7/31 - Gorham and Hopewell, NY

We went on a wild goose chase yesterday looking for the 50 amp circuit breaker fuse we need for the RV.  Found 30 and 40 amps but no 50 amp.  An RV parts place in Palmyra (55 miles away) was supposed to call and let us know if they had one but we didn’t hear from them.  With our terrible phone service here they may have tried to call us without getting through.

The parts chase was threaded in between looking for clues to the whereabouts of the ever elusive great-great-great-grandfather Edward Smith.  After fighting for the colonies in the Revolution he settled in the area around Gorham, NY, very near Canandaigua Lake.  As far as we can determine he spent the rest of his life here.  I didn’t think we’d get to visit Gorham today but we passed a sign saying we were only 3 miles from it so we took a detour.  It’s a lovely little town with not much “town” to it.  The only thing going on for miles around is farming and there are no farming-related businesses there.  In fact, there were hardly any businesses at all.  Most of the people probably work in Hopewell/Canandaigua which isn’t far away.

We have no idea why Gorham calls itself the “Bandstand of the Finger Lakes.”  Didn’t see any bandstands around.

We loved this tiny little post office with its antique mail boxes and woodwork.  The window is only open from 1 to 5 so we were way too early to talk to the postmaster about the possibility of Gorham having a Town Clerk.  I’m guessing they don’t have one because we didn’t see any official looking storefronts or buildings.  Even the Court building is only open when court is in session and the next session isn’t until 6:00 pm Tuesday.

Jim in front of the Gorham Post Office on Main Street.

A typical section of Main Street.  A very neat, clean and attractive little community.  

Farmland next to Gorham. 

After Gorham we went to the Ontario County Complex in Hopewell/Canandaigua where all the records are kept.  All except the vital ones…..birth, marriage and death…..which are kept in each individual municipality.  They weren’t required to keep vital records until well into the 19^th century so tracking down people earlier than the mid 1800’s is very difficult.  A much better job was done with land records, wills and probates, but we didn’t find anything in those records.  There were a lot of Smiths (of course), and some with names that could have been Edward’s sons but it would take a lot more time than we’ve got to gather all that information.  (He had 10 or 12 sons and we know the names of only five.)  

We did get one really interesting piece of information when the woman helping us located an 1833 newspaper mention of an inquest into the death of Edward Smith who was found in the Canandaigua outlet.  It was ruled an “accidental death by drowning.”  The outlet from Canandaigua Lake is very near where Edward may have been living when he died, and 1833 matches our guess that he died the same year his Revolutionary War pension was last paid. 

Tomorrow we continue the hunt for the circuit breaker fuse and hope it’s easier to find than Edward.

7/30 - Prattsburgh and Naples, NY

Yesterday we moved 125 miles from Niagara Falls to Prattsburgh which is about 20 miles south of Canandaigua Lake in the Finger Lakes country.  It looks just like home but with lower mountains.  Our campground is in a valley with minimal phone service, no Verizon hotspot, no over-air TV reception and internet only at the office which is too far to walk to.  The road is so bad we will go in and out only once a day so I’ll write emails at night and send them in the morning.  Our “space” is in a lumpy and sloped grass field wherever we want to park as long as its close enough to the hook-ups.  We couldn’t get level in the first place we tried so had to move to a second spot.

We’re in this area to do more family research so, once we finally got set up and ate lunch, we headed off to the library in Naples.  They have a good genealogy section but we didn’t find anything we were looking for.  The Village Clerk’s office didn’t have records back as far as we needed so we struck out there too.  Naples is a lovely little town with lots of picturesque houses and businesses.  Wineries are big in this area, too.  The Finger Lakes are famous for them.

A residential section of Main Street in Naples, NY.

Part of the business section of Main Street.  The low brick building across the street is the library which was exceptionally nice with a very helpful librarian.

Southern end of Canandaigua Lake with the mountain called High Tor across the water.  It comes right down to the water (and continues underneath) but there are still houses all along the shoreline, squeezed in tight between the mountain and the water.  We drove down one of the little roads trying to find a place to take a picture and nearly got stuck in there.  The road was obviously not built for extra-wide trucks and we had to go all the way to the end to get turned around.  In some places we had just a few inches clearance on either side.

