At Home in Rochester: Cyrus and Laura Reimer House

Reimer/Fisher house ca.1957 (Swords Family Archive)

This grand house was built at 1690 S. Rochester Road (west side of the road, south of Avon) in 1922 for Cyrus Reimer and his second wife, Laura Clough Reimer. Cyrus Reimer, who was born in 1854 in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, had been a hardware merchant in Rochester, operating the store founded by his father, Joseph Reimer, which he later sold to Harvey J. Taylor. (Taylor, in turn, sold the store to Charles W. Case and it later became known as Case's Hardware). Cyrus Reimer became a traveling hardware salesmen for the Buhl company of Detroit, and also operated a hardware store in Owosso, Michigan, before settling in Cleveland, where he was sales manager for the American Fork and Hoe Company. 

In retirement, Cyrus decided to return to the Rochester area. The Pontiac Daily Press reported in March 1922:

The contract has been let for a fine residence for Cyrus Reimer, to be built on his farm, one and one half miles south of Rochester. Mr. Reimer was formerly a Rochester resident, but has made his home in Cleveland for the last 15 years.

Unfortunately, Cyrus Reimer died just over a year after this announcement was published, so he probably spent very little time enjoying his new house south of Rochester.  Two years later his widow sold the property, as revealed by this item from the Rochester Clarion of April 17, 1925:

William A. Fisher, president of the Fisher Body Works, of Detroit, has purchased the palatial farm home of Mrs. Laura Reimer, one and one-fourth miles south of Rochester on the Rochester pavement. Ward Carey has been engaged as overseer of the farm and will occupy the house, while George Stewart will occupy the tenant house vacated by George Ahrens.

Fisher's name is the one that is most associated with this house, as he owned it for a much longer span of time that the Reimers.  One of the famed brothers who founded the Fisher Body Company that later became a division of General Motors, William A. Fisher used his Avon Township home as a summer getaway and weekend retreat, while living the rest of the time at his primary residence in the Boston-Edison district of Detroit. His Avon Township property was a large parcel in section 22, and he employed local people to farm it for him.

The Fisher property was sold to the Mount Elliott Cemetery Association in 1951, but plans to develop a cemetery on the property never left the drawing board. Instead, the property was sold for development to the Winchester Association in 1969.  About that time, the Reimer/Fisher house was moved west across the fields to a lot on Crestline Street, in the Bogart's Place subdivision plat, which is where it stands today.

To learn more about the Cyrus Reimer house, visit the Oakland Regional Historic Sites record for this property.

Thanks to Melanie and Janet Swords for sharing this image from the Swords Family Archive.

At Home in Rochester: Joseph Reimer House

Rochester hardware merchant Joseph Reimer built this Italianate Victorian style house at 211 Walnut Street in the summer of 1878 as his personal family residence.  Reimer was born in Pennsylvania in 1826 and lived in Upper Mount Bethel township in Northampton County.  Several of his neighbors in that Pennsylvania community also emigrated to Rochester in the mid-19th century, including Azariah Ross, John Ross, Reuben Immick, Francis Stofflet, Dr. William Deats, and Elias Butts.

Joseph Reimer served briefly in the Civil War as the captain of a company in the 153rd Pennsylvania volunteer regiment.  When the war was over, he moved with his wife and four children to Rochester and established a hardware business. In 1878, he built this house on Walnut Street and in 1885 he built a brand-new brick building at 418 S. Main Street to house his store. (The hardware store building still stands today and is now the home of the Sumo Sushi restaurant.  Reimer sold his hardware to his son, Cyrus, and son-in-law, Alvin Bliss, in 1886; eventually, Harvey J. Taylor bought them out and moved the store to 335 S. Main.  Then, Charles W. Case bought out Taylor and the hardware firm became known as Case's Hardware.) Reimer also served the community as a member of the school board for Avon District #5, and as a justice of the peace.

