Hattie Olsen, the story goes, once fell through the attic of the farmhouse where she lived with husband Charles in Port Oneida. She was fine, but her boys laughed when they saw her legs protruding from the ceiling. Life was hard, but there was also humor on the farmstead where the Olsens lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Charles, when he grew older, would sometimes fall while plowing the land. The horses knew him and knew every inch of the land, would stop and wait for him to get up.
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.