I’m in front of an Italianate house in the first block south of the Kalamazoo Mall. I arrived early so I could clear off the fresh snow along a Burdick Street curb in Kalamazoo.
Historian Sharon Ferraro and our Why’s That? question asker, Emily Blowers, are on their way to meet me.
Ferraro arrives first. A few minutes later, a young woman in a Western Michigan University Broncos pom-pom knit cap approaches with a cheerful greeting.
It’s Emily. She works at the Bronson Healthcare lab next door.
"I like to go up and down walks on the mall during my lunch break,” Emily explains as we stand together on the sidewalk facing the street.
We are looking back and forth between two sets of stone stairs that go nowhere.
Both stairs are close to the curb, about one parking spot apart. One is plain with an iron ring on one side, and the base of the other is an ornate sculptured creature. If you climbed the two steps and jumped off either of them, you’d land on the curb or in the street.
Emily continues her story.
“I was seeing these strange dragon-looking stairs. And I wanted to know what is that? Why is it here? And then, does it have a twin? Does this have to do with the second one next to it? That’s just steps with no dragon. One has a dragon, and one doesn't,” Emily said.
Is it even a dragon? And what did Emily think they were used for?
"My one, and it's a really silly guess, is like for carriage steps. You have a carriage and then you could get in them. But I think that would be really weird."
Doctors' Row
Ferraro was Kalamazoo’s historic preservation coordinator. She retired in 2022.
"I’m a Kalamazoo native, so this sort of story has always captured me. It's like, what is this? Why is this here? What is it for? And so that, working for the city for 20 years, gave me a chance to find answers to a lot of those questions,” Ferraro said.
First, let’s find out about the house.
On the porch it says 1867. The Kalamazoo Public Library website says that’s when the house was built by businessman Isaac Brown, just two years after the Civil War ended.
Lynn Houghton at the Zhang Legacy Collections Center at Western Michigan University, said Brown was originally from Vermont and had gone to California during the Gold Rush. She said he had family in Kalamazoo and settled here around 1862.
Brown lived in the house until his death in 1904, when it was then sold to a doctor, who added a wing for his medical practice.
Ferraro said it was common at the time for doctors to see patients in their home. She said that was true for several doctors who lived on Burdick Street and around the corner on Lovell
"If you look at old maps that show the footprints of houses, this was called 'Doctors' Row.’ You would see probably a dozen houses that had the little wing at the back."
What about the stone steps at the curb? Emily’s guess is carriage steps.
"Your instincts were right on the money," said Ferraro, who compares stepping out of a horse-drawn carriage to climbing out of a truck.
"Have you've ever gotten into someone's, I don't know, Ford F450?” Ferraro asked.
Emily has, her brother has a Ford F350. Emily said getting out of his truck is "impossible," especially for their grandmother.
“That's what carriage steps are for," Ferraro said, and that the plain steps with the iron ring are probably original to the 1860s home.
The placement of the carriage stone is important.
"This is directly in front of the home and the front door of the house. Okay? So, this was for guests coming to the house."
The iron ring was for hitching the horse, so it would not wander away.
Ferraro leads us to what Emily had described as the dragon steps.
“I'm not really sure it's a dragon, it might be a salamander,” Ferraro says.
“You see this, and you see it's lined up with the wing at the back that was the doctor's office. So, this is where you’d come, and you get dropped off, if you're going to see the doctor. And if you look at the front, you'll see it says Bosman. Because this was Dr. Bosman’s house."
The letter “n” in Bosman has broken off, but the rest of the engraving is still clear.
"They put them right back where they were"
I asked Houghton if she knew if the carriage stone was a dragon, a salamander or something else.
“I don’t know exactly what it is,’ Houghton said, but added, "I have always felt looking at the carriage steps for Dr. Bosman, that it was serpent tied to medicine.”
For centuries serpents have been used as symbols for medicine and healing. The caduceus, often used in pharmacy and healthcare logos, depicts two snakes coiling up a staff.
John W. Bosman was the doctor who bought the house after Isaac Brown died in 1904. The fanciful carriage stone would have been added with the new medical office addition, but it would not have been used for long.
In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, a relatively affordable car.
The horse-drawn carriage era would soon end, along with the need for carriage steps. But as Ferraro observed, these ones have survived.
"My predecessor in this job made sure that when they did come and repave along here, that they handled these very carefully and put them right back where they were."
"It's kind of cool to all wrap it up and know what it was, and my intuition was right,” Emily says toward the end of our visit.
“You were right on the money, " Ferraro agrees. "You were very 19th century."
Emily laughs. “I'm just a 19th century gal in a 21st century world, right?"
