This continues a series adapted from the book, “A Port Oneida Collection,” Volume 1 of the twopart set, “Oral History, Photographs, and Maps from the Sleeping Bear Region,” produced by Tom Van Zoeren in partnership with Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear. Here we look at the Carsten & Catherine Miller Farm, surrounding the present-day trailhead for the Pyramid Point Trail.
Mary Miller grew up with five sisters in a small log house built by their father 400 feet west of the present-day Pyramid Point Trail parking area, in a place now marked by just a few scattered foundation boulders, a cellar pit, and a gnarly old apple tree. Neighbor Lucille (Baker) Barratt remembered the old place as having a “beautiful long porch on the front ... It was a nice-looking home.”
Little is remembered about Mary’s parents, Carsten and Catherine Miller, who homesteaded the land. Neighbor Jack Barratt told that he once heard that when they first arrived by boat, they simply dumped the cattle they had brought into the lake and let them swim to shore.
Neighbor Laura Basch reported that after her husband’s grandmother died while bearing her second child on North Manitou Island around 1859, the widowed husband found another home for their first child with the Millers. Upon later remarrying, he asked for the return of his son. The Millers were reluctant to give him up, having no sons of their own; but finally relented.
We know nothing about the next few decades, but researcher Andrew J. White found an 1896 newspaper clipping stating that an “orphan girl” who had a “grudge” against neighbor Frank Prause (the owner of “The Weaver Farm” at the time) had been arrested on suspicion of burning the Prauses’ barn. The “orphan” neighbor, who was actually 32 years old at the time, was Ella (Ellie) Miller, one of Mary’s sisters.
The article states that Ellie had been on her way to take a train to Chicago, and stopped to buy some red pepper, “as she said, to throw in the officer’s eyes if he attempted to arrest her.” According to legal records, Ellie claimed innocence, and was not formally charged — presumably for lack of sufficient evidence.
Ellie was then charged with having burned a field of Mr. Prause’s beans the previous year, and was convicted and fined $50 plus court costs — a considerable amount at the time. Of course, we unfortunately don’t have any of Ellie’s side of this story, and that would be interesting. We do know that neighboring boys loved to torment her sister Mary in various ways, and there might be a lot more to it.
Laura told that after Mary’s parents died and her sisters all moved on, Mary “decided that she didn’t want to live in that log house, and that their folks didn’t know how to build a house, and she went and pulled it all down. And she made a shack to live in. It was just a shack; that’s all it was, a lot of boards nailed together.” Neighbor Marie (Andresen) Rader recalled that it was largely made from driftwood. It was east across the meadow, on the knoll you can identify by the remaining apple tree (which Laura said is of the Ben Davis variety) to the right of the Pyramid Point Trail as viewed from the parking area.
Mary became what you might call a hermit. As neighbor Ruth (Baker) Oleson said, she “was a little scary. I don’t think I ever wanted to go by her place by myself when I was small. Her dress was something else! I don’t know where she got her clothes . . . But she didn’t bother anybody, she kept pretty much to herself.”
Laura remembered that “she had a big goiter (an enlarged thyroid, which can cause a sizable bulge in the neck) and you could hear her breathing a long ways . . . She lived off the land,” with a large garden and “a nice berry patch . . . and she’d always drink rainwater.” Lacking a well, she would bring her animals down to Lake Michigan to drink each day. In winter she melted snow for them. “Anybody didn’t know how she could exist on it.”
As neighbor Lucille (Baker) Barratt said, “She loved her animals.” She had a horse named Dexter whom she would not ride. Her chickens lived in her shack with her. She had a cow that she would walk with to her sister’s place in Traverse City sometimes when it got too cold in her shack. In the spring, Fred Baker would call out that spring had arrived when he saw Mary, Dexter, and her cow all walking up the road. She would sometimes go by the Camp Kohahna riding ring and yell at the girls to get off the horses and stop hurting their backs. Bessie Musil reported, “There’s horses buried right there (by her shack). She was kind of weird. She wanted to be buried with her horses, too.”
As one who was a little different, Mary was sometimes an unfortunate target. Lucille reported that “The young men used to think it was fun to shoot through her house and do anything to scare her. They were terrible.” Young neighbor Art Basch liked to exercise his slingshot expertise by shooting to “hit her stovepipe a couple of times, just to listen to her yell.”
Jack Barratt told of a night when “Charlie Miller, Art Basch, and I don’t know who else went up to Mary Miller’s (This was 10 or 12:00), and they put a cloth over the stove pipe (Her shack only had a metal stove pipe coming out the roof); and when the stove started smoking, it drove her out; and when she came out of the house, they jumped up from wherever they were hidden, and they grabbed her by the skirts and pulled the skirts up over her head (and tied them), and ran off into the woods.”
Generally, though, Mary seems to have been regarded as an acceptable, if eccentric, member of the community. George Burfiend remembered that when he was about five years old, his father Howard told him and his brother to take a pail of milk and a roast of pork up to Mary and her sister. “They just had nothing.” When they arrived, she exclaimed, “Oh my, I don’t even have any cookies for you.” But she had them sit and warm up and visit. After that whenever she passed by the Burfiends’, she would ask “where her boys were.”
Laura remembered that she would pull her small daughter Arlene “on a little sled, and come down and check on her, and see if she was all right. She used to just love to think that I would bring my little girl down. And she always had ginger snaps; and she’d say, ‘I’ve gotta give her some ginger snaps for home.’ She was a good person to get along with. People pestered her, but it was just because she’d yell some. But as far as I can say, she was a real good person.”