The southern tip of the lake where the West River runs out to the south and then turns east.  (No idea why was it named “West”.)  On an 1855 county map this land was owned by Jim’s great-great-great-grandfather Amos Mabie who later moved to Cedar Springs, MI.  Ducks Unlimited is managing a habitat improvement program here now so it probably doesn’t look anything like it did in 1855.

The West River southeast of the lake.  Jim’s great-great-grandfather Israel Chapin Smith had a steam sawmill operation along the banks of this river in the mid-1800’s.  All evidence of industrial use in this area is gone.  There aren’t even any houses visible from here.  Things have obviously changed a great deal since then. 

We discovered this morning we’ve got an electrical problem with our hydraulic system that controls the slides and levelers.  After much time on the phone with the Lippert Components the best guess is an about-to-die breaker.  We’re hoping we can find the right part at an auto parts store in Canandaigua and that Jim can replace it.  If it fails completely we are stuck with the slides and levelers in whatever position they’re in at that point.  We’re on our way to Canandaigua right now to do more family research as well as hunt for the part.  If Jim can’t fix it we’ll have to find a shop that can repair it, hopefully Monday, and probably have to cancel our next one or two stops.  Fingers crossed.

7/29 - Niagara Falls

We’re back to sightseeing after five days in Cedar Springs, MI, visiting cousins and doing genealogy research.  Jim patiently put up with my photographing dozens of gravestones in several cemeteries where lots of his relatives are buried. 

Our drive from Cedar Springs to our stopping point in Geneva, Ohio, went better than expected.  I was apprehensive about the traffic around Toledo and Cleveland but we got through both places with relative ease although the temperature hit 94 on Monday.  It wasn’t any cooler when we got to Niagara Falls yesterday and today was in the 90’s again.  It’s supposed to cool off by ten degrees for the next week which will be most welcome.  

Beautiful farmland near the Michigan/Ohio line.  Blurred crops but we didn’t know what they were anyway.  Guessing they may have been soybeans.

Another big river.  Looks like every other river picture I’ve taken.  It’s the Maumee River near Toledo.

What I really wish I could have got a picture of was the miles of vineyards we passed in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York along I-90 between north of Cleveland and nearly to Buffalo.  We had no idea there were so many grapes being grown here but it’s a gigantic business.  Ohio has a growing wine industry with 25 wineries around Geneva alone.  But the real biggie is the 60 mile stretch from Erie County, PA, to Silver Creek, NY, which is called the Lake Erie Concord Grape Belt.  It is the oldest and largest Concord grape growing area in the world with 30,000 vineyard acres under cultivation between the two states.  While much of it goes into wine, the bulk is used for juice, jams, jellies and syrup.  There’s a Grape Discovery Center near Westfield, NY, devoted to everything grape.  We’ll have to add it to the list for a future trip.

Since I couldn’t get a picture of the vineyards, here’s one with Lake Erie in the background from the Chautauqua County Visitors Bureau.  Imagine this going on for 60-plus miles.

Today we did Niagara Falls.  The area around the falls is the Niagara Falls State Park, the oldest state park in the country.  The falls themselves are spectacular, of course, but the park is definitely not.  The words that came to mind for both of us were rip-off and tourist-trap.  There’s road and park construction going on everywhere which makes it difficult to get around and prevented us from seeing two things we wanted to see.  The real attraction is the falls but the park has added “attractions” which make it a fourth-rate amusement park without amusement.  It’s dirty, trashy,  and run-down.  The Maid of the Mist boat tour was good……the highlight of the day.  We did it first so didn’t have to wait in line too long.  Second was the Cave of the Winds for which we waited in line in blazing sun for about 45 minutes.  It was not as advertised since the cave is long gone.  They lead you to believe you’re going behind a section of the waterfall when all you’re doing is walking along wooden decks and steps at the base of Bridal Veil Falls where you get drenched (which was refreshingly cool).  The experience of being that close to the falls was neat but we wouldn’t do it again if we had to wait more than 10 minutes.  The remaining things were an aquarium and Discovery Center which were poor and an Imax movie which was very disappointing.  They have trolleys transporting people all over the park which was good, but several of the stops have no shade or seats anywhere near them so people were getting really overheated.  With what we know now, if we could do it over we’d just do the Maid of the Mist tour and skip the rest.  We could have spent a lot more time just viewing the river rushing over the rapids.  The second highlight was lunch which we ate at the Top of the Falls Restaurant.  The food was extremely good and we had a great view of the falls from our table.  

