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Title: |
West Side Iron Works, Portrait of Józef Jakóbowicz |
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Photos and descriptions courtesy of Edward Michael Jackoboice |
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11/1/2014 9:46:37 PM |
Photo #1-Józef Jakóbowicz (a.k.a. Joseph Jackoboice) of Kalisz, Poland. As a career machinist he made machinery in Poland, Germany and America. During the final four decades of his career in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he founded the West Side Iron Works (1880-1921). He and son Edward Joseph manufactured steam engines and a variety of saws and machines for riverside sawmills, furniture factories and others (in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin). They also built and installed over 100 fire escapes in Grand Rapids, some still seen aside old buildings. Joseph died at age 74 in 1899. He is buried with his family on the West Side of Grand Rapids at Mt. Calvary Cemetery (three plots).
Photo #2-Joseph's immigrant wife, Frances Rasch Jackoboice of Prussia. She arrived in Grand Rapids in 1857 and they married in 1858. Frances and family established the Rasch House hostelry and lodged "log runners," sawmill workers and others. The 4-story Rasch Hotel (est. 1872) was renamed as the Clarendon in 1880 and as the Charlevoix in 1912. By 1923 the old hotel was razed and replaced by the 8-story Hotel Rowe, ultimately renamed Olds Manor from 1963 to 2014.... (Frances' father, Florian Franz Rasch I (1793-1855), was a Quartermaster Captain in Napoleon's Army during the march to Moscow and the retreat (1812). He emigrated to America in 1852, and is buried near Detroit in Center Line, Michigan.)
Photo #3-Edward Joseph Jackoboice (1864-1935) served as the bridge between the two eras of the family business: from the manufacture of woodworking machinery... to the manufacture of road maintenance machinery/hydraulics. Why this transition? Edward Joseph built a steam-powered automobile in 1897 (the fourth in Grand Rapids) and drove it to Detroit in 1898. This six-day round trip by car, on horse and wagon roads, likely sparked a desire to build road maintenance machinery. In the early 1900s, as Model Ts and other cars rolled and bounced along dirt and gravel roads, the public began demanding better road conditions. Edward Joseph began building road maintenance machinery and specialized in it by 1921. In this photo (circa 1929-1935) he demonstrates his "Road scraper" grading blade for road graders. |
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West Side Iron Works , Portrait of Józef Jakóbowicz
West Side Iron Works , Portrait of Frances Rasch Jackoboice
West Side Iron Works , Photo of Edward Joseph Jackoboice
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