2025.01.29

The interview notes begin with the Grace Cobb being born at Shackhuddle on the Grand River near Ada, Michigan. He father worked dragging logs with horses, later at a tannery in Holland, and still later cutting ice out of Black Lake... until refrigeration was invented. After a mishap with her brother and horses, the father was invited by a man named Kyle to care for horses "where the Crane Farm was". Grace went to school with the Hamilton girls and Belle Schuham in Douglas and switched to the Saugatuck school for 11th grade but never graduated. The family moved to Ann Arbor but she remained in Douglas. Grace met her husband when she and Nina Wick were down on the dock of the Pokagon Inn peeling potatoes. The steamer Anna C. Wilson ran into the dock, dumping Grace, the potato peelings and everyone else on the dock into the river. Captain William "Dodie" Wilson fished her out and they married. Grace lived on Mary Street near Wickwood. Her husband operated a coal and lumber office. When John Aliber died and sold his house down the street, and Dodie inheriting after the death of his father, she expressed a desire to restore the cement-block house. A trainload of bricks that spilled at New Richmond supplied cheap materials. The text mentions that the Anna C. Wilson was sold to Morton Salt, then ran from Jackson Park to the Chicago Municipal Pier, before ending its days in St. Joseph, Michigan; Dodie's brother Frankie was a good swimmer/lifesaver who saved many lives and ran the Saugatuck beach house. Dodie's parents were born in Singapore. Dodie born in building next to Old Rail, then build a white stucco house, then a factory, was original owner of American Twisting. The account includes Grace's courtship with Dodie and rival Jack of Belvedere Farm, purchasing the Singapore Bank building, Isadore Schuham, the Kozy Koffee Kup, posing as an artist's model at Ox-Bow, and her sons Garth and Bill running the Wilson's ice cream shop, a painting by Cora Bliss Taylor, reframed by Florence Hunn, and the opening of the Community Hospital's Attic Shop.

Family HistoryCommercial businessesNautical

Winthers, Sally

https://sdhc-collections.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/videos/318-WilsonGrace-at94.mp4

08/03/2025

10/22/2025