The American Falls on the left and Horseshoe Falls in back.  Horseshoe is divided between the US and Canada.

Rainbow Bridge between the two Niagara Falls cities….NY and Ontario.  The predecessor to this bridge fell into the river in January 1938 when a massive ice jam on the river knocked it off its abutments.  It sat on the ice until the thaw started, then part sank here and another section rode down the river and sank closer to Lake Ontario.  Rainbow Bridge’s abutments were constructed 28 feet higher so ice wouldn’t hit them.

American Falls (center) and Bridal Veil Falls to the right.  The observation tower is at far left.  The people on the right are on the Cave of the Winds decks and stairs.  The spray fills the area in front of all the falls and can be seen from a long way off.

Horseshoe Falls with a tour boat heading for it. 

Tomorrow we’re moving 125 miles over to Prattsburgh, NY, near the south end of Canandaigua Lake to search for more of Jim’s ancestors. 

7/22 - Cedar Springs

This post originally was written only for family since nothing happened which would be of interest to anyone else, but I've decided it put it on the blog anyway.  I’m kicking myself now for not taking any pictures of our get-togethers with Tim and Bonnie but at least we have one picture I took of them on our Soo Locks tour last weekend.

Tim and Bonnie Marvin – Tim and Jim are third cousins.

Tim and I met three years ago via Ancestry.com and have been emailing ever since in our search for the roots of our Smith clan.  It was great that they were able to come to the reunion so we could meet in person.  They live in Grand Rapids, 20 miles south of our campground in Cedar Springs, so we’ve been able to see them three times while we’ve been here.  Tim is has an encyclopedic knowledge of this area having grown up in and around Cedar Springs.  He’s also become obsessed with family history and has found far more information than I would ever have dug up on my own.  The two of us are still doing our best to find Edward Smith, the first one of our Smith line to come from England just before the Revolution. 

We got here in time Wednesday to go to the little Cedar Springs Historical Society Museum but we weren’t successful at finding any previously unknown information.  They’re only open one afternoon a week and then they took up most of that afternoon with a meeting during which they closed the place.  Tim knows the museum well so I trust he has already found everything there that’s worth finding.  Tim and Bonnie picked us up later and drove us all over the area to see the farm where Grandpa Smith grew up, two cemeteries where various relatives were buried, and other family landmarks. 

This area is very easy to find your way around in since it’s fairly flat and the roads are set up in squares which are broken only by the many little lakes scattered around.  We found our way back to the farm and the cemeteries on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  I’ve been taking pictures of gravestones for three days which no doubt bored Jim to tears but he patiently sat in the truck and read while I searched for relatives.  Gravestones are extremely helpful in piecing information together so it was well worth the effort.

This is the 20-acre farm which was owned by Jim’s great-grandparents Sam and Mary Smith.  It’s where they were living when Grandpa Smith was born so it’s where he spent his childhood.  Tim’s great-grandfather was Israel Eugene Smith, Sam’s brother, who also owned land nearby.

Great-great-grandfather Israel Chapin Smith came here from the Finger Lakes area of New York in 1865.  He had previously moved to southern Michigan in 1837 but went back to New York for a few years.  He returned to Michigan in 1865 and bought land in the Cedar Springs area.  We think he came here because of the timber industry because he’d had a sawmill in New York and had another sawmill plus a shingle-making operation after he moved here.  The land was very heavily covered in timber at the time and farming would have required clearing the land first, so making a living off timber was the first order of business.  (That was Israel Chapin’s profession anyway.)  White pine was the timber of choice because it was tall and straight and made excellent shingles.  Like in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and northern Minnesota, there were so many trees people thought the timber industry would go on forever.  After all the timber was cut here there was great land for farming so the later generations of the Smith extended family became farmers.

