More “Looking for the Boizards”
By Barbara Kelly
Sun contributor
All the hot weather we’ve had led me to re-read the 19th century Boizard letters written during the winter time in Glen Arbor. Exploring how some early white settlers got through the cold, snowy winters here offered an instructive perspective on the heat. I also wanted to continue to mine the letters for references to the Civil War, as the Boizard letters offer many informative first-hand descriptions. How did people deal with Glen Arbor winters in the 1860s? What was it like to be without a steady source of affordable groceries and supplies for up to half a year, particularly when it was bitterly cold with high snow? Is this how the phrase, “cabin fever” came to be?
I focused on the letters from the winter months of the 1860s that J. Oliver Boizard, Eleanor Boizard and their daughter, Marietta, wrote back and forth while Oliver was stationed in Chicago and Eleanor and Marietta were settling into Glen Arbor. These letters were kept, treasured and preserved by the Boizard family and their descendants, and then much later found and published. The Boizard letters offer a unique window into life in early Glen Arbor. At the same time, these letters open out to the larger world, including national events of the period. As we mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War we are very fortunate that the Boizard letters begin in the run-up to the war and continue through the 1870s, with many references to the war as well as to the quality of life in Glen Arbor soon after the town was established in 1856.
I began with the letters from November 1864, which was Eleanor and Marietta’s first winter in Glen Arbor. Eleanor was 36 years old at the time and Marietta was 12. In a letter dated November 11, just after she told her dad, “don’t be frightened because we [ask] for so much as we can’t get anything more until the first of May [six months later],” Marietta wrote, “Now for the village news. They have been drafting. Dorsey is drafted and Parker and I don’t know how many more. They have to go to Traverse [City] on the 16th.” According to the Historical Times Encyclopedia of the Civil War, “Under the Union draft act men faced the possibility of conscription in July 1863 and in March, July, and December, 1864.” It is probable that these Glen Arbor men, who were being drafted in November, as reported by Marietta Boizard, may have been included in that December, 1864 conscription.
As winters go in Glen Arbor, the winter of 1864-65 apparently was a mild one. On Dec. 14, 1864, reporting on their new house in the woods, Marietta Boizard wrote to her father: “Dear Papa, There is about one foot of snow. You asked if the snow blew in the house. It don’t and the house is quite comfortable considering as there is no carpet on the floor.” A few months later, on Feb. 2, 1865, she wrote, “I go to school and the weather is very mild.” That same week in February 1865, Oliver vividly wrote to his wife about the possible end of the war, which finally came about two months later with General Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865. Oliver wrote, “There are negotiations now for peace and it is hoped that it will be satisfactory. General Sherman is moving on to Charleston, S.C., and likely there will be heavy fighting in the course of [the next] two weeks. General Lee is still [in] Richmond and Grant is watching him.”
The next mention in a Boizard letter to national events is not to the surrender of Lee’s army to Ulysses Grant but to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, which occurred a mere five days after Confederacy surrender. Great Lakes shipping had just opened again after the winter and Oliver Boizard included a letter to his wife, dated April 16, 1865, along with much needed supplies of flour and a large box of groceries, all taken by boat to one of the Glen Arbor docks. He called the news of the assassination “deplorable,” and informed Eleanor that “the whole country is placed in Solemnity.” All the buildings in Chicago were “decorated in black crepe.”
Their next winter — that of 1865-66 — was much rougher than the previous one and the Glen Arbor Boizards often expressed their intense loneliness to Oliver. On Dec. 29, 1865, Eleanor and Marietta wrote, “We never spent such a poor Christmas as this Christmas was.” Toward the end of the next month, on Jan. 26, 1866, Marietta told her dad, “The weather is very cold and the snow is so deep it covers a barrel standing on end. It is very lonesome here. I have not been out since New Years’ and I hardly ever see anyone this winter.” By the next March (1866), they wrote again, “It is dreadfully lonesome. If it were not for a party occasionally we would not know what to do.”
Perhaps all this isolation and loneliness took their toll. Eleanor and Marietta spent the winter of 1867 with Oliver in Chicago. This separation from their Glen Arbor friends occasions some wonderful letters between Marietta and her boyfriend and future husband, Charles A. Fisher, son of the founders of Glen Arbor, John and Harriet. It is to these letters that we will turn in our next installment in this series of Looking for The Boizards.
Read more installments of Barbara Kelly’s series on the Boizards online here.