Joseph Reimer died in 1896 and in 1917 his heirs sold the Walnut Street home to Elizabeth Butts Casey and her mother, Julia Bromley Butts.  The two women divided the house into apartments and used it as both a residence and an income property.  After Elizabeth Butts Casey Case died in 1973, her daughter Della Casey Wilson inherited the property, and when her heirs sold it in 1995, it had been in the Casey/Case family for 78 years, more than twice the number of years that the Reimer family owned it.  The house is currently vacant.

Main Street Stories: The Reimer Building

The building at 418 S. Main is the oldest structure standing on the east side of Main in the block between Fourth Street and University Drive, and has some ties to one of Rochester's best-remembered local businesses. It was built in the summer of 1885 by Joseph Reimer, who was associated in the hardware business with his son, Cyrus Reimer. According to accounts in the Rochester Era, Joseph Reimer moved into his new store in November of 1885, but sold out to his son, Cyrus, and a partner, Alvin S. Bliss, in June of the following year. Cyrus Reimer was a traveling hardware salesman for the Detroit firm of Buhl & Sons, and because he spent so much time on the road he left the management of the store to partner Bliss. In 1888, Bliss sold his part of the business to Harvey J. Taylor, who eventually bought out Reimer and moved the hardware store to a new building on the west side of Main in 1890. Taylor subsequently sold out to Charles Case, and the company, by then located at 335 S. Main, became known as Case's Hardware.

Meanwhile, the building at 418 S. Main hosted many businesses, including the Drace & Bartholomew meat market. In 1903, it became one of the early locations of George Burr's hardware and implement business. Burr remained there until 1914 when he built a large new store on the west side of Main (the location today of Green's Art Supply). In 1923, the Buchanan & Kemler pool room occupied 418 S. Main. By 1925, it was home of the McKinney Lunch & Billiards establishment. In 1929, Bruno Perna was operating a fruit and produce market there, and in the 1940s Young's Grocery was located in the building. McCotter's Lunch and Grocery and Gerda's Restaurant were there in the 1950s, and Stapp's Shoes was the tenant in the 1960s. During the 1970s and early 1980s, 418 was the home of Trackside Hobbies, and in 1998, The Gilded Rabbit was there. The Sumo Sushi & Seafood restaurant is currently located at 418 S. Main.

The Reimer building celebrates its 124th birthday this summer.

Photo: This view of the Reimer building was taken sometime after George Burr bought it for his implement business in 1903. Over the years, the building has had a least three different brick veneers on the Main Street elevation and the second-floor windows have been completely re-worked at least twice.

Bygone Business: Case's Hardware

C. W. Case (right) in front of his store about 1905 (Rochester Hills Public Library)

A Main Street fixture for well over three quarters of a century, Case's Hardware stood at 335 S. Main from 1890-1968, but the company's roots in Rochester go back even further.  The business that most twentieth century residents of Rochester knew as Case's began in 1872 when a Civil War veteran named Joseph Reimer opened a hardware store on the east side of Main. In 1885, Reimer built a brand-new brick building to house his store at 418 S. Main (the location of today's Sumo Sushi restaurant), and shortly thereafter retired and sold the hardware to his son, Cyrus. Cyrus ran the store with the help of his partner and brother-in-law for a while, but was busy working out of town as a traveling representative for an implement manufacturer, so he sold his Rochester hardware to Harvey J. Taylor in 1888.

Taylor, who quickly decided that he did not want to continue paying rent in the Reimer building, began to scout around for a new location and settled upon a lot across the street and down a block, at 335 S. Main. Here he built a two-story brick structure in 1890, with a salesroom on the first floor and warehouse space and a tin shop on the second floor.  For the next half-century, the second-floor metal shop would be the domain of tinsmith Alexander Rose.