We had dinner with Tim and Bonnie again on Friday night plus spent all day today with them at their lovely lakefront cabin about 10 miles north of Cedar Springs.  We had a wonderful time with them and are hoping they will make the 700 mile trip to Asheville to see us.  They’ve been to the Smokies before so I’m pretty sure the distance won’t deter them.  It will just be a matter of Tim getting the time off from the post office to do it.  It’s uncommon to meet people you hit it off with so well that you can talk non-stop for so much time and still have more to cover.

Our campground here has been an experience.  It is 90% occupied by seasonal/permanent campers.   There are two rows for short-timers or transients like us.  When we arrived there were very few people in the two rows.  By Friday evening every space was filled.  The rules, like most campgrounds, are that there’s only one camper or tent allowed per space.  Check this out:

This was taken through the window next to our couch. The space behind us had 3 tents, 1 screen-room tent and 2 canopies.  They were with the people on the left with a camper and another tent and the people on the right with another camper and tent.  The yellow tent was so close to the back of our RV we could hardly walk around it.  Jim asked one of the campground’s workers how many units were allowed on a space…..we didn’t complain, but when we got back later the yellow and blue tents had been moved to the other side of the canopies.  Still just as many tents on the space but at least they weren’t in our space.  Incredibly poor camping etiquette plus the campground isn’t enforcing its own rules.  We were very lucky that the people weren’t very noisy, but the highway is so loud maybe we just couldn’t hear them over the traffic.  Unfortunately this area has only two campgrounds and the other one was jam-packed, too, and is very tight with a lot of huge trees.   If we come back here to visit Tim and Bonnie we’ll have a hard decision to make on which one to choose. 

Tomorrow is the first day of our two day drive to Niagara Falls.  We’ll be staying one night in Geneva, Ohio, then on to Niagara the next day.  We have to get around Toledo and Cleveland plus drive 385 miles which 85 miles farther than our preferred maximum.  There was nowhere to stay closer than Geneva.  This will be one of the two toughest days of the trip, the other being Boston to Philadelphia on our way home.  Fingers crossed for reasonable traffic and no road construction. 

7/20 & 7/21 - Petoskey, Michigan

Yesterday we moved 100 miles south to Petoskey, MI, on the shore of Lake Michigan’s Little Traverse Bay.  It’s in the most northwestern county of lower Michigan, as far north as you can get without crossing the Mackinac Straits.  The bridge over the Straits opened in 1957, replacing the ferry crossing which was the only way to get to the Upper Peninsula without driving through Ontario or around the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan.  We have a cousin who is petrified of crossing the bridge so I hope there wasn’t a high wind warning on Sunday like there was yesterday.  RVs and trucks were instructed to keep their speed down to 20 mph.  Jim said he didn’t feel the wind at all.

This does not give one a feeling of confidence starting over the bridge.

High up on the Mackinac Bridge. We have a certificate given to Jim's Grandma Smith when she crossed the bridge on the first day it was open for traffic, Nov. 1, 1957.

Today we roamed around Petoskey, visiting the Little Traverse Museum, the marina, and around the downtown area.  It’s a spectacular little town…..only little in the winter with approximately 6000 permanent residents.  The town entertains around 400,000 visitors a year now so summer traffic is heavy.  It’s been a coastal resort community since the latter half of the 19^th century with tourists increasing as transportation improved.  Among its many lovely houses are Victorian and Arts and Crafts styles which give it a slightly similar look to some of Asheville’s oldest neighborhoods.  The whole place is spotless with not a shred of trash anywhere.  Not every house is immaculate…..there are some unkempt yards and a few houses in dire need of an overhaul…..but there is zero trash. 

Two of Petoskey’s many lovely homes.  

The history museum had several interesting exhibits.  One was of Ernest Hemingway’s connection to the area.  His parents built a cabin on Walloon Lake near Petoskey so he spent summers here as a child and young adult.  His first books were set here including his “Nick Adams” stories.

