His family brought him back to Grand Ledge for burial, and the Grand Ledge Chair Company closed down for the afternoon so that his fellow workers could attend his services.  Alice returned to California to be near her children, but the family decided to keep the house on East Scott Street as a rental property.  Arthur Clark and his wife Beatrice rented the house for a time and were living there in 1927.  He was a teacher.

Harold Aldrich and Ada Hamilton finally sold their parents’ home about 1937 to Gordon and Marjorie Rathburn.  Gordon’s mother, Harriet Rathburn, owned a dress shop in town and Marjorie worked there.  Gordon (also known as Jeff) worked as a supervisor at the Fisher Body plant in Lansing.  After World War II, Gordon went to New Jersey to work with the man who was developing the Tucker automobile.  When that project failed to develop successfully, the Rathburns relocated to Ohio. 

In 1946, the Rathburns sold the house to John P. and Irene A. Schraw.  John Schraw worked for the railroad.  Two of their children, Pat and George, recall that the upstairs was rented out while they lived there, but they do not recall a fully outfitted apartment unit upstairs.  The Schraw family moved to Lansing in 1953.

John Chaplin owned the property after the Schraws, and he rented it out as a two-family unit.  Phillip and Donna Sweet rented the downstairs unit from 1954 to 1957, after Phillip returned from military service in Germany.  Donna remembers pocket doors leading into the front bedroom facing Scott Street (part of the present living room).  There was another smaller bedroom behind it with a walk-in closet (also part of the present living room).  The wall dividing these two rooms has been removed and the rooms combined to create a large living room.  The small kitchen had a large old sink and free-standing metal cabinets.  The bathroom had doors opening both into the kitchen and the dining room.  After John Chaplin died, his children inherited the house and they continued to rent it.  Vine Chaplin, Marjorie Snavely, and Elizabeth Hixson were his daughters. 

Lila Hiesrodt owned the house next, again, as a rental property.

Wiley and Patricia Bean bought the house in December 1964 and changed it back to a single family home, making extensive changes and additions.  Pat Bean remembers that there was not a full kitchen upstairs, but that there was a large metal sink in the front bedroom. They took out the pocket door and installed French doors leading from the foyer into the living room.  They added onto the small L-shaped kitchen and put a second story over the whole back of the house for a master bedroom and bathroom suite upstairs.  They made many updates and modernizations to the house after its many years as a rental structure.

In 1976, Armin and Hope Kurz bought the house from the Beans; John and Kay Cogley bought the house from them about 1987/1988. 

Matt and Karole White moved into the house in 1990 and have continued to update and redecorate the house.  Local craftsmen Tim Block and Dick Cypher have done much of the work.  Since it was last on Home Tour in 1996, the Whites have completed the upstairs bathroom, with a claw foot tub and a pedestal sink.  One interesting point is that the sink came from the Olds Plaza Hotel in Lansing.  They have added a pantry, built the garage which is designed like a carriage house, and added fish scales to the upper gables of the house.  Although it has been through so many changes that a restoration to its 1870s state is neither practical nor desirable, the Whites have given it a polish and elegance it has not seen in many decades, and it is truly one of Grand Ledge’s showplaces.