Glen Noonan: for the Love of the Land

By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor

With a face as weathered as one of the boulders from his fields, and a blunt demeanor to match, Glen Noonan presents a formidable figure in the complex social and geographical landscapes of Leelanau County. This farmer, businessman, political fixture and quiet benefactor to many has plowed his fields, herded cattle, shaken cherries and picked apples, mined gravel, raised seven children with his late wife Ella, been the backbone of some key local government boards, and helped shape virtually every realm of life for the region’s residents for over six decades.

Broach any subject dear to a county resident — be it property taxes, winter road conditions, Governor Snyder’s emergency manager law, sprawl on M-72, cherry blossoms, the future of farming, Leelanau’s natural beauty — all roads (graveled and paved, of course) seem to lead back to Noonan. He’s a curious blend: old-fashioned individualism and forward-thinking community planning. A Republican who admired Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts during the Great Depression. A supporter of individual property rights, yet a stalwart defender of local government’s denial of land uses for some. A rugged individualist who passes on his good fortune through charitable groups like the Cedar-Maple City Lions Club, the Empire Masonic Lodge and the Prospectors Club.

The youngest son of 11 children, Noonan was born on the land around quiet Polack Lake, tucked along M-72’s broad curve from west to north, near the intersection with County Road 669 (Coleman Rd). “I had an uncle that had a shanty there. My grandpa Ashmore [his mother Lulu was from Union City, Mich., and his father Charles came from Pennsylvania around 1915] helped my dad build a house there, with a later addition put on the south end.” The house still stands on Coleman Rd, flanked by rows of gnarled apple trees he planted after he later bought the property.

His mother died of cancer there in 1934, when he was only seven, and his father remarried two years later. Young Glen attended the one-room Armstrong School for his elementary education, then transferred to Empire’s rural agricultural high school. He remembers raising three pigs on school property to help fund a field trip to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry one year.

“At that time, you had to pay tuition, if you didn’t live in the district. I stayed with one family for three years, and worked for the lady of the house. Then in 1942, I stayed with another family, did work for the farmer for my room and board.” Clearly, education was important to him, and he retains a lifelong love of history and other subjects.

When the war came, he tried to enlist in the military, but a maimed hand from a childhood mishap excluded his acceptance. “Finally I read where they wanted people in the Merchant Marines, so I went down to Detroit and enlisted. They were a pretty tough bunch … I went to Odessa, which had been captured by the Germans and then retaken by the Russians, a pretty desolate place. [In spite of his hand], I handled more ropes and lines than most of them in the Navy. I was in the last convoy that went across; about this time we heard that Roosevelt had died, and Truman had taken over.”

He notes, “Roosevelt was probably one of our greater presidents; he’s the one that promoted a lot of the activities that put people to work, where people actually worked for what they got. Roosevelt was one of the better-liked Democrats — if you talk to a Republican, they may not agree — but he’d done an awful lot for the country, at a time when we were in pretty desperate straits. Here, they had ‘barberry gangs’: they put people to work taking these bad shrubs out of the woods, and they were paid a certain amount,” an early form of invasive species control that also taught work skills, reminiscent of today’s non-profit group SEEDS’ youth programs.

After the war ended, he returned to the county to do some cattle farming, but the pasture he was using was eventually bought by someone else. He recalls, “Two days later, I was gone, which probably was very good for me in the end. I had a ’41 Ford, which was all paid for, had a friend, Maurice Fritz, and asked him if he wanted to go out West.”

He continues, “Had an uncle in Nebraska; we cut potatoes for a few days, then to Kansas for the wheat harvest, but we were too early.” Eventually the pair found themselves in Oregon, working for a sugar beet farmer. After a year, Fritz returned to Michigan, and Noonan stayed on. There he met his future wife Ella Montgomery, a former schoolteacher from Nebraska who had come to stay with relatives.

“It was 1947. Vale, Oregon — I met her at a dance, and I took her home to where she was staying with friends. When she let me kiss her goodnight — that was the end for me.” At the end of 1948, the young couple, along with their newborn son Robert, loaded up their ’43 Chevrolet pickup and drove back to Leelanau. They arrived on New Year’s Eve to the 80-acre family farm that he had purchased from his father. “A table and a three-legged chair, that’s all that was left. We didn’t have much.”

