Still Looking For Mrs. Boizard

By Barbara Kelly
Sun contributor

“There were 40 couples at the Fourth of July ball at McCarty’s house in town [Glen Arbor].” Boizard letter, July 6, 1863

Several years ago I wrote an article in this publication about my many years-long “search” for a woman who lived in Glen Arbor from around 1860 until her death in 1911 (see “Looking for Mrs. Boizard,” Glen Arbor Sun, August 2006). My enthrallment with Eleanor Boizard began after reading many of her handwritten letters which had been preserved over the years by family members, and then found in an old house in Glen Arbor which was about to be torn down following the death of one of her last descendants. This astonishing cache of letters spans the years 1855 to 1888 and were mostly written between Eleanor Boizard, living in Glen Arbor with their young daughter, Marietta, and her husband, Oliver, who had to stay behind in Chicago to earn a living.

Thankfully, the letters were found, collected, sorted, transcribed and then finally published in a 1993 book entitled The Boizard Letters: Letters From A Pioneer Homestead. The letter-finders, sorters and transcribers were the late Julia Dickinson and Jo Bolton. The book itself is still in print and has now been followed by an even more complete edition of the Boizard letters, edited by one of Mrs. Boizard’s descendants, Jodie Sewall, entitled Long Distance Love: 1855-1870. Both books are available at The Cottage Bookstore in Glen Arbor.

I am well aware that it is not possible to “find” a woman who has been dead 100 years. But when I titled my earlier essay “Looking for Mrs. Boizard,” I wasn’t only describing my literal years-long search for the site of her log cabin at the base of Miller Hill across from Fisher Lake. Reading Mrs. Boizard’s mail also served as a window through which I could look for glimpses of the thoughts, activities, relationships, commerce and struggles of people living in Glen Arbor just as the town became established in 1856. What we are shown when reading the Boizard letters is how some families lived and loved and partied and struggled 150 years ago in the very town we all love and visit or live in now. We also get a sense of how some things haven’t changed all that much in 150 years. As Eleanor writes to Oliver on Saturday, May 21, 1864 describing the large ships that arrived at docks in Glen Arbor from Chicago and elsewhere: “There is not hardly a boat but that they bring more settlers … there are so many Land lookers and families moving in.”

In addition to illustrations of life as it was in Glen Arbor in the 1860s and 1870s, it turns out that the Boizard letters offer a remarkable lens through which we can see the impact of the Civil War on the people living in Glen Arbor at the time. One of the most impressive of such letters, which will be featured in a subsequent article in this series, is one written by Mr. Boizard in April 1865, in which he gives a first-hand account of the impact on people in the streets of Chicago when they heard the news of the assassination of President Lincoln.

So now, in the 150th anniversary of the beginning of this country’s Civil War, it seems a good time to return to the Boizard letters. How incredible that in them we get a first-hand, tangible sense of daily life in Glen Arbor in the years during the Civil War, as written and recorded by Mr. and Mrs. Boizard and their friends.

For example, from Harriet Fisher, wife of one of the first Glen Arbor settlers, John Fisher, we learn in an 1863 letter to the Boizards that “Quite a number have enlisted [in the Civil War]…13, I think. So you see Glen Arbor has contributed her share towards putting down this rebellion and what a terrible war it is. So many lives lost. I wish it would end but not until the South is whipped.” And then, with astute insight, Mrs. Fisher adds this additional thought about the Civil War, “I always consider family fights the very worst, and that is what this is, but a family fight.”

In another letter sent to Mr. and Mrs. Boizard, written in 1863, John Fisher, Harriet’s husband, emphatically asserts: “Freedom to All. ALL, not part of the people. It is a truth, well known to all who have observed, that where Slavery exists at all, it to a certain degree enslaves the whole, it demoralizes the whole, but thank God the people of this land are beginning to see the value of full and unrestricted freedom and though the lesson is costing dear, very dear, yet I presume we could not have learned it at any other School.”

What I find striking about these expressions of passion for the Northern cause by John and Harriet Fisher, is that they are written by people who are apparently very well-informed about and thoughtfully engaged with events in the larger world beyond Glen Arbor. And yet, in the case of John, according to an 1863 letter by his wife to the Boizards, we see a person who is fully engaged in activities in Glen Arbor itself. At the same time that John Fisher served as Judge of Probate for Leelanau County, Town Supervisor, Justice of the Peace and School Trustee, he “Gets up at four in the morning, goes down to the Saw Mill before breakfast to oversee affairs, sometimes comes back to his breakfast but oftener I send it to him, and is generally not home until dark, then he is very tired…”

When Oliver Boizard writes his wife about the war, it is usually interspersed with the details of his ongoing efforts to support her in Glen Arbor, even while he is living in Chicago. In 1864 he writes from Chicago: “About the beginning of next month I will try to send you some Mackrel. There has been terrible fightings between the Two Armies, and I suppose they will fight terribly at the taking of the Rebel Capital (Richmond. You state that potatoes are $1.00 per bushel. I hope you will content yourself and keep your health.” To which their daughter, living with Eleanor in Glen Arbor, writes back: “Momma says you had better send her a table and an oil cloth instead of a fish (!)” a comment which launches a litany of Mrs. Boizard’s discontent toward Mr. Boizard, lasting for years, and which she expresses in letter after letter. It was probably not for nothing that Mrs. Boizard was described in her obituary as “a Great Sufferer.”

In subsequent articles in this series, we will continue to relate the reactions of Glen Arbor residents to the events of the Civil War as reflected in the vivid, first-hand accounts as found in the Boizard letters.