Stebbins Real Estate Collection at CADL Local History

Tucked away in the basement of the downtown main branch of the Capital Area District Library is a unique collection of greater Lansing area real estate history. The Stebbins Real Estate Collection as it is known as is one of the most valuable resources for researching the history of area homes and is used by thousands of home owners and researchers every year.

The collections contains nearly 90,000 real estate cards containing information on one side about the square feet, number and types or rooms, type of heating, date built and other appropriate information. On the reverse side is a photo of the house or business and the price. These mimeographed 3x5 cards “real estate cards” or prospect cards were provided to real estates firms twice a week in the forties and fifties and often contain personalized notes from realtors.

Home owners usually are thrilled with early photos of their homes and clues to what the home may have looked before renovations.

Like every important collection in archives there is usually a back story about how the collection was preserved and then how it managed to be preserved before finding a home to be archived.

In this instance you can thank realtor C. Rowland “Rolly” Stebbins and his three sons Malcolm, Kenyon and Win Stebbins who all had a hand in preserving these records for future generations.

The cards were meant to be used and then disposed of but Rolly Stebbins had a different idea. Stebbins brought the old cards home and he had his sons alphabetize them and then put the cards in numerical order by address. Rolly’s idea according to his son Win was to have his sons learn the alphabet and organizational skills.

Sitting on the floor of their home at 1710 Moores River Dr. the boys would work the organizational magic and the real estate cards would be placed in shoe boxes and stored at Rolly’s office on N. Washington. In addition, on summer car trips to sites across the United States we would sort them in the back of Dad’s station wagon as we travelled,” Win Stebbins said.

“After 20 years we had an extensive collection and I think he (dad) knew the real estate collection was valuable in historic terms,” he said.

The collection was almost headed for the dumpster in 1965 when Lansing Community College purchased the 500 and 600 blocks of Washington Ave where Stebbins real estate company, advanced realty was located. Geneva Wiskemann, local historian and archivist, and her husband George came to the rescue and load up the more than dozen file cabinets and trucked them off to their farm north of Lansing where they stored them in an old barn.

After they were stored there a few years it was decided a safer location was needed and Wayne State University Archives snatched them up where they sat for nearly 15 years before being transferred to Capital Area District Library for archiving.

Today, the records are available for viewing when the local history room at the Capital Area District Libraries Downtown Lansing branch is open. To arrange an appointment or plan your visit, please contact CADL Local History. They are used regularly for house history research by Lansing residents looking into the history of their home, among an array of other uses often seen.

Most recently the cards were used in the Pave the Way exhibit to show how real estate properties in the St. Joseph-Main St. Corridor were often used to discriminate against minority ownership through what was called real estate steering where real estate agents would steer minority buyers to redlined neighborhoods. Pave the Way has been a multi year project to show the impact of the construction of I-496 on minority families and businesses in the St. Joseph-Main St. Corridor. Notably real estate cards from the St. Joseph-Main St. neighborhood would have hand written notes indicating everything from “colored” only designations to “can be sold to colored.”

In the Pave the Way exhibit, which was held in the windows of the Knapp’s Centre in downtown Lansing, the cards were paired with redlining maps and classifieds ad from the daily newspaper showing listings for “colored only.”