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Jessamine Street Lots

Chadwick & Clarke Lots page from the past

Jessamine St. Ten lots now all owned by David Chadwick as of 2018. Purchased for $1500, bringing to a close a business that was founded in the forties by my father Kelroy Chadwick and Walter Clarke. This is one of the only investments of my life other than in my own mad schemes and projects.

These lots were the last scraps owned by Chadwick and Clarke, acquired by my father and Walter Clarke in a bundled purchase of property that the city sold in auction. They were after other lots in that sale. For many decades - maybe 5 or 6 they sat there. Johnny and Ray Clarke wanted to give them away or stop paying the tiny tax on them so the city would take them and then later give them to me for getting the Harvey Street ones sold once I'd done taken care of that. Our CPA said that would be complicated. We almost sold them for a nominal amount to a Catholic mendicant order that had to be in the poorest part of town but they found something else. Mother would get upset when I asked her about them and I think this was because she knew she, Johnny, and Ray had just ignored them. She was writing checks up to seven times a year for them to be mowed and they weren't being mowed. I figured after lengthy calculations that B&F Mowing charged us about $2000 for work not done on those lots. They couldn't be mowed. Harvey Street lots were full of cement and dumped stuff and the Jessamine were super overgrown. Warren Lynn and I looked at city maps, walked the lots, measured them (see my experience with that). He met with the owner to see where he'd been mowing and he showed a lot next door and when Warren said that's not the right lot he said Well I couldn't get over there. I checked with the nearby owner of the lot who was clearly not too interested in talking to a white person (though his friend on the porch and I had a nice conversation and when he asked if I could spare some change for cigs I gave him a five. The owner came out and said he mowed them himself and no one else did. B&F mowed our lots for many years and they did so some which needed it but not that often. I found out who owned nearby lots and went around the neighborhood asking what people had seen including going to a nearby church on Sunday - and ended up selling the two Harvey lots to a neat guy with a nearby stables. As soon as mother was too gone to deal with it, I canceled with the owner of B&F Mowing who tried to scare me from doing so saying we'd get a huge fine if they're not mowed. Well, that's not what happens - first you get a warning. I knew how much they needed it. I've mowed big fields in California to the satisfaction of the fire departments - once a year that's all they need. Maybe twice if weather conditions call for it. But with our lots no one was paying attention so we got taken advantage of. I do remember my discussions of the phone with the owner of B&F Mowing. He'd start out by saying how much he loved my mother and was always happy to see her at Colonial Country Club. Warren talked to him about refunding the money he'd received for mowing when he didn't mow and he said, "Not gonna happen." Met with sister Susan, lawyer friends Steve Smith and Jackie Cox to talk about it - maybe small claims court - and realized it wasn't worth trying anything.

Total acreage: .9047

Total sq.ft:  39,415

They were listed thus:

Kelroy Chadwick - 2

Blk 24 Lots 6 & 7

Ahdel Chadwick - 9

Blk 12 Lts 14, 16 Thru 22

Land Acres - 0.5739

Land SqFt - 24,999

Land Acres - 0.1619

Land SqFt - 7,055

Land Acres - 0.1689

Land SqFt - 7,361

Kelroy Chadwick lots could not be found by searching for his name, only by street name.

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DC lots to the right of where Jessamine makes a right angle turn to the south.

DC lots above the public apartments in the bottom right corner. I think looking from the east

DC lots from the other side close up - maybe looking from the west