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The collection documents the history of Saint Charles, Michigan, the Bad and Shiawassee rivers, canals, steamboats, sawmills, public waterways and routes, coal mines, river restoration, and the Greve family.

This is an excellent local history collection of Saint Charles, Michigan, 1800-2011, collected, researched and created by a local historian and researcher, Dale Greve, from 1980 through 2011. The collection documents the history of Saint Charles, Michigan, the Bad and Shiawassee rivers, canals, steamboats, sawmills, public waterways and routes, coal mines, river restoration, and the Greve family in research notes, scrapbooks, maps, reminiscences, photographs, newspaper clippings, reel-to-reel tapes, videos, archaeological surveys and studies, articles, and mitigation plans and project reports.

The collection is organized first by size with oversized materials placed at the end of the finding aid. Letter-size materials are in Boxes 1-23 and legal-sized materials are in boxes 24-27 and 29.Boxes 1-18 are each cubic foot boxes, 19-28 are .5 cubic foot and Box 29 is .25 cubic foot.

After size, the collection is organized by topic and format, and then alphabetically. Boxes 1-18 consist of materials previously in binders, documenting Saint Charles, the Bad and Shiawassee rivers route, canals, steamboats, and sawmills. Boxes 19-22 document the river route from Saginaw to Saint Charles, canals, coal mines, the Bad and Shiawassee rivers, the Greve family, houseboats, motor boating, fishing, the Saginaw Valley waterways, and river and steamboats charts, graphs, and history documented in a variety of formats. Box 23 consists mostly of river studies. Box 24 consists mostly of Greve’s original notes on his research. Boxes 25-26 include most of the Saint Charles history photographs, although some are found also in Box 19. Boxes 26-27 consist mostly of reminiscences on reel-to-reel tapes and videos.

The oversized Saint Charles materials include a volume on the Coal Mine Era in Saint Charles. The first two oversized folders include folder 1) mostly oversized photographs and other oversized related materials; and folder 2) mostly oversized maps and related materials.

2021 Addition: In 2021, boxes 28-29 and four oversized folders were added to the collection. These materials are arranged alphabetically. Box 28 contains St. Charles materials gathered by Dale Greve, including: interviews, maps, certificates, research notes, articles, a report, and a CD, Up River from Saginaw to St. Charles, a forgotten history, 2019. The majority of the collection is a gathered history report of St. Charles, 1822-2020. Additionally, there is a detailed report of the history of coal mines in St. Charles with location, details, and images of almost all the coal mines there. There are two typed transcriptions of 1982 oral history interviews of Aldo Hulien (1905-1986), probably conducted by Dale, and of Jeannette Mason (1890-1986), conducted by Aldo’s wife, Lillian Hulien (1907-1995), who adds her memories. (Their vital statistic dates from Social Security Death Index.)The interviewees tell their story and experience of what it was like living in St. Charles. There are no permission/release forms for these interviews in the collection. There are also maps and research notes composed by Greve of the Bad and Shiawassee Rivers.

Box 29 has legal-sized materials that include Abstracts, a letter, a list, and a story. The letter was written by Dale Greve and sent to Bob Przybyzski. The letter outlines all of Greve’s research on St. Charles mines, and his offer to help Przybyzski if he ever needed it (see Letter to Bob Przybyzski, 2017). The list is items compiled by Greve that were lost from the past and present in St. Charles (See Items Lost to the Village of St. Charles, Past and Present, 016). The story is nine pages long and is about the life of a St. Charles coal miner in 1929 (see St. Charles Coal miner’s life, 1929).

The four oversized folders, #3-6, include St. Charles architecture blueprints, maps, abstracts, a certificate, a graph, and a panorama. Folder 3) is a Certificate of First-Aid Training by the Bureau of mines for Charles Krause. Folder 4) has two blueprints, one of an engineer’s office from a mine and the other being the complete 1946 St. Charles sewer system. Folder 5) has a panoramic picture of Shiawassee Lake, a chronological timeline of St. Charles coal mines, and abstracts. Folder 6) has a map of the Bad and Shiawassee rivers routes and park plan for St. Charles.

The David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography consists of over 120,000 images in a variety of formats including daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cabinet photographs, real photo postcards, stereographs, and mounted and unmounted paper prints. The collection is primarily made up of vernacular photographs of everyday life in Michigan taken by both professional and amateur photographers from the 1840s into the mid-twentieth century. In addition to supporting local history research, the collection has resources for the study of specific events and subjects. Included are images related to lumbering, mining, suburbanization; the industrialization of cities; travel and transportation; the impact of the automobile; the rise of middle-class leisure society; fashion and dress; ethnicity and race; the role of fraternal organizations in society; and the participation of photographers in business, domestic, and social life. The collection is only partially open for research.

The subject contents of different photographic format series within the Tinder collection vary, depending in part upon how each format was historically used, and the date range of that format's popularity. For example, cartes de visite and cased images are most often formal studio portraits, while stereographs are likely to be outdoor views. Cabinet photographs are frequently portraits, but often composed with less formality than the cartes de visite and cased images. The postcards and the mounted prints contain very diverse subjects. The photographers' file contains many important and rare images of photographers, their galleries, promotional images, and the activities of photographers in the field. See individual series descriptions in the Contents List below for more specific details.

Included throughout are images by both professional and amateur photographers, although those by professionals are extant in far greater numbers.