This carriage in the museum looks like it has a dead cat in it.  The “dead cat” is actually a fur muff with a tail.  It was rather startling.

The town started a Winter Carnival many years ago in an effort to keep tourists coming all year round after snow removal equipment made it possible for people to get here.  This picture of the “Winter Carnival Royalty” was a real surprise.  Tom Harmon was the Winter King in 1941.  If I didn’t know this was taken in 1941 I would have thought it was Ted Cruz’s brother.  The resemblance is striking.

Petoskey is known as the town with million dollar sunsets.  We’ve only been here two evenings but neither of them had an unusually good sunset.  The campground does have a dynamite view of Little Traverse Bay which lasts a whole lot longer than a sunset.  There have been waves crashing on the shore since we got here so it sounds very like the ocean. 

Petoskey also has the Little Traverse Wheelway, a 26-mile-long paved path for walking and biking which stretches along the coast from Charlevoix in the south to Harbor Springs north of Petoskey.  It has beautiful views of the lake and is a fantastic place to walk, although we nearly got run over by speeding bicycles the first time we crossed it to get to the water. 

Tomorrow we’re moving 165 miles south to Cedar Springs, just north of Grand Rapids.  No more water views for a while.

7/19 Sault Ste Marie

Everyone had such a good time at the reunion it was decided to also hold the next one in the Soo (2017).  That was a bit of a surprise because it’s so much farther for everyone except the Michigan and Wisconsin members of the family.  We’re already thinking of places we want to go on the way to and from the next one.

The reunions are very short, officially only Friday and Saturday although a few people come earlier. We were the only ones who stayed until Monday morning. On Saturday after the boat tour of the Soo Locks several of us went to the cemetery where one set of Jim’s great-grandparents are buried but, in spite of having many people looking, we weren’t able to find them. Sunday Jim and I went back and were able to find a number of Aube family grave markers as well as the one for his great-grandmother which had such deteriorated engraving after 104 years it was very difficult to read. 

Sunday afternoon we went through the Soo Locks visitor center and watched one of the big ore carriers go through the locks. 

Seeing the ship nose into the lock which is only five feet wider than the ship is interesting at first, but it goes extremely slowly (for obvious reasons) so after 30 minutes of hardly anything happening you begin to feel like you’re watching paint dry.  We gave up on it before it got out of the locks into the St. Mary’s River. Back in the visitor center we watched a 30 minute video, read most of the information boards, and the ship was just leaving the lock area as we came out.  If we had hurried just a little bit we would have beaten it to our campground a couple of miles down the river.

One of the giant ore carriers going by our campground on the St. Mary's River.

An aerial view of the Soo Locks with Canada on the right and Lake Superior in the background.  The two locks on the right are no longer used.  The bridge is the International Bridge between Soo, Michigan, and Soo, Ontario (which is five times the size of its Michigan sister city).  The two on the left are in use 24/7 for 42 weeks a year.  For 10 weeks in the winter they’re closed for maintenance.  There’s no charge to use the locks which are operated by the Corps of Engineers. 

The McArthur Lock (on the far left) is 800 feet long and 80 feet wide.  The second from left is the much bigger Poe Lock, 1200 feet long and 110 feet wide.  It was built to accommodate the “Lakers” which are just over 1000 feet long and 105 feet wide.  They’re too big to go through the canal around Niagara Falls so can never leave the Great Lakes which is why they’re called Lakers. The locks operate by gravity with over 22 million gallons of water moving through the Poe Lock every time a ship goes through.

The locks were built to bypass the 21-foot drop of the Falls of St. Mary (Sault Ste Marie in French).  Prior to the locks being built everything had to be portaged around the falls as the Indians had been doing forever. Cargo would be off-loaded at one end, transported around the falls and re-loaded on a ship at the other end, thus the name “Portage Avenue” in the Soo.  A steamship was portaged around the falls before the locks were built, taking seven weeks to be pulled over rolling logs up Portage Avenue. 

