National Park to spruce up Port Oneida

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
At long last, the check is on its way. After waiting for over a decade the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (our local branch of the National Park Service) will finally get funds of $1.1 million from Washington to restore, rehabilitate and promote the Port Oneida rural historic district, located four miles north of Glen Arbor off M-22.

Sometime after the construction actually begins in 2011 the Lakeshore will erect, or convert one of Port Oneida’s existing barns into, a visitor contact station kiosk that welcomes folks, either as they approach the historic district from M-22 or after they turn west onto Port Oneida Road. Several smaller parking lots may be built, or the Lakeshore may confine all cars to one larger lot, to accommodate the flow of visitors, which will inevitably increase as more money is pumped into Port Oneida. In addition, the Lakeshore will restore 12 of the 22 structures in the district (the Park owns 20 of them) and utilize one of the old farms for staff housing while attempting to also preserve their historical legacy.
Local concern at two public meetings at the old Port Oneida schoolhouse in early May focused on whether opening up Port Oneida to more tourism might overwhelm the cherished district, or at least the unique experience of a day walking in its pastoral beauty, largely untouched by the traffic and development we’ve seen elsewhere in Leelanau County in the past couple decades.
One local resident likened the dilemma to a Catch-22, in that the Park needs to give people access to the Lakeshore to assure them that their public funds are well spent, but more visitors to a place like Port Oneida could well damage the experience, not to mention the nature and the historic farmsteads. “Do we really have to invite it?” she asked.
Another commenter worried that increasing the flow of people to Port Oneida might overcrowd its pristine Lake Michigan beaches, turning them into another North Bar Lake — once a favorite and well-hidden beach north of Empire where the Lakeshore has since built a giant parking lot that welcomes tourists by the busload and makes North Bar seem, at least by northern Michigan standards, as crowded as Miami Beach.
But the Lakeshore’s Assistant Superintendent Tom Ulrich sought to assure concerned locals on May 3 that nothing in the revitalized Port Oneida district will be paved over, and other park interpreters told me that the parking lots will be small and unthreatening to the visitor’s overall experience — built for no more than 4-6 vehicles, or 10-16 cars in the case of a larger lot — similar to the gravel parking lot at the trailhead for Pyramid Point, which is further down Port Oneida Road.
“Those who remember long, solitary hikes through Port Oneida without seeing another soul will notice the difference, but most will not,” I was told.
Much of the discussion at the public meetings focused on where to put the parking, the staff housing and the visitor contact station kiosk, and that will inevitably carry over into a public comment period, still months away, following the Lakeshore’s development of alternatives and an environmental assessment.
Look for more coverage of Port Oneida in future issues of the Glen Arbor Sun. Reach the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore at (231) 326-5314.