Port Oneida Historic Landscape Plan raises question of preservation vs. recreation
By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor
This summer, the National Park Service (NPS) unveiled its options for the Historic Landscape Management Plan of the Port Oneida Rural Historic District. Some four miles east of Glen Arbor, the shoreline settlement was founded as a logging community, with subsistence (family) farming and fishing, in the early 1860s by immigrant pioneers from Prussia and Hanover (now parts of modern Germany), and lived in continuously until the 1970s. It is defined as a “historic vernacular landscape … that has evolved through use by ordinary people” over a “period of significance of 1870-1945,” in the Plan’s Executive Summary, and it is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Port Oneida’s treasures encompass over 150 buildings, including farm houses, barns and other outbuildings; cemeteries; two schoolhouses; sites of former farms, docks and other vanishing structures; and an “olden days” travel-distribution-communications network of cattle paths, logging trails, county roads and bluffside dugways. At 3,400 acres — just a part of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — Port Oneida carries the distinction of being “the largest and most complete historic agricultural landscape in public ownership in the country,” according to the plan, co-authored by Sleeping Bear’s environmental specialist Michael Duwe and NPS regional historical landscape architect Marla McEnaney.
With the recent honor (some might say dubious honor) of being named “America’s favorite vacation place,” by ABC’s “Good Morning, America!” Sleeping Bear must brace for increased visitor attention — including the inevitable “wear and tear” on its much-loved historical, cultural and natural resources that were already incrementally losing the battle with nature and decades-long neglect. Implementation of its “Preferred Alternative” Plan, along with the larger, 20-year General Management plan of 2009, would ideally focus and allocate resources to maintain and improve the historic landscape patterns that tell a vital part of Port Oneida’s story. (The other option is “No Action,” or more accurately, continuing the ad hoc: “as-fluctuating-budget-and-manpower-and-volunteer-efforts-allow” — management solutions thus far in place since the Park reversed its original “let it moulder” policy of wilderness reversion of the 1970s and early ‘80s.)
With any NPS proposal, differing ideas, historical information, and interpretations of terms and facts must be reconciled to the extent that the plan can move forward with concrete actions. In the case of Port Oneida, the illusion of a lost era frozen in time belies the urgency that some have felt, such as preservation groups Friends of Sleeping Bear, Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear (PHSB) and Manitou Islands Memorial Society, to save the precious resources from time’s ravages. In addition these groups, as well as the many individuals who love the park, want to be as certain as they can be that the plan gets it right, both in the facts and the spirit of the shared endeavor to save Port Oneida.
On a summer day in early September, one of these concerned citizens, former park ranger Tom Van Zoeren, led an instructive tour through some of the historic district. The 21-year veteran of Sleeping Bear carries a wealth of knowledge about the area’s history as it entwined Port Oneida’s families, socioeconomics, culture and the natural world over its 75-year span of “significance.”
Though he retired in 2005, Van Zoeren tirelessly researches Port Oneida’s people and places, interviews remaining descendants, and writes a popular, ongoing series of books, Images and Recollections from Port Oneida — his way, he says, of giving back to a place and career that has nurtured and sustained him. In addition, he acts as a Port Oneida advocate and watchdog of the Park’s plans and proposals; with his depth and breadth of knowledge, he is able to seek clarity and ask questions in ways that the average Park visitor might not know how to articulate.
On our tour, Van Zoeren points out some of the changes in the landscape, both large and small, which affect the integrity of the historic landscape. Visiting a “nonextant” farm site such as George Eckherdt’s holding (across from the Martin Basch farm), regularly spaced, gnarled apple trees and non-native foundation plantings provide scant clues to human habitation. Half-buried, disintegrating fence posts, (their rail mortises still visible) and a square section of folded wire bear mute testimony to the boundaries of hardscrabble lives once eked out here, while a pine plantation, darkening the Eckherdts’ former fields, speaks of the destructive possibilities of non-native species that deny a place for native plants and animals.
The retired ranger suggests that, in places like this, or more prominent locations such as the so-called Miller barn (the only remnant of second pioneer family Frederick and Margretha Werner’s farm), placement of identifying corner posts or even outlined timber frames could show locations of lost structures, along with interpretive displays or signs.
He says, “As a docent in the Charles and Hattie Olsen Farm, I have found this is really what people are interested in,” that is, the human lives that unfolded in this place so long ago, but which still connects them to a shared common history of living on the land.
His ongoing work is “based on the idea that we have all these farms in Port Oneida that the government has spent so many thousands of dollars on. This [management plan] is a permanent plan; maybe we can’t picture restoring some of the features now, but 30 years from now, maybe we can do that, so it should be outlined … If we’re going to draw up a plan saying what we’re trying to do — to the degree possible — let’s say it’s a goal to be historically accurate. ‘Topography’ — what does that mean? I’d rather try to document the historically correct configurations,” of farms and fields, the evidence of which is more numerous than the 1938 aerial photographs being used as the main guideline for the plan.