With his typical determination and a canny knack for seeing opportunities that others overlooked, he began to stitch together the lands he’d known and loved from childhood. “In ’53 I bought the farm where the gravel pit is now — Kasson Sand and Gravel. I was milking cows at that time. A guy named Mr. Hoedli that was the head of the Farmers Home Administration was the one that talked me into buying it from the federal land bank [the previous owner had defaulted and walked away, owing $6,000]. That FHA was a very good program. People told me I was crazy ‘cause it was the stoniest piece of ground in the county! The kids used to pick up stones; I don’t know how many piles was on that property.

Kasson Township’s abundance of stone was left by an ancient glacier, and while it made a lean farmer’s harvest, offered rich potential for a growing postwar economy that needed construction materials. In 1961, he met Max Wysong, “the man who had the biggest impact on me. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in leasing my land for the production of gravel — so we shook hands on it that night. Later we had a contract: a hundred-year lease on the property.” Eventually, Noonan got a $1 million loan to buy back the lease and reclaim his land. The largest private landowner in Leelanau County, at one time he had over 3,000 acres.

Other ventures included buying the Maple Tavern in Maple City (which later burned down), getting into the landfill business in the 1960s, and becoming a landlord of houses that stood on properties he acquired. He also bought the old red school house in Maple City that is now a restaurant, sports bar and fitness gym. Many of his farms have passed to family members, and the landfill was sold some years ago to a national company. Yet he still rises early, eats breakfast at 3:30 a.m., meets with one or more of his children around 7 a.m., and frequently goes across the road to visit his beloved Polack Lake. After 43 years on the County Road Commission board, he’s running for re-election, and recently started a family funded tree-planting project for county roads, to replace aging and damaged sugar maples.

He is adamant about the need to keep government local; the word “control” pops up regularly in his discussions. About the emergency manager law, “I think the governor could stay the hell out of my business! This started to impact different people the wrong way. I think he had good intentions, but he wasn’t in touch with the people.”

He has served on the Road Commission since 1971, and says, “I like to be involved … I probably know more about stone, and where deposits are, than anyone else in the county.” He continues, “Growth is gonna lead to development one way or the other, as long as it’s zoned appropriately. When the national park come in here, it changed a lot in this area. More opportunities for people to work, no question.”

If he could turn back the clock 50 years, he’d dial down some of the zoning regulations that hamper or disallow some small businesses — an amazing revelation when considering that at least two of his sons and a daughter-in-law are quite active members of Kasson Township’s governing board. In particular, a long-running dispute between the township and a property owner who wanted to rezone her land for gravel mining went all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court, culminating in a 2011 victory for the township. But, he’s quick to add, “It’s a very important factor to keep everything stable.” The close weave of a small, rural community becomes apparent in the complexity of the case; at one point, three of the board members (two were Noonan family members) had to abstain from voting on the zoning change, being owners or beneficiaries of existing gravel companies in the township, and the two remaining members could not form a quorum.

He goes on, “Farming is one of those enterprises that are encourage. Most people want to see it, because it lends to the beauty and value of the rest of the county. Most zoning — you’ve gotta have 10 acres [for agricultural zones]; it’s pretty hard for some of these young people to buy. Acreage takes a lot of money, then to build a house on it, or get something started …

Nevertheless, “Farming is still viable, mainly through the fruit industry. You’ve gotta have something that’s gonna bring more income than just general farming. The corn and the cattle, you can’t do it — gotta have something else to subsidize it. I’ve got 600 Holsteins. The price is going up a little, but replacements — feed and so on — have also been going up. You get up to $8 corn [per bushel], you’re gonna see more grassfed, no question.

“The cherry industry has changed the county considerably. The boys [his sons] have got several hundred acres now of tart cherries — this year, there weren’t any, but we’ve seen drought conditions before, in the ’30s. The cherry industry and growth of new products is really what’s bringing it on bigger and harder.” About grapes, “You’ve gotta have the right slope for grapes, and so on; I think I’ll stick to cherries.”

Why does he care so much about the land? The businessman states with a grin, “One thing, they don’t make more land. I could see the value of the land was gonna go up, and it has.” But Noonan’s emotional connection goes hand in hand with his considerable financial acumen. He recently placed two parcels in southern Leelanau, totaling 506 acres, in the Leelanau Conservancy’s conservation program. The family retains some control, while ceding development rights. The 200 acres in Empire Twp includes a rare, 100-foot-deep “kettle hole” that was created by retreating glacier ice, mature hardwood forest, and 700 feet of frontage of Hatlem Creek, which supports the rare monkey flower plant. His goal for his old home place in Kasson Twp, totaling 306 acres, is “to see Polack Lake like it is, like Mother Nature made it, so it’ll be protected forever.” His favorite place in the county is here, he says simply: “Home.”