Orvil J. Ayrs House, 320 M.A.C. Ave. (1915)

O. J. Ayrs House, November 2003. Photo Credit: Kevin S. Forsyth.

O. J. Ayrs was a local developer, an Alderman (council member) of the City during the 1920s and a board member of the East Lansing State Bank. He served as Grand Master of the nearby Masonic Lodge in 1938. Ayrs was a “master carpenter and plumber and worked personally on every house built under his name. These houses were—and are—all wood frame, modest by today’s standards, but fine family houses with oak flooring, tall gables, and clapboard or shingle siding. In the late 1920s the claim was made that O. J. Ayrs had built half of the young city.”[Kestenbaum, p. 25] Several anecdotes about this eccentric but kind-hearted man appear in At the Campus Gate.