Pentwater News - Brass Anchor Building 1872
The Pentwater News, the county’s oldest and one-time its leading newspaper began as the Oceana Times in 1861. The offices were eventually located in the Italianate-style Pentwater News Building, known today as the Brass Anchor Building. The sturdy structure was designed with walls three bricks thick over huge timber framing and was the first to be built with Pentwater creme bricks.
Oceana Times proprietor-editor F. William Ratzel published “the sheet” on Fridays. Subscription cost $1. per year plus 25 cents for delivery. His August 22, 1862 issue, was shorter because Ratzel was out recruiting 40 men for the “Lake Shore Tiger Company” that joined an Ionia regiment and the “great Union Army of the North.” Ratzel’s eloquent prose apprised readers of Union Army progress. Paid advertisers included “Chas. Mears’ CHEAP STORE in Pentwater, Michigan” which sold everything from groceries to crockery to shoes and furs.
The paper was the East Shore News in 1871, and the Pentwater News by 1872 under the shared ownership of a man named Rastall and Amos Dresser Jr. The classifieds documented growing village commerce and professional services and recruited desperately needed trades people like masons. The editor opined on social and political trends, covering Pentwater suffrage, temperance, and political meetings.
On May 30,1873, the Kalamazoo Gazette published a thank you letter from the administrators of the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital (then known as the Michigan Asylum for the Insane) to 120 newspaper editors, including the Pentwater News, who sent newspaper copies for residents stuck inside during a severe winter.
Dresser’s Pentwater News’ partner from 1876 to 1879, was William Canfield who published the Mt. Clemens Republican newspaper from 1856 to 1866. Canfield moved to Pentwater and was known as a horticulturalist who worked with the native Americans on plant cultivation. He lived with his mail order bride and many children in what became the Candlewyk Inn.
L.M. Harzell edited the newspaper by 1881. The Oddfellows held their meetings and events on the second floor of the Pentwater News Building from 1890-1946. Village bazaars and events took place there, and the owners converted the upper floor into apartments by the 1960s.
By 1934, Mrs. Esther Dempsey operated the Chamber of Commerce Bureau of Information there handling over a thousand tourist accommodations and transportation questions and issuing fishing licenses. By then, Harry M. Royal published it along with the Oceana Herald, the Hart Courier, and the Hesperia Union. Royal was also the president of the Shelby Oceana Canning Company and published the industry newsletter Michigan Kan Kan.
In 1968, the building housed the Candle Shop. By 1980, Donna and Chick Kolinger renovated the building and opened the nautical store, the Brass Anchor. Today, building renovations are in process by the Kolinger family.
Sources: “Fifty Years an Editor,” Grand Rapids Press, 5/24/1938. “History is Reviewed,” Ludington Daily News 7/15/1970.“Owned the Pentwater News,” Grand Rapids Press 5/12/1904. “Pentwater C of C Helpful to Tourists,” Grand Rapids Press, 9/18/1934. Oceana Times, August 22, 1862. “Pentwater Residents Call Community Ideal Town,” Grand Rapids Press 9/19/1940. Special thanks to the University of Michigan Bentley Library which houses several pristine copies of the early Oceana Times, East Shore News, and Pentwater News.