Faye Vandercook Page 464-465 - Faye Vandercook is a representative of the third generation of the Vandercook family to be identified with the marble and granite business in Michigan, as applied to the production of high grade cemetery memorials, and he now owns and conducts in Grand Rapids a substantial business that was here founded by his father in the year 1892. This well ordered business enterprise is carried on under the title of the Grand Rapids Monument Company. Mr. Vandercook was born at Allegan, Michigan in the year 1881, and is a scion of a family that was founded in this state more than seventy-five years ago. His grandfather, the late Michael Vandercook, was a pioneer in the monument and grave-stone business at Ann Arbor, and later was engaged in the same line of business at Kalamazoo, where he continued operations until his removal to Allegan, the latter city having been his place of residence at the time of his death. Henry B. Vandercook, father of the subject of this sketch, was born at Ann Arbor, in 1862, and he learned his trade under the effective direction of his father, with whom he was long associated in business and whom he succeeded in the control of the business at Allegan, where he maintained his home many years. In 1892 Henry B. Vandercook came with his family to Grand Rapids and engaged in the monument business in partnership with Jeremiah E. Poland and Joseph Wenzel. He eventually purchased the interests of his partners, and in 1916 he admitted his son Faye to partnership in the business, this alliance having continued until 1922, since which year Faye Vandercook has continued the enterprise in an individual way, the Grand Rapids Monument Company being one of the leading concerns of this kind in western Michigan and controlling a substantial and prosperous business. The company has a plant of most modern equipment and facilities and the high grade of the output constitutes the best advertising for the concern. The rudimentary education of Faye Vandercook was acquired in the public schools of Allegan, and he later attended the public schools of Grand Rapids, to which city the family removed when he was a lad of eleven years. Here also he attended McLaughlin Business College, and through his close association with his father’s business he fortified himself in all details of the monument trade and business, of which he is now a prominent and successful exponent in this city. His son Wayne L. a graduate of the Grand Rapids south high school, is, in 1925, taking a course in designing at the Bliss Designing School of Rockford, Illinois, where he is equipping himself for future association with his father in the monument business, in which he will be a representative of the fourth generation of the family.

Transcriber: Evelyn Sawyer
Created: 19 August 2003