In 1889, just before the construction of his new building, Taylor had hired his sister Charlotte's young son, Charles Wallace Case, to work in the hardware store. Fresh off the farm and nineteen years old,  C. W. Case learned his uncle's business and ten years later, in 1899, formed a partnership with H. Frank Stone to purchase the Taylor store.  At that time, the business became known as Stone and Case, but after only a few months Stone sold his interest in the store to William Tienken, and the firm changed its name to Tienken and Case.  When William Tienken decided to go into the plumbing and heating business on his own in 1915, Case bought him out and the store became known as the C. W. Case Hardware. Meanwhile, William Tienken built a new store right next door at 333 S. Main to house his plumbing and heating business.

C. W. Case was a civic-minded merchant who served as Rochester village president and held a number of other political offices.  He was also well known for one of his best-loved hobbies, that of raising purebred poultry.  In 1912, he received international attention when his pair of purebred Buff Cochins won a championship for pairs held at Madison Square Garden in New York.  He proudly displayed a picture of this winning pair of chickens on the wall of the hardware store for many years.

Case operated the store until his death in 1944, but by that time his son, Mason, had taken over as manager because of the elder Case's declining health.  Mason Case succeeded his father as owner of the hardware store and the business remained in family hands until the building was destroyed by fire on December 12, 1968.

In its day, Case's filled important needs for the citizens of the Rochester area. The service provided was personal; my father recalls that if he needed three nails, he could go to Case's and they would happily sell him three nails, not a box of 100. Case's Hardware belonged to an era when merchants concentrated on serving customers more than on moving merchandise, and for that it is ever fondly remembered.

This Month in Rochester History

Fifty years ago this month, Rochester residents learned that they would soon be saying goodbye to a treasured local business that had been a Main Street fixture for 65 years.  The owners of Burr's Hardware announced that they were selling out and retiring, ending their long run as hardware merchants that had started in 1899.

In that year, a young Macomb County entrepreneur named George Burr had established a hardware and farm implement store on Main Street.  His store was located for several years on the east side of Main, in the former Joseph Reimer building at 418 S. Main.  Having outgrown that location after his first decade in business, he built a brand new brick block across the street at 429 S. Main  and moved his store there in late 1914.

In 1922, George Burr retired from the business he had founded and passed the management of the store to his daughter, Neva, and her husband, Ward Crissman.  Burr died in 1934 and Ward Crissman died suddenly in 1935; at that time, Neva Crissman brought her own daughter, Arlene, and son-in-law Leon Robertson into the business, and they continued to manage it until they decided to close the hardware store and sell the building in June 1965.

Green's Artist Supply opened at 429 S. Main in late summer 1965, and celebrates its 50th anniversary in that location this year.

Vanished Rochester: Abram Horn Building

Rochester is fortunate that many of the brick business blocks that were built along Main Street during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century are still standing for us to appreciate and enjoy.  One such building that has vanished from the landscape, however, is the Abram Horn Building, which stood at 426-428 S. Main Street from 1886 to 1962. The Victorian-style block was built in the summer of 1886 by merchant Abram Horn and his wife, Esther Mariah Hayes Horn, to house their respective grocery and millinery businesses.  Esther Horn was a native of Michigan, but her husband was born in Upper Mt. Bethel, Northampton County, Pennsylvania, and was one of a large number of people from that area who migrated to Rochester and Avon Township in the first half of the nineteenth century. (Among the former Northampton County, Pennsylvania residents who also settled in Rochester were the Fox, Butts, Immick, Lomason and Reimer families, as well as George Horton and Dr. William Deats.) After Abram Horn died in 1912 and his wife followed him in 1914, their daughter, Belle Horn Hadley, ran a "fancy goods" shop in this location.  In the 1920s, the Horn building housed the Little Blue Style Shop and in the 1940s was the home of the Belle Greene Beauty Shoppe. In the 1950s, the Fashion Beauty Salon, Avon Taxi and the Carmichael Bus Lines were located there. The last tenant in the Horn building was Larry's Pizzeria, which suffered a serious fire in April 1961. The Horn building was torn down soon thereafter.

This photo from the collection of Marjorie and the late Walter Dernier shows the Horn building as it looked in 1961, just before it was razed.