These locks are among the busiest in the world with an estimated value of over $500 billion in iron ore alone moving through the locks each year.  The locks are so vital to shipping they were considered a prime target during WWII and were very heavily guarded.  

7/14 & 7/15 - Grand Marais and Munising

Yesterday dawned cold, gray and threatening rain.  It was in the low 40’s both nights and never got above the mid 50’s all day yesterday, although by mid-afternoon the sky was blue……beautiful but cold and windy.  Back to gray and cold this morning, the promised sunshine and warm-up didn’t arrive until mid-afternoon.

We spent yesterday morning browsing through the Gitche Gumee Museum a block from the campground, named after the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior.  Anyone familiar with Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” will recognize the name. The museum is a tiny place but packed with all sorts of interesting things. The owner, Karen, grew up in Grand Marais and is very knowledgeable about both local history and rocks.  The business is part museum (which could never support anyone with the $1.00 price of admission) and part shop where she sells jewelry and rocks.  There was so much in the museum it would have taken days to read it all.  We recognized a lot of the rocks she was selling as coming from the same wholesale suppliers we bought from for years.

The Gitche Gumee Museum (in the building, not the boat).  The boat, named the Shark, was a fishing boat handmade by Axel Niemi and his father. Axel was a fascinating character, a native of Grand Marais who started the museum many years ago.  This is the strangest-looking boat we’ve ever seen.  We couldn’t figure out how one could fish from it.  Karen knew Axel all her life.  She’s the second owner of the museum since Axel sold it. 

When the weather cleared later we went out to Coast Guard Point which is the divider between the open lake and the harbor.  Grand Marais was officially designated a Harbor of Refuge in the late 1800’s after ships kept wrecking trying to get to safety in the harbor.  One of them sank right in the entrance to the harbor which made a mess of shipping for years.  The Harbor of Refuge improvements could have been built for a fraction of what was lost in shipping revenue during that period.  A Life-Saving Station was built here which later became a Coast Guard station after the Life-Saving Service and the Marine Revenue Service were combined to form the Coast Guard. Congress was pretty slow back in those days, too, because it took them 16 years to appropriate funds to build the living-saving station after they authorized it in 1882. The Light House Board was also incorporated into the Coast Guard in 1939.

The lighthouse keeper’s quarters at Coast Guard Point.  This replaced the previous quarters which consisted of a shanty built by the first light keeper which was so inadequate it’s unbelievable that anyone could survive a winter in it.  (Not surprisingly, he quit four years before the new quarters were built.)  When the new quarters were finished in 1908 the first thing the light keeper did was petition the Light House Board for funds to build a privy which the board had forgotten to include with the building.  

                                Rear range light on harbor side.                                                 

Front range light on breakwater on lake side.

These are range lights, something I’d never heard of.  Unlike regular lighthouses which warn ships away from danger, range lights are used to navigate towards something like this harbor.  Navigators followed a line created by keeping the front light lined up with the rear light to get into the harbor.  Looks like tricky business because if they headed right for the front range light (the small one in the lower picture) they’d end up on the rocks so they really had to know what they were doing.  The original lights were white but were too hard to see against the lights of the town so they were changed to red.  

Grand Marais  has a very picturesque little harbor. It saved many a ship from the storms of Lake Superior.

The original post office has been turned into a very interesting little museum.  It’s another place I could have spent much more time.  This town has a wealth of history for such a small out-of-the-way place, most of it having to do with logging, shipping and railroading.  The logging industry put Grand Marais on the map, expanding its population rapidly to 3000.  Logs needed transporting which required ships.  Ships needed a port.  Then the logs needed a sawmill and more transporting…..shipping again plus a railroad.  Even before the log-shipping business got going there were ships going back and forth along the coast from the Soo and Duluth.  So many of them wrecked in Superior’s infamous storms this was known as the “Shipwreck Coast,” reminding us of the Graveyard of the Atlantic along North Carolina’s Outer Banks. 

When logging ended it nearly destroyed the town and it’s been struggling to survive ever since.  The sawmill closed down after a few years and the railroad was no longer needed.  The townspeople mounted a big campaign to keep the railroad here but they were unsuccessful.  To add insult to injury, the last train that left Grand Marais pulled up the tracks behind it.  

