The Sleeping Bear Dunes are alive in many ways — in folklore and legend, in plant and animal life, and, beginning in the late 1990s, with music. The first of many mid-July concerts staged at the Dune Climb took place on July 19, 1998. The idea was spawned by Crispin Campbell, cellist and Interlochen Arts Academy instructor since 1980.
Aral was a logging settlement with a colorful history, largely because it witnessed one of the area’s few pioneer shootouts. Aral is located four miles south of Empire at the end of Esch Road, where Otter Creek empties into Lake Michigan. Today it’s one of the most popular swimming beaches in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and offers few signs of its colorful past, when Aral was a thriving wooding town.
This is the first in a series of articles prompted by the centennial celebration of the founding of the National Park Service. Throughout 2015, the Glen Arbor Sun will publish a range of stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and people’s relationships with their local park.
A new National Park Service report shows that 1,395,400 visitors to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in 2014 spent $144.7 million in communities near the park. That spending supported 2,309 jobs in the local area and had a cumulative benefit to the local economy of $181.7 million.
The Glen Lake Library in Empire will host a presentation by Amanda Wetzel of the Grand Traverse Lighthouse Museum on Tuesday, March 31, at 7 p.m., at the Empire Township Hall. Wetzel will discuss the history of two aircraft carriers that served on Lake Michigan between 1943 and 1945, providing critical training for thousands of World War II pilots, including future president George H. W. Bush.
I wanted to have African-American relatives long before I learned that, through marriage, I did. It just made sense to me that with the Stocking family in America for almost 400 years that sometime, somewhere, somehow, we had married people who were black.
Burdickville historian Tom Van Zoeren reports that Dottie Lanham passed away on December 30 — five days after her 90th birthday. She was born on Christmas Day in 1924. Van Zoeren penned the book Dottie Lanham of Burdickville: Images, Recollections, and Observations of a Northern Michigan Woman and Her Community.
Cherry Republic employee Andrew Moore found more than radiant fall colors and beachgrass on a walk in the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes earlier this fall. He came across shards of clay that appear to be specimens of Native American pottery from long before the white man landed in the Americas.
On her way to work one morning this past summer, Kama Ross noticed some sick-looking oak trees near a recently cleared right-of-way in Bingham County. Luckily, Ross knew what she was looking at: the first confirmed case of oak wilt disease in Leelanau County.
It is apple season and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore will host an Antique Apples Special Program on October 18 from noon to 3 p.m. in the Port Oneida Rural Historic District. Park Rangers and volunteer experts will be on hand for this apple bonanza. Apples played a big role in Port Oneida during its peak and the apple pickers of today still realize their value. Some of the topics that will be presented at this program include: 1) identifying varieties of apples in the park, 2) understanding why early Port Oneida settlers planted them and how they were used, and 3) discussing and demonstrating grafting techniques being used in the park to ensure rare and antique apple varieties remain in the park for years to come.