Three brothers, one Lake Superior fishery: the Hokensons at Little Sand Bay

Three brothers who could not make three families' living from a cold, poor-soiled farm turned to fishing, and ran a family fishery at Little Sand Bay for more than 30 years. Leo, Roy and Eskel Hokenson, sons of Swedish immigrants, grew up in Bayfield and started as dairy farmers on the family homestead. In 1927 they began their fishery, entering an industry that had thrived around the Apostle Islands since railroads linked this remote region to markets in Chicago and New York. They fished the largest expanse of freshwater in the world, and made a profit.

Leo, Roy and Eskel Hokenson (left to right). NPS photo

The Hokenson Brothers Fishery stands on the shore of Lake Superior at Little Sand Bay. It started from scratch and, the NPS says, prospered through the families' resourcefulness, ingenuity and hard work. Florence Henderson recalled the choice her husband and his brothers faced: keep farming or starve. Roy Hokenson put their approach this way: if they did not know how to do something, they figured it out.

Hokenson property layout. NPS graphic

The buildings

• House. Built in 1940 for Roy and his wife Irene; having a brother on site brought peace of mind on stormy nights. It is now employee housing, so visitors are asked to respect privacy.
• Twine Shed. Named for the twine in fishing nets, it is where nets were prepared, repaired and stored. Machinery, spare parts and lubricants share its south end, and a forge let the brothers make or mend rings, anchors and other tools. It was workshop, storehouse, smithy and junkyard in one, showing the range of skills a commercial fisherman needed.
• Ice House. Winter lake ice kept the summer catch of lake trout and whitefish fresh. When the ice was about 2 feet thick, the brothers cut blocks of about 2' x 4' x 2' with a horse-drawn ice plow and ice saws; in the 1940s they built a gas-powered sled-mounted circular saw. Snow was packed between blocks so they would not freeze together, and sawdust insulated them.
• Dock and Herring Shed. The dock was the first structure built. Its "L" shape gave boats some protection, though in northerly storms the brothers occasionally moved the Twilite to Sand Island.

The Hokenson house. NPS photo

Twine shed and net drying reel. NPS photo

Nets and boats

The Hokensons mostly used pound nets: large, stationary nets hung from poles driven into the lake bottom in 20-70 feet of water, set out in May and pulled in October. To keep them from rotting they were dipped in tar, which stained them brown; the dark netting was easier for fish to see and guided them into the pot. Fish came up undamaged and alive, as Jeanette Hokenson put it. Gill nets, by contrast, had to be invisible to fish, so they could not be tarred; they were dried on reels to slow decay. Winches gave the mechanical advantage to lift nets, poles and boats; the one set in cement pulled the Twilite up the beach in storms.

Pound net diagram. NPS graphic

A pile driver on a raft, towed to the site, set the poles. A pole was pushed into the mud until it would stay, then pounded in. Once a cable slipped and the hammer came down on Eskel's hand; he got through the trip to the hospital, where the broken bones were set well enough that he regained its use.

The pound net boat was flat-bottomed so fishermen could stand and haul without capsizing. Before the brothers built the Twilite, they went to their nets in it, and Eskel's wife Florence remembered watching them nearly vanish in the waves.

Fishing with a pound net. NPS photo

Cutting ice at Little Sand Bay. NPS photo

The Twilite

The Twilite. NPS photo

The 38-foot, diesel-powered Twilite is a typical Great Lakes fishing tug: wooden, enclosed and high-bowed. The Hokensons built it in 1937 with help from their cousin Halvor Reiten, a professional boatbuilder. It let them travel further and in worse weather, and its winch lifted gill nets for fall herring fishing. The name comes from the days when they still farmed by day and fished in the evening, which earned them the neighbors' nickname "twilight fishermen". In storms the boat heeled far over, and the brothers sat on its side windows.

Herring season, and what changed

The dock and herring shed. NPS photo

Lake herring, a small whitefish, school to spawn in late fall, and herring season was busy and profitable: tons were taken with miles of gill net. The brothers lifted the nets early in the morning and brought them in on the Twilite. In the Herring Shed, wives, children and hired hands each had a job on an assembly line: untangle the fish, rinse in a wooden tank, gut and behead, rinse again, drip-dry, salt and barrel.

Fishing was dangerous. The hired hand John Nelson was hit in the head by a spinning winch handle and woke up blind; Roy and Irene cared for him until his sight returned.

Standing on the dock today, the view is the same as when the fishery operated, but the story has changed. By the time the brothers retired in the mid-1960's, the Lake Superior fishery had changed drastically. Sea lamprey invaded in the 1940's and by the 1950's had nearly decimated lake trout and reduced whitefish. Smelt, another exotic fish, may have reduced herring, and overfishing had greatly diminished all three species. The few remaining commercial fishermen know that profits are limited not just by skill and stamina but by the need to conserve and share the resource.

Sources

• National Park Service, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, "Historic Hokenson Brothers Fishery" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/historic-hokenson-brothers-fishery-apis.htm); rewritten in hubnx's own words.