A Simple Time

A Simple Place

“Dog Town” was a Sturgis neighborhood east of S. Centerville Road and south of US. 12 that began about a century ago.

Mike Mort made a movie about the community because Sturgis native, Karen Kitson Yoder, remembered it well from her childhood.

“I was jealous of them,” Karen said. 

She lived a block or two outside of Dog Town but attended Wenzel Elementary with many of the children.

“They all knew each other and most of them were related to each other,” she said.

Karen found some of her former classmates and several years ago they shared memories. The movie premiered at Sturges-Young in May 2019.

The movie was popular as it depicted a simpler time and place when neighbors and relatives took care of each other out of mutual respect and camaraderie. Kids played outside from morning to night. Parents worked hard.

We showed the movie at the Sturgis Historical Museum on Jan. 19. In spite of inclement weather on the Sunday afternoon, 12 people came, many with memories of their childhood.

Dona Beers Hagen is a descendant of the two brothers who left the Six Lake Michigan area in 1909 looking for a better life and land they could afford. Marion and Ernest Beers, in their late teenage years, walked to Sturgis and started building that life.

Dona’s grandfather was one of them. While he worked hard, he was skeptical of newfangled education.

“My grandfather didn’t believe anything his two eyes couldn’t see,” Dona said.

When he learned his granddaughter was being taught that the world was round, he advised the parents to get her out of that school.

But he could see how to build houses and built one after another building a better life for others as well as his own family.

“They took the money from one house and built the next,” Dona said.

The houses were tiny by today’s standards, about 650 square feet, mostly one big room. For plumbing they had an outhouse, an outside pump or maybe one faucet inside. Some homes had linoleum laid over a dirt floor.

Such a tiny house held a family with several children and often a dog, or so it seems from the photos. A child is hugging a friendly canine in many of the pictures

Larry Grate told how “Old Man Beers,” most likely Dona’s grandfather, made playground equipment out of available scrap metal.

Karyl Kreps had not been involved with the movie but arrived on Sunday with a photo of two cute little girls with their dolls in front of Veterans Housing. It had been on Orange Street, north of South Street. 

That photo was a gem for the Dog Town researchers who had searched for any original photo of the veterans housing. All they found were two metal units that had been moved to W. Fawn River. One had been completely renovated and one was a decaying shell.

Although the neighborhood may have been on the “wrong side of the tracks” as considered by some, it was Home Sweet Home to many of that generation.

“I’d go back to that time in a second if I could,” Dona said. “We didn’t know we were poor. We were happy.”