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Show Small Town Bank Closes; Wouldn't Yield to State PORT HOPE, Mich. Miss Lydia A. Welsch, the woman banker of the village of Port Hope, is busy liquidating the privately owned Citizens Citi-zens bank rather than accept a state charter and submit to government gov-ernment regulation. The bank had 392 depositors with deposits of $497,000. The decision to liquidate leaves only 11 private banks in the state of Michigan. The Port Hope bankers, bank-ers, including a retired farmer and the retired postmaster of the village, vil-lage, faced the issue of accepting a charter when the Commercial Bank of West Branch collapsed a few weeks before. As a result of the Commercial Bank crash, the state banking commissioner com-missioner urged the owners of the surviving private banks to apply for charters. Without a state or federal fed-eral charter no bank can get federal fed-eral deposit insurance. The commissioner said Miss Welsch could easily have qualified for a state charter without changing chang-ing her banking methods. "The liquid condition of the Port Hope bank is astonishing," he said. "If I had to pick the state's most successful suc-cessful banker, the honor would go to Miss Welsch." Of the other private banks in Michigan, all but one has agreed to apply for a charter. The dissenter, dis-senter, who plans to go on doing business as he has for years, is S. W. Varty of Rhodes. The village now has less than a dozen buildings, but was once a thriving lumber town. |