Field clearing and maintenance is a huge part of the ongoing effort to reestablish the spatial patchwork that the former agricultural community had created. By the 1890s, the entire area had been clear-cut by the logging operations of its pioneer settlers, whose descendents turned next to farming, fishing and trade with the steamships that plied the Great Lakes. Crops, orchards, invasive species, dairy farming and now-outmoded land-use practices all left strong patterns on the fragile ecosystem, which nevertheless has crept relentlessly back in the years since the National Park’s formation in 1970.
In the Preferred Alternative, work on fields would continue and increase, including annual mowing, fence lines restored, and site-sensitive removal of pine plantations and black locust tree groves. Some of these projects have been underway for several years, evidenced by the piles of brush and locust logs seen along roadsides that were cleared by volunteers, such as the nonprofit SEEDS Michigan Youth Corps.
Van Zoeren’s work with Port Oneida descendants and his GPS identification of historic spots for the Park’s Geographical Information System software program have shown where old structures are or were, numerous fence lines not on the 1938 photos, and even a small family cemetery completely covered by lilacs.
He explains, “I’ve interviewed pretty much everybody that’s left, I record any information or memory they may have. It’s like mining for gold; you have to sift through the nuggets.” One recent “nugget” was a 1926 photograph given to him last year by Fritz Barratt, a Port Oneida descendant who holds private property on the Baker Farm, near the former site of the village and the Carsten Burfiend Farm. Looking north towards Pyramid Point, it shows an astounding degree of cleared land, as well as farm buildings (some now gone), and some village structures that orients a viewer strongly to a distant place in time, and establishes a clear continuum between then and now.
An area that is given little coverage in the plan is the identification and adaptive reuse potential of some of the travel network that stitched the individual farms and businesses together across Port Oneida. Old cattle paths, which crisscross the area around the Bay View Trail and elsewhere, remain anonymous, as do the hand carved “dugways” that zigzag down bluff faces to Lake Michigan and Shell Lake, enabling wagon goods, logs, small boats and livestock to traverse to and from the shore and “commons” grazing areas. Several places in the plan suggest “new” or “improved hiking trails, with no mention of adaptive reuse of historic cattle trails and human footpaths, or signs identifying them as such to visitors. Van Zoeren also emphasizes the need for these physical connections to be more prominent, a point he brought up at the public presentation given on August 23 at the Park’s Visitor Center in Empire.
At the same time, the recent implementation of the new, 27-mile-long Sleeping Bear multiuse Heritage Trail, which would run through Port Oneida along the north side of M-22, gets little attention, raising concerns about an intrusive non-historical, hardscaped feature running within feet of (at least) the Charles Olsen Farm’s front door. At the August 23 meeting, several people expressed worries over the Park’s perceived continuing pattern of paving, straightening and widening travel surfaces (mainly for automobiles). Recent examples include sections of the Heritage Trail, the trail at the base of Alligator Hill, and parking lots at North Bar Lake, Glen Haven and Good Harbor Bay.
Cookie Thatcher of Glen Arbor expressed frustration with the apparent missed communications between public wishes and Park implementations in the past, saying, “Be very careful when someone [in the NPS] says, ‘recreational zone’!”
Another audience member commented unfavorably on the “Disneyfication” of the Port Oneida area, mentioning “stairs to the beach,” and pots of geraniums (actually both are historically accurate) on the Charles Olsen porch, which serves as a popular visitor stop and the headquarters of PHSB). But her larger point was a fear of Port Oneida’s historical truths, written in its centuries-old landscape, being eroded and destroyed — as real a threat as the blurred edges of fields encroached by trees, or the erosion of bluffs by overeager beachgoers disdaining the stairs.
With increased visitation in Port Oneida, the Park (in collaboration with Leelanau County, which is the actual owner of these roads) may be tempted to widen, straighten and pave some of the gravel roads (such as Baker Road and old logging tracks (part of Basch or Thoreson Roads, for instance) that contribute to the historical integrity and atmosphere of the landscape, as well as provide “calming” traffic stratagems, like curves and softer surfaces.
Tom Van Zoeren says, “There is a lot of protectiveness, concern that, ‘We’re going to lose this.’ I think that people really want to preserve the charm, the feel of it. Everybody owns the Park, everybody feels that way,” even though their expressions of that concern may look very different to each other.
Although the public comment period ended on September 12 at midnight (Mountain Daylight Time), hopefully the many individuals, groups, and governmental units who share a stake in Port Oneida will continue their thoughtful dialogue, so that, in the spirit of the commons on which public stewardship is based — a true consensus in the here and now — its future preservation is assured.
This GlenArbor.com online story was sponsored by Ruth Conklin Gallery in Glen Arbor, which for over 25 years has brought the natural beauty of the shores of Lake Michigan to life through exquisite artwork and handcrafted pieces created by over one hundred talented artists.
