Mark your calendar for the 2017 Port Oneida Fair at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore where history comes alive at six historic sites. Friday and Saturday, Aug. 11-12, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Port Oneida becomes a lively fun-filled location once again. This two-day event includes rural history demonstrations, activities, and special events each day. The event will end Saturday night with solar viewing and an astronomy party.
Tom and Phyl Davis have been part of the Glen Lake community since the 1950s. It started with a cottage on Big Glen Lake. Each year the then young family spent summer vacations in a rented cottage that was part of Peppler Glen View Resort near Old Settlers Picnic Grounds. Their three boys learned how to sail and waterski, honed their swimming skills, and fished to enjoy occasional family fish fries featuring the day’s catch.
I heat with wood. Most of us up here do. Wood is still cheaper than any other fuel, and it’s available. Some of us cut our own wood, but to do that you have to have a woodlot, a truck, a saw in good condition, and time. My husband and I cut our own wood one winter, but in retrospect it seems like that’s all we did.
Photos courtesy of Empire Area Museum By Linda Alice Dewey Sun contributor Part of our series on prominent but derelict or vacant buildings in our region. If you were around this area in the late 1960s, ’70s or ’80s, you might remember the old Ace hardware store located at the end of Front Street, adjacent […]
An Empire real estate development firm has cleared the first hurdle in developing a vacant three-acre strip of properties at the end of Lake Street. The complex would include the old Salisbury/Ace hardware store, the white house just south of it, the livery barn on the corner of Lake and Niagara, a house across Niagara Street to the north, and a quarter mile strip of land along South Bar Lake.
Empire holds its 40th Anchor Day Festival on Saturday, July 15, with a parade, a street dance, a fun run, a quilt show, a movie and a chicken dinner.
North Manitou Light Keepers (NMLK), a Michigan nonprofit organization, announces that its acquisition of the North Manitou Shoal Light (also known in its local area as “The Crib”) is complete and its restoration of the lighthouse starts now. NMLK plans to fully restore the lighthouse and make it available to the public for tours and appreciation by July 4, 2021. The organization also invites fellow enthusiasts to become members of the NMLK team and help restore the lighthouse by contributing to the “Campaign for the Crib!”
Ruby John, 26, is a jewel of a girl. Her name fits her. She’s also a gifted and versatile fiddler. One balmy Friday evening in mid-June she’s entertaining families at the Little Traverse Inn, fiddling in the Ruby Sky Band with some of her friends: Dane Hyde, who sings and plays guitar; Katie O’Conner, a singer and Irish dancer; and John Driscoll, a flautist and singer. The next week she’ll play for a staff dance at the Interlochen Arts Academy’s opening of summer camp. And after that, Saturday July 15, from 7 p.m.-1 a.m., Tucker’s in Northport. She’s known for playing a Métis-style of fiddle as well as Celtic, and standard country-and-mountain-style.
University of Michigan professor, Phil Deloria, will speak on the topic “American Indian History 101: Constitutions, Treaties, Laws, Courts, Empires, Slaves, Automobiles, and a Few Other Things Besides” on Thursday, July 6 at the Leelanau Historical Society in downtown Leland. A reception with wine and appetizers will begin at 7 p.m. and the talk will start at 7:30. Suggested donation of $5 per person.
One of the most puzzling marriages in Michigan history, perhaps in American history, has to have been that between Henry Schoolcraft and his Native American wife, Jane. Henry, whose name now graces roads, schools, and counties in Michigan, was an explorer who worked for the United States Department of War. He was the Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie from 1823 to 1833. Jane was the daughter of an aristocratic Irish fur trader, John Johnston, and his wife, Ozhaw-Guscoday-Wayquay, daughter of a powerful Chippewa chief.