We’re home. We’re self-quarantining ourselves. We’re practicing social distancing. The restaurants and bars are closed. Crowds no longer gather. What better way to spend these pandemic days than to read books newly published by Leelanau authors? Here’s a roundup of local books, or books by local authors, in 2020:
Those who are interested in the Port Oneida historic district of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore might be interested to know that a new book about the place is now available. Tom Van Zoeren’s A Port Oneida Collection: Images, Oral History, Maps presents the story of each of the farms of Port Oneida, based mainly, as the title suggests, on oral history interviews conducted with residents of the community, and on photographs collected from them. It is illustrated with a detailed map of each farm.
Retirement is an interpretive experience. For one guy it might mean a pastured life. For another, there’s the Tom Van Zoeren School of Retirement: Not! A former ranger with the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (SBDNL), Van Zoeren’s post-professional life is a blueprint of engaged, purposeful work.
Amidst the pain, it’s important to remember this lesson: the Aug. 2 megastorm — though it may have been the storm of the century — is one of several cataclysmic events that have changed this land we call Sleeping Bear since the glaciers receded and left behind the great lake and the rolling dunes and forests. And after each event, the land and its animals adapted and tended ahead. Alligator Hill will do the same.
Burdickville historian Tom Van Zoeren reports that Dottie Lanham passed away on December 30 — five days after her 90th birthday. She was born on Christmas Day in 1924. Van Zoeren penned the book Dottie Lanham of Burdickville: Images, Recollections, and Observations of a Northern Michigan Woman and Her Community.
Ten local, state and national organizations have joined together in endorsing a statement calling on The Homestead Resort and the Michigan Department of Enviromental Quality to work together to correct the problem of partially-treated wastewater spray blowing into a portion of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, rendering it unavailable for public use.
Leelanau County oral historian/author Tom Van Zoeren has published a new book pertaining to Michigan history. Coauthored with 92-year-old native of the subject area, Alma Holwerda, and published to benefit the Holland (Michigan) Museum, A Farm Album from Michigan’s Dutch Colony: An Oral and Photographic History is based on oral histories, letters, and other historic sources, and is illustrated with historic photographs.
Local storyteller Tom Van Zoeren posted this video about the story, and the muse, behind the new stone bench at Inspiration Point, which overlooks the Glen Lakes. The first half of the 25-minute amateur video shows Empire stone mason Mark Finstad making the bench out of split stone. The second half shows people enjoying the bench in various ways.
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.
This letter represents the views of an informal group of citizens who are concerned about the impact that your sewage system is having on Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.