Sleepy Port Oneida Rural Historic District awakens for two-day fair

By Bill Herd
Park interpreter
The normally quite Port Oneida Rural Historic District in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore will come alive with a buzz of activity Friday and Saturday, August 8 and 9. More than 90 folks have offered to share their traditional skills during the two day Port Oneida Rural Arts and Culture Fair. There will be blacksmiths, barn builders, weavers, quilters, broom makers and a host of other traditional crafts. Contemporary artists who take inspiration from the rural landscape will also share their crafts. Always a big hit are Marco and Polo, a team of large gentle oxen, who will display their skills mowing hay and performing other fieldwork.
Photos by Len Overmyer

The fair will be held at five farms and the one-room schoolhouse, making moving between the six sites a necessity for this unique event.
Visitors can drive to each site or, better yet, park for the day and take either a shuttle bus, horse and wagon ride, bike or walk through the wildflower-covered fields between the farms, allowing visitors to experience the rural picture perfect landscape in a relaxed manner.
The new addition to this year’s fair is bike tours on Friday at 11 a.m. and again on Saturday at 5 p.m. The bike tours are one and a half hours long and will cover most of the back roads of the historic district with stops to point out significant historic landscape features. Civil War and Second World War re-enactors will also present at the fair. Though these scenes may seem out of place at a farm history fair, they are a reminder that Michigan’s rural communities were not exempt from the pull of world events. Many of Port Oneida’s early settlers experienced the Civil War firsthand. The Second World War also impacted farm families in a big way, and in turn they played a major role in the nation’s war effort. The re-enactors will demonstrate camp life and explain the war’s impact on the home front.
Don’t miss the fair because you need to buy groceries or need a gift for the folks taking care of your cat. You will find fresh fruit and vegetables at the expanded farmer’s market, and many of the craft demonstrators will sell items they have produced.
Kids will find most fair activities interesting, especially the hands-on activities just for kids. With a handwringer and washboard they can experience how clothes were washed before washing machines hit the market. Along with their parents they can enjoy a free horse and wagon ride or operate a hand-cranked corn sheller, play with toys their grandparents used, try to figure out the purpose of old objects on hand, or just visit with farm animals.
The fair is a good place for families to talk together, so bring a grandparent or grandchild and share experiences and create new memories. The Port Oneida Fair runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days.