Chelsea's Corner Grocery Store

A continuous line of grocery houses occupied the corner of Main and Park streets for more than 120 years. The property at 125 S. Main Street marked Chelsea's southern border in the 1850s, when a deep ravine ran through the area and formed part of the eastern half of South Street, later redirected, graded, and renamed Part Street in the 1870s. The present brick Commercial Victorian building replaced a wood-framed structure owned by Thomas Godfrey and was built in late 1889 by Thomas Wilinson and Frank Staffan, who jointly owned the property. Distinct from earlier Commercial Italianate buildings on the block, it had a more streamlined roof line and window moldings. Its grocery history began in early 1890 with William Emmert, founder and publisher of The Chelsea Standard and proprietor of the Standard Drug & Grocery House, who ran the newspaper on the second story and the drug and grocery business on the first floor before selling the store that same year and the newspaper a year later to O. T. Hoover, who published it in the basement for more than a decade. In the 1890s and early 20th Century, J. S. Cummings operated a grocery in the south half and Adam Eppler operated a meat market in the north half, with Cummings advertising the business as the Busy Corner or the Corner Grocery. Michigan State Telephone Co. occupied the front of the second story in 1904, and Michigan Bell Telephone later used the building for the next 40 years; Gladys Klumpp became a well-known daytime switchboard operator there beginning in the 1920s. In 1907, L. T. Freeman's Drug and J. S. Cummings Grocery merged as Freeman & Cummings Co., took over both halves of the building, hired Frank & Howard Brooks to extend it 40 feet along Park Street, and installed a steam heating plant in the basement. In 1928, O. D. Schneider moved his grocery there from across the street and later joined Waldo Kusterer in Schneider's & Kusterer's; by the 1940s it was known as Schneider's Grocery and was owned by Carl D. Schneider and Howard "Red" Flintoft until their deaths in 1991 and 1993. The market later continued as the Common Market under Craig Common, then the Chelsea Market under Jim O'Sullivan and Jeff Flintoft, and then the New Chelsea Market established in 2007 by Kevin Riley and Francisca Fernandez; the Flintoft family's involvement ended with Jeff Flintoft's death in 2010.

Chelsea, Michigan · United States