This is part one of a brief history of East Leland and Porter’s Landing by Mark Smith, Omena Historical Society. Part two continues next week with a description of resort life.
A few weeks ago while doing some local history research I happened upon some photographs in the archive section of LHSM. One photograph showed a group of teen girls in East Leland walking up Horn Road, back when it was still sandy and prone to washouts. The caption indicates it is the 1920s and it is a beautiful summer’s day, about noon based on the shadows. Nine girls wearing loosely fitting, white, short-sleeved blouses with black sashes and knee length black bloomers are laboring up Horn Road in the heat, up the “view hill” from Porter’s Landing on Lake Leelanau. Most of the girls wear wide-brimmed white stetsons. The caption states that the girls were part of a camp, Camp Oshibwa, and they are on an excursion. This was the start of my investigation. This snapshot, this fascinating slice of life from over 100 years ago, inspired me to start digging. I wondered who these girls were, and what it was like to be young and alive under the sun on that beautiful day so long ago.
I knew nothing about Camp Oshibwa. But I knew that Porter’s Landing was named after John Porter of Omena. John Porter came to teach with Reverend Peter Dougherty at Grove Hill School in Omena in 1854, when he was 28 years old. He had been a teacher and a farmer in his home state of Pennsylvania. Porter’s uncle, Andrew Porter, was in charge of the Indian Mission in Bear Creek (Petoskey) in 1854. Mr. John Porter remained a teacher in Omena until 1861, then moved to Section 11 in Leland Township (East Leland), where he had accumulated 356 acres of prime farmland. (Surveyors always knew where the best land was for farming). John Porter, in his time, was township supervisor, justice of the peace, township treasurer, highway commissioner and county surveyor. Many of his legal records still survive.
Sometime after the Civil War Mr. Porter and the Reverend George Thompson of Leland seem to have started a small church, called “Concord”, probably situated in Mr. Porter’s house or the Horn Road schoolhouse. Records from 1867 indicate that Reverend Thompson preached there intermittently, relying on good ice to cross over in the winter, a time of relatively easy travel. In 1867, Thompson records five males and six females in the small congregation. Further research will likely reveal more. John Porter lived a long and respected life, dying in 1904 at the age of 78 and is buried with his family up the hill from his farmhouse, in the East Leland Cemetery on Horn Road.
Fast forwarding to the turn of the century we find that there is a rustic resorter community which has established itself in East Leland. Thanks to a trove of marvelous old photos, an old diary from 1908, a reminiscence by Warren R. Smith, another by Barbara Trueblood Abbot and an unpublished manuscript by Maryellen Gould Hadjisky, I was able to piece together a picture of resorter life in East Leland in the early days. It seems that the very first visitors to East Leland came before the turn of the century, but only started coming in any significant numbers some time after 1900, probably venturing on from the Fountain Point Resort on south Lake Leelanau. This paper by necessity will limit itself to the beginnings of the East Leland community. I hope others will read this and add to the story.
The early resorters rented camping sites from Mr. Porter for $5 per summer and he stored their tents in his barn for them until they returned the next summer. The tents were on platforms in the woods near the shore. According to a ~reminiscence~ by Warren R. Smith “Mr. Porter may have sold a few lots directly to occupants but he sold most of his Lake Leelanau frontage to Mr. Best (Maro the Prestidigitator) who bought a lot of other lake frontage, and most of us bought from him or his widow.” And who were these intrepid campers? Mostly they were college lecturers and their families who came up Lake Michigan by ship from Lake Forest, Illinois. The early names include the following families: Atkins, Bridgman, Burlap, Stanley, Locy and Gould. Their camps were rustic and their days were long and filled with the physical labor of a camper. According to Barbara Trueblood Abbot: “The air on arrival from downstate always brought on deep breaths and murmurs of appreciation for that clear and unpolluted inspiration, faintly scented with the smell of the pine and balsam, both fresh, and from the fires burning in the stove and fireplace.”
Details of Clara Porter Atkins’ life from *Leelanau Enterprise, 19 July 1973, and ancestry.com, thanks to Marsha Buehler; thanks to the help and support from the Leelanau Historical Society. All other sources as mentioned, unpublished.)
