“Looking for Mrs. Boizard”

By Barb Kelly
Sun contributor
Grace Dickinson Johnson, Joanne Rettke and Barb Kelly paid a visit in June to the late Mrs. E.M. Boizard (1828-1911), formerly of Miller Hill. All admired the lovely wild roses that grow plentifully in Mrs. Boizard’s garden, as well as the fruit trees that pay homage to this resourceful woman who moved to Glen Arbor in 1863, with her daughter, Marietta, in tow.
I have been looking for Mrs. Boizard since I read the treasure of a book, The Boizard Letters: Letters From A Pioneer Homestead, edited by Julia Terry Dickinson and Jo Bolton, with illustrations by Grace Dickinson Johnson (I purchased my copy at The Cottage Book Shop). Searching for Mrs. Boizard morphed over the years from a casual pastime to a Holy Grail kind of mission, and I would spend big chunks of my precious two-week vacation in Glen Arbor each year traipsing around the Tucker Lake and Miller Hill area described in the book as the site of her old log cabin, looking for signs of her. I was spurred on by the fact that Julia Dickinson states in the book that she and her daughter, Grace, actually found the place. The book contains simple, stunning illustrations by Grace to prove it. This was real motivation. For years, though, I only saw a lot of trees, a lot of swamp and a lot of mosquitoes. Nevertheless I persevered.

During my explorations I stumbled across many signs of the early White pioneers’ life in the Glen Arbor area, but I often didn’t know what I was looking at. Also, I was so obsessed with finding Mrs. Boizard that everything I came across became something owned or used by her, in my fertile, Irish imagination. A large, rusted, complicated machine with gears and wheels, which had come to a halt just south of Tucker Lake, came to be, in my mind, “Mrs. Boizard’s logging machine.” But I’m from the big city, so who knows? It could just as well been Mrs. Boizard’s egg-sorter, or Mrs. Boizard’s cat-herder. The exciting thing was that everything came to be a sign of Mrs. Boizard’s presence. A beer bottle? “Mrs. Boizard’s beer bottle” (a real find, since she signed a temperance pledge on May 1, 1878, according to the book). A rusted bucket? “Mrs. Boizard’s berry-picking bucket” or more likely what she used to carry those empties deep into the woods to hide them.
An exciting find last year was “Mrs. Boizard’s shovel.” Just off a nearby local road there is a huge tree that has grown around a shovel so that the shovel is impossible to budge. It rests not just against the tree, but into the tree so that handle and spade both are encased in the tree’s enveloping bark. Some long-ago slacker set that shovel against the tree and blew off his chores for, say, 30 years. Now he has the perfect excuse: “Dude, the tree ate my shovel! Guess I don’t have to dig that hole after all.”
Or here’s another explanation for the “tree that ate the shovel”: In a letter to her husband, left behind in Chicago to earn a living, Mrs. Boizard writes, “If you possibly can send me a Shovel like the one I had, but I don’t care about it being so large. When we went to Chicago we let Mr. Tucker have one, our other one. There are none in the place. (April 14th, 1870).
Well, yes there are, Mrs. B. Just check out the tree where “Mr. Tucker” left that other shovel of yours. Oops, too late.
Along the way, I found other signs of the pioneers to this area. Hidden in plain view is a Fisher family tombstone, along with three graves eerily sunken into the sandy soil. John Fisher was — guess what? — Mrs. Boizard’s landlord. Really.
So, finding the site of her nineteenth century log cabin last month, deep in the mosquito-infested woods at the base of Miller Hill, was the crowning event of years of looking for Mrs. Boizard. While during all my previous traipsing and tromping, my heart would quicken at every imagined symmetrical rise of land or, alternatively, every indentation that could possibly have been Mrs. Boizard’s root cellar or cistern, there was nothing subtle or imagined about this site: a four-square rise of land that once held high her log cabin (140 years ago), along with the adjacent clearing so often described in Mrs. B’s letters to her husband, where she raised potatoes and squash, lima beans and cucumbers, greens and beans, and where her pig wandered, her chickens pecked, and her dogs romped. Be still my joyful heart.
The letters that launched my search — letters back and forth from Mrs. to Mr. Boizard from Glen Arbor to Chicago — and how they came to be found, is another amazing story in itself and one I’ll briefly tell here, but you can read more about it in the book. The old Westcott home behind the Glen Arbor Township Hall was being torn down. Most of the furniture had been hauled off and whoever did so dumped the contents of the drawers everywhere. Well, Julia Dickinson and Jo Bolton, intrepid anthropologists that they were — that’s my word: Grace’s word for them is “junk diggers” (same thing as far as I’m concerned) — scooped up what turned out to be an amazing cache of letters from the nineteenth century, some with very familiar names like “Fisher” and “Tucker” and “Westcott”, and others with unfamiliar names — like “Boizard.” Julia Dickinson painstakingly transcribed each and every one of these faded letters with their flowery script; Jo, Grace and she arranged each one in chronological order; and Grace created illustrations that illuminate and amplify the content and narrative flow of the letters (it was published in 1993 by the Empire Heritage Group). This book not only sent me on a wonderful adventure, it also brought me into contact with many who are the current chroniclers, story-tellers, memory-keepers, archivists and lovers of this Land of Leelanau and its compelling lore. These people are the worthy descendents of Mrs. Eleanor Magill Boizard, letter-writer and Glen Arbor pioneer.