Martin Luther Sweet/The Sweet House

This Italianate house was constructed in the early 1860s by local builder Reuben Wheeler for Martin Sweet (1819-1905), his wife Desdemona (1817-1890), and their three children. Sweet came to Grand Rapids in 1846. Soon he owned nineteen businesses and became one of the wealthiest men in Grand Rapids. In 1861 the M. L. Sweet and Company Exchange Bank merged with First National Bank, which eventually became Fifth Third Bank. In 1868 he opened Sweet’s Hotel at the site that later became the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. He owned a grain elevator, a railroad, three farms, three furniture companies, two gravel companies, and a plank road company. Sweet served on city and county boards for twenty years and became the first Republican mayor of Grand Rapids in 1860. He died in this house on his eighty-sixth birthday. The Sweet House Businessman Martin Sweet willed this house to his second wife, Emma, who gave it to her children in 1913. Frank and Clara Davis leased the house from 1911 to 1919. Clara, one of the founders of the St. Cecilia Music Society, arranged to have renowned concert pianist Ottokar Malek (1875-1923) run the Malek School of Music out of the house from 1914 to 1919. Malek became the conductor of the Grand Rapids Civic Orchestra, which became the Grand Rapids Symphony in 1924. Between 1919 and 1927, the house served as a boardinghouse. The Women’s City Club of Grand Rapids purchased it for use as a clubhouse in 1927, making extensive renovations, including adding the west wing. The Women’s City Club established the Sweet House Foundation to preserve, operate, and maintain the house for the public in 2005.