[The Morrice depot mysteriously burned. The nearby village of
Perry petitioned
to have the trains stop there, instead.] ...In a compromise
solution, the railroad
agreed to stop only at the village which could erect a depot
first. The race was
on.
The popular story goes that both towns were looking over the
same piece of timber,
which belonged to a man from Perry; Morrice offered the highest price, and
he sold. People of Perry were furious, and one morning, the residents
of Morrice woke up to find their new pile of lumber over in Perry. With this
stolen lumber, citizens of Perry worked in shifts, around the clock, to get a
depot built. They finished late on the seventh
night. According to legend,
Perry held a gala celebration, and by the wee hours, the whole town was reeling.
When the bedraggled inhabitants began to sober up, about noon the next day,
they learned that railroad officials had already inspected and approved
their handiwork--but the building happened to be standing in Morrice at
the time.
Dr. Halsted, who actually witnessed the theft of the lumber,
referred to the
building stolen back as a section house (or repairmen's
dormitory). Though no
separate building is known, it is possible that two stories have
merged, and that the
Morrice depot was honestly built faster than Perry's. Unaware
of the colorful
history, railroad officials demolished the old Morrice depot without warning
one day in 1974....
To keep a favorite teacher (and former graduate) who had
recently married,
the school board offered the superintendency in 1920 to her husband. People of
Morrice first knew Claud J. Shufelt (1893-1964) as “Miss
Cohoon’s husband.”
When he finally stepped down in 1951 to continue his career at the county
level, he left a school that had become a model for vocational
education. In
addition to the traditional college-preparatory curriculum, he
introduced full programs
in shop (1921), home economics (1921), agriculture (1923), and business
(1937). The high school orchestra also began in
1921. In 1936, the University
of Michigan rated Morrice High School as one of the two outstanding schools in
the state with a practical modern curriculum.... Mrs. S. A.
Shufelt started a
school hot lunch program in 1923--long before other schools had anything
like it. Girls in her Home Economics class fed over 100
students at an average
cost of 35¢ a week....