Downtown Sturgis in Yesteryear
I feel like I’ve been strolling through downtown Sturgis and it’s been a long walk. Nearly two centuries of history in some cases.
It’s all because we are preparing for the 2025 Oak Lawn Cemetery Tour that will highlight a few of the many Sturgis businesses over the years. Cemetery Tours will go along with Mike Mort’s next movie on the history of downtown Sturgis.
At the turn of the century Sturgis was doing very well. Frank Wait and other town leaders were attracting manufacturing companies which supported downtown businesses. It seemed like money flowed rather freely before the Depression and didn’t do too badly after, for some.
For instance, there has been a hotel at the corner of Chicago Road and North Street since the town began 1828. It was torn down or burned a few times but it was there until the mid 1960s and is best remembered as Hotel Elliott. Business was good under Charles Farr, but in 1921 Dan Gerow bought the hotel and began setting an example of what could be expected of a fine dining and lodging establishment.
On down the street was a family hardware business. But in 1909 E.C. Wright sold it because he was more interested in being the only Ford dealer in the area. He was chummy with Henry Ford’s staff in 1912 when he paid $17,000 cash for 23 Ford cars. All along what is now US-12, this line of automobiles heading to Sturgis, showed off the largest single purchase of Ford cars at that time. By the end of his long life E.C. Wright had left his mark on Sturgis.
During the 1930s there were usually about 10 women’s clothing shops downtown. One of them was Tribbett’s which stayed in business for 100 years. Carl Rehm’s was one of the men’s clothing stores that took care of male customers for decades.
Grocery stores were abundant throughout Sturgis history, but Central Meat Market outlasted them all and is still thriving.
There were shoe stores and dime stores, candy shops, soda shops and theaters. Several restaurants were downtown but one moved west of town and became a destination restaurant – Patterson’s Supper Club.
Fortunately, Marshall Parham was one a several local photographers who kept the historical record in photos. Without photographers, whose work is worth a 1,000 words, we wouldn’t even know what Sturgis once looked like.
We will remember Jessie Schaeffer the first female realtor, Hazel Prince Foglesong Spence, an early female funeral director and Florence Hagen, a beautician who worked for 60 years retiring in her 90s.
All these I have met on my “stroll” through downtown Sturgis in the last century.
