Port Oneida, homage to a farming community
By Linda Beaty
Sun contributor
Most of the towns and villages in Leelanau County were built up around the lumber business. And Port Oneida, most of it now part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, was no exception. It was first settled in 1852 by Carsten Burfiend, a German immigrant, who traveled with his wife Elizabeth to Buffalo, NY, in 1846. Elizabeth stayed in New York while Carsten went on to work as a fisherman on North Manitou Island. North Manitou had recently been settled by wood dealer Nicolas Pickard and his brother Simeon, who had been in the wooding business in New York. The brothers erected several docks at various locations around the island and began a successful wooding station business, supplying cordwood for fuel to passing steamships traveling from the Erie Canal to Chicago.
Burfiend was drawn to North Manitou Island because of the fishing there. Trout and whitefish were abundant, and there was a good market for dried or salted fish on the mainland. He built a cabin on the island and worked as a fisherman until 1852, when northern Michigan’s mainland was increasing being settled. He purchased 275 acres of land on the west side of Pyramid Point, sent for his wife and children back in New York, and built a three-story log cabin for them on the beach. He continued to work as a fisherman, and also ferried other settlers to and from the Manitou Islands on his fishing boat. Life was hard for the young couple, and the fierce storms coming across the lake eventually caused them to move their home to the more protected bluffs above Lake Michigan, the area that was eventually called Port Oneida.
More settlers came to the Pyramid Point area, many of them friends and relatives of the Burfiends from Hannover, Germany. By 1860, the area’s population numbered 87. Around this time Thomas Kelderhouse, a successful businessman from New York, had struck a deal with Burfiend. Kelderhouse, who owned ships that carried cargo on Lake Michigan, and who had seen the mainland from a stop on North Manitou Island, recognized the potential of the heavily forested area for a wooding station to be built in the Pyramid Point area. So he agreed to build a dock if Burfiend provided the land. The dock was built, and Kelderhouse began to buy up land and process cordwood for sale to passing ships. By this time the area had been named after the SS Oneida, one of the first steamships that had stopped at the Kelderhouse dock.
Over the next three decades, Port Oneida grew around the wooding business. There was a boarding house for workers, a blacksmith shop, a general store and a post office, as well as various residences, including the Kelderhouse residence. Most of the property in the area was owned by Kelderhouse, who donated some of it to the Glen Arbor School District in 1865 to build a school for the growing community, which could be used for community meetings and gatherings as well. He also owned a gristmill on the Crystal River.
By the late 1800s, most of the forested areas around Port Oneida had been logged and the steamships were using coal in favor of wood, because it burned hotter and longer, reducing the need for fuel stops. Kelderhouse sold the dock and mill, and died soon afterwards, and his property was inherited by his son William, who built a farmhouse for his own family there.
The original homes and buildings of Port Oneida gave way to newer farms, complete with barns and silos, granaries, chicken coops, root cellars, wood sheds, milk houses and sugar shacks. From about 1890 until World War II, Port Oneida was a closely knit farming community, with the settlers engaging in subsistence agriculture, or growing most everything they needed to live. They raised cattle for milk and chickens for meat and eggs, grew fruit and vegetables to eat and to store for the winter, and made maple syrup. They grew corn and grain for animal feed. But farming was a hard way to live, because the sandy glacial soil was difficult to grow things in, other than potatoes, which was the only reliable cash crop. Many of the farmers worked outside of their homes in seasonal jobs.
By 1970, Port Oneida joined the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. But the historic structures — barns and houses, outbuildings and school — may have crumbled into oblivion due to lack of funding to preserve them if not for more than a decade of efforts by Park partner Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear (PHSB), which is dedicated solely to preservation of historic structures and cultural landscapes within the National Park. PHSB, joined by Park partner Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes and many community volunteers, continues the work to keep Port Oneida alive today. Through barn and house restoration efforts, as well as orchard and field projects, the little community has been preserved much as it was during the late 1800s and early 1900s for all to learn about and enjoy. Port Oneida Rural Historic District has 120 buildings, 20 structures, and 18 farmsteads and 3,400 acres of agricultural land, and it is on the National Register of Historic Places as of June 1997.
Most exciting are recent efforts by the Park and partners as well as loving community members, some of them descendants of Port Oneida pioneers, to work toward adaptive use of some of the land and buildings within the district.
You can step back in time on August 7-8 at the annual Port Oneida Fair to see what life was like for early settlers of the Port Oneida area. With six historical farmsteads open for demonstrations such as blacksmithing, food preservation and cooking, candle making, spinning, crop growing and harvesting, along with food and music and much more, you won’t come away disappointed.
For more information on Port Oneida’s history, read: Port Oneida, A Publication of Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes, available at the Park headquarters; Farming at the Waters Edge, by Marla J. McEnaney, William H. Tishler, and Arnold R. Alanen, available at the Park headquarters and at area bookstores, and Images and Recollections from Port Oneida, a series of books produced by Tom Van Zoeren in partnership with the Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes, and available at area bookstores and through VZOralHistory.com. Also, visit the Charles Olsen Farm, home of Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear or the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore website, Nps.gov/slbe/planyourvisit/portoneida.
