Sanderson House

Frederick M. Sanderson (1812-1876) settled in Battle Creek in 1838 and entered business as a wagonmaker. He married Huldah Rogers in 1840. They had three children together. Before the incorporation of the village of Battle Creek in 1850, Sanderson served as supervisor for Emmett Township. He later served as Battle Creek supervisor, assessor, trustee, or alderman for most of his life. In his official duties, Sanderson was “never known to swerve from the line of strictest integrity.” He built this Italianate-style house circa 1871 on a rural plot of land in Emmett Township near the village of Verona, which was an early competitor to Battle Creek. After suffering a stroke in 1872, Sanderson ended his active civic work. Huldah and their daughter Ida moved out of the house after his death in 1876. They sold the property but returned after complications canceled the sale. Battle Creek annexed the village of Verona and this rural area of Emmett Township near the end of the nineteenth century. By the early 1910s the city had subdivided the farmlands surrounding this house, which was constructed by Frederick Sanderson, into residential plats. Sanderson’s granddaughter Effa Phillips married Ancil Hoyt, a Battle Creek Businessman, in 1915. Hoyt was manager and secretary of the Business Men’s Credit Association. He drafted and published a credit rating directory of some 29,000 people in the county and in 1918 helped found the Battle Creek Dog Food Company. He entered the real estate business in 1920. From the late 1920s through the 1940s Hoyt was an administrator of three oil drilling and refining companies. He died in 1950. Until Effa’s death on April 8, 1977, Sanderson’s descendants lived here almost continuously.