TRAVERSE CITY -- A forgotten box of old local newspapers, county atlases and postcards shoved under a bed in the 1970s could turn out to be memorable for George Sarris.
The owner of North Shore Inn on East Bay rediscovered the late-1800s, early-1900s artifacts last week in a narrow plastic box stored under a bed in a guest room at his Acme Township home.
"I don't understand why I have them, to tell the truth," he said. "It must have been a very momentary fascination with this sort of thing. I just put them away and they gathered a lot of dust."
Sarris said he bought the collection in the 1970s from a Leelanau County sawmill owner whose name he no longer recalls.
"I think I just stumbled across it and thought it would be a nice thing to preserve some things I thought would be destroyed," he said.
The two oldest items are an 1855 Detroit Daily Free Press and a Park Place menu dated June 23, 1879. That was just about the time Traverse City lumber baron Perry Hannah re-opened the refurbished Campbell House, a wooden structure he bought that year.
He renovated it into an elegant showpiece and renamed it the Park Place Hotel. It was considered the grandest hotel in Michigan north of Grand Rapids just as a two-decade lumber boom was starting for the village.
Other newspapers date from the late 1800s to 1919 and include more than two dozen single copies of Traverse Bay Eagles, Daily Eagles, Grand Traverse Heralds, Morning Records, Evening Records, a Pilgrim's Progress (Elk Rapids), an Elk Rapids Progress and a Bellaire Independent.
The Grand Traverse and Leelanau atlases were published in 1881, 1895, 1901 and 1908.
Sarris' find also contains several postcards by well-known Traverse City postcard-maker Orson Peck.
Sarris graduated from Traverse City High School, attended Northwestern Michigan College and earned a doctorate in college administration from the University of Michigan. He worked in that field in Michigan until 1968, when he returned to Traverse City to enter the hotel business.
He bought an East Bay cottage motel called Cape Cod Cottages and renamed it the Lakeshore Resort. He constructed and operated the Bayside Market along U.S. 31 in East Bay Township in the early 1980s and for 20 years developed some Caribbean properties in U.S. Virgin Islands and St. Barthelemy Island.
In 1990, he built the North Shore Inn, a condominium hotel he operates along with a rental management business in North Carolina and Florida.
He said he wasn't looking for his long-forgotten collection when he found it. He'd like to sell it and has contacted an antique appraiser to determine the artifacts' values.
Print this story
E-mail this story
