John Theodore Herrmann (1837-1898) and his family made their way to Lansing from Darmstadt, Germany in 1872, lured by a booming State Capital and a letter from a relative saying “how you could shoot a deer form your front porch.” He started a thriving bespoke men’s clothing company with a storefront on Washington Ave. In 1893, he built a grand Tudor home on Capitol Ave. that now is the home to the President of Lansing Community College.

One of Herrmann’s grandsons and namesake, John Herrmann, became a gifted writer and part of Hemingway’s Lost Generation in Paris. Ernest Hemingway and John Herrmann were fast friends and were quite similar in looks and size. Hemingway often turned to John Herrmann’s Sons clothing company for his own suits. In a 1930 letter to Herrmann, Hemingway wrote: “It is a damned handsome suit - thanks.”

John Herrmann was on his way to becoming a successful writer when his first book “What Happens” was banned in 1926 and the books destroyed. Herrmann along with his spouse Josephine Herbst would become well-known socialist writers. In the 1930s, John Herrmann would get caught up in one of the nation’s biggest scandals when he was tied to the Communist spy ring figures Harold “Hal” Ware, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers. He served in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II and later moved to Mexico where he connected with beat writers, including William Burroughs. He died in 1959.