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An Introduction to Gitchel

I was helping a relative with some genealogy work, and found an interesting headline on a website: “Gitchel: The Ghost Town.” I've previously reported on Shackhuddle, the ghost town south of Hudsonville that, from what I can tell, got largely bulldozed to make way for the I-196 Ford Freeway in the 60's and 70's...but, that name “Gitchel” rung a faint bell at the back of my memory. I'd seen it before when researching this blog. I turned to some old sources, including Walter Romig's “Michigan Place Names” book, and found that, the post office at Gitchel operated from 1886 to 1902, which indicates that there was some sort of settlement in this unincorporated part of Jamestown Township. But, what else was there?

 I took to the Google search engine, and found a couple of real estate listings, one for a brick farmhouse along 24th Ave. south of Jamestown, and the other actually listing the Gitchel schoolhouse on 24th at Adams St. I'd read one location of Gitchel being 32nd Ave. at Byron Rd., but that's 2 miles north and 1 mile west of 24th and Adams, and in the area that I would've considered to be Forest Grove.

Little side note: I drove that stretch of Adams St. for a little over 2 years, and discovered that the intersection of 24th and Adams is a speed trap: There'll often be an Ottawa County sheriff parked in front of the schoolhouse, monitoring traffic at the 4-way intersection, while either an Allegan County or Ottawa County patrolman will be doing laps down Adams, around the Drenthe landfill, and back; pulling over traffic violators. 

 But, there it was: That intersection of 24th and Adams. The same intersection that Eddie Bentz turned south at, to escape Holland Police after robbing a bank 30 years after the Post Office at Gitchel was demolished. 

 I can't wait for this quarantine to lift, so I can get to the library and sink my teeth into some public records and printed material – I've got a small list of books to look at, not limited to the same interurban records I used when researching Shackhuddle, and maybe the Grand River Memorials book that I cited in my Cedar Swamp Village article. I'm intensely interested in what else was at this location.  There's a faint tickle of a memory of an interurban station there, which would seem to concur with the still-standing power poles a few hundred feet to the north of Adams St., which powered the electric train cars back in the day.

 Works Cited: 
 Romig, Walter. Michigan Place Names: the History of the Founding and the Naming of More than 5000 Past and Present Michigan Communities. Wayne State Univ. Pr, 1986.

 https://www.redfin.com/MI/Hudsonville/704-24th-Ave-49426/home/97595494

 https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/hudsonville/775-24th-ave-hudsonville-mi-49426--2052427672

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