Homes with Stories, Lamont, Michigan

Coopersville Observer, June 9, 1922--Some of the new residents of Lamont are building according to their own notions and some are adapting the old homes which have stories.

Louis S. Reynolds, president of the Foote-Reynolds Furniture Company, has a modern home, one hundred feet above the river, with an engine which pumps him water from a spring on the bank.

Stuart Foote, brother-in-law of Louis Reynolds, and president of the Imperial Furniture Company, spends his summer in a house every board of which was dressed by hand. The man who built this home came from Chicago in the 1850s, and went into business in Lamont, but was drowned trying to save a boy who fell through the river ice.

F. M. Koons, manager of the linen department of the Wurzburg store, Grand Rapids, Michigan, is the latest businessman to settle in Lamont. He has bought the home of the Rev. Charles Doolittle, longtime pastor of the Lamont Congregational church. Hundreds of marriages have been celebrated in Mr. Koons' front parlor.

According to the 1870 Census, Ottawa County, Michigan, Rev. Doolittle, born in New York, about 1802, lived in Lamont with his wife, Mary, and two children, Charley, age 18, and Nellie, age 20. Mary Doolittle died February 19, 1876, at Lamont, Michigan, daughter of Arthur and Berthy Norton.

Thomas Woodbury, one of the first settlers of Lamont, whose first wife, Eliza Goodale Woodbury, is buried in Elmwood Cemetery, deeded the site of the Lamont Congregational church to the Congregational church and deeded the site of the Lamont boulevard to the village of Lamont. Woodbury's home, built in 1837, was still standing in 1922, although the pen, in which he used to house his dozen pet deer, has disappeared. His home was located south and a little west of the Congregational church. Thomas died in the poorhouse in Muskegon, Michigan, on March 23, 1888. Northeast Ottawa County People by Boersma

 

Transcriber: Joan VanSpronsen
Created: 29 July 2013