Port Oneida, Michigan: from lumber port to farming community and historic district

Port Oneida began as a place to sell firewood to passing steamships, and became a farming community. The Port Oneida Rural Historic District, within the northern mainland area of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan, covers 3,400 acres and is, according to the National Park Service (NPS), one of the largest and most complete historic agricultural landscapes in public ownership. It contains 121 buildings, five sites and 20 structures that add to its historical importance, dating from 1870 to 1945.

Thoreson Farm. NPS.

From cordwood to crops

Port Oneida was founded in the early 1860s, and its first business was lumber. Immigrants, mostly of German descent, sold cordwood to passing ships and ran small farms. Thomas Kelderhouse, a New York businessman and early immigrant, funded a dock and sawmill on the shoreline in the 1860s, and the community took its name from one of the first steamships to stop, the SS Oneida. Less than thirty years later, deforestation and a preference for coal as steamship fuel had cut the profits of the lumber trade. By the 1890s that decline pushed the community toward agriculture, and some cleared land became farms.

The federal government opened mainland Michigan to settlement in 1852, and the Preemption Act of 1841 and the Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged individuals to claim and improve land. Settlers built houses, barns, stables, corn cribs and chicken houses. One of the oldest farms, the Franklin Basch Centennial Farm, was started around 1855 and still has some of the oldest buildings in the district, including a large stone barn.

Miller Barn. NPS.

Farmers grew pears, apples, peaches, hay, straw, oats, wheat and rye, but potatoes were the district's only consistent cash crop. The work was demanding and encouraged cooperation, and accounts describe a close-knit, supportive community. Livestock fed residents, and abundant forage and pasture suited dairy farming.

A landscape of ridges, fields and trees

Wooded ridges and open fields give the district its character. In the 19th and 20th centuries the lower, level fields were used for crops or grazing; today they are kept as meadows. The NPS says that is not historically accurate, but meadows need less maintenance and allow beneficial native species to return. The fields are often ringed by forested hillsides, conifer windbreaks, pine plantations or orchards.

Farm families planted small orchards of usually about twenty trees, mostly apple or cherry, to meet their own needs and perhaps produce a small surplus, and remnants survive at several farms. Rows of sugar maples along Port Oneida roads tie fragmented sites together and mark the district's east and west entrances, and residents tapped both the roadside trees and those on their farms for maple syrup.

Klett Farm at Port Oneida lies at the base of a wooded ridge in a former glacial meltwater channel. It was a successful operation compared with many neighbors, as its use of post-World War II technology shows. Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS MI-352), Library of Congress.

The land itself was shaped by the Port Huron substage of the Wisconsin glacial stage, which left moraines, bluffs, drainage channels and bays; prehistoric lakes covered the area for approximately 700 years after the ice retreated. Most of the soils have coarse, permeable subsoil, largely unsuitable for farming, though irregular patches of productive soil supported permanent settlement.

Kelderhouse Farmhouse. NPS.

Miller Farm. Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS MI-358-A), Library of Congress.

Decline and protection

Subsistence farming became less viable in the 1940s. Residents give several reasons: the 1930s Depression, poor soil fertility, distant markets and young people moving to cities for better-paid work. Congress designated Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in 1970, taking in all of Port Oneida, and many remaining residents then sold their properties to the NPS. The district joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

NPS lists it as a historic vernacular landscape, one tied to the lives of ordinary people over generations, with a period of significance from 1870 to 1945, state-level significance and National Register criterion A. It keeps a high level of historic integrity: its spatial conditions and structures are relatively untouched by modern development, and the landscape shows the effects of European settlement and the community's agricultural legacy.

Port Oneida School. NPS.

Sources

• National Park Service, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, article on the Port Oneida Rural Historic District cultural landscape (https://www.nps.gov/articles/port-oneida-rural-historic-district-500003.htm); the source's statement that the farming community lasted into the "mid-19th century" is left out as an evident slip; rewritten in hubnx's own words.