Two of the very attractive houses in town.

Today we drove 45 miles west through the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore to Munising, stopping at Miner’s Castle along the way.  This is the only place any part of the colorful cliffs of the Lakeshore can be viewed from land.

Miner's Castle

View of the water from 200 feet above

The boat tour of the Pictured Rocks didn’t even run the past two days because of the weather.  We were planning on doing the tour today but the weather stayed cold and gray until it was too late for us to do it.  We saw a long line of people getting on the tour boat so we might not have been able to get tickets that late anyway.  I was very disappointed to miss the tour but it was the first time this year we’ve missed something because of weather so we’ve been very lucky.

We stopped off at Munising Falls at the west end of the park.  As with all the other creeks and rivers we’ve seen up here, the water is the color of dark tea from tannin.

Jim thought this Shell station price board was worthy of a picture, and it wasn’t the only station with these prices.  We have NEVER seen diesel at $.26 less than regular gas!  If oil companies can do it here, why not other places?

Last stop of the day was back in Grand Marais at the Pickle Barrel Museum which we missed by ten minutes yesterday (because I was poking about in the Old Post Office Museum).  The Teenie Weenies were  cartoon characters from a comic strip which debuted in the Chicago Tribune in 1914 (which we’d never seen or heard of).  William Donahey, creator of the characters, did several ads for Reid-Murdoch and Company for the Monarch Food Line which, among other things, made pickles which were packed in miniature oak barrels.  In 1926, as a surprise for William and Mary Donahey, Reid-Murdoch had this house built by the barrel-building company as a large-scale version of the miniature pickle barrels.  It was erected on Grand Sable Lake just west of here as a vacation home for the Donaheys.  Naturally there was a lot of publicity about the house and the Donaheys were swamped with non-stop visitors, sometimes as many as 200 a day.  After ten years they couldn’t stand the lack of privacy any longer so gave the house away.  It was moved to Grand Marais and the Donaheys built a log cabin on the same land which they continued to enjoy for many years.  The Pickle Barrel was an ice cream shop for a while, and an information kiosk and a gift shop, but it wasn’t maintained and fell into a terrible state of disrepair. The Grand Marais Historical Society acquired the property and restored it to its present excellent condition. The big barrel is the living room and upstairs bedroom.  The small barrel is the kitchen. The two are joined by a pantry.

This is a really interesting little town with a great history.  If if weren’t a tedious hour’s drive to a grocery store it would be a wonderful place to spend a month.  There are quite a few summer residents here and lots of people stay in the campground all summer so they’ve obviously found a way around the inconveniences.

View of the lake yesterday evening.  The character of the lake changes often.  It reminds us of what the Irish say…..”if you don’t like our weather, wait five minutes.”

Tomorrow we’re off to the Soo for the 2 ½ day Smith family reunion. 

7/12 and 7/13 - Grand Marais, Michigan

The drive across the Upper Peninsula the past two days was uneventful and monotonous.  The entire U.P. was extensively logged during the 19^th and 20^th centuries so there are few large trees.  Most of what’s left is scruffy-looking second growth.  After logging ended a lot of the land reverted to ownership of the state because of back taxes.  It was then sold to settlers who got land that was cleared except for the stumps and debris.  What we were seeing wasn’t homesteads, though, unless it had been abandoned.  It looked like land that was neither being managed nor had returned to its natural state.

The logging boom created towns like Grand Marais which had a population of 3000 during its days as a major shipping point for timber. The town now has a year-round population of around 400.  It has one block with a hardware store and two other small stores for groceries which are little more than our gas station convenience stores at home.  The single gas station has diesel for $3.11 a gallon.  The next town of any size is Munising, 50 miles west on the lake, where we saw diesel for $2.49 yesterday.  We’ll wait till we’re back there on Wednesday to fill up.

The reason we’re in Grand Marais is to see the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore which runs from here to Munising.  Staying in Munising would have been more convenient but I couldn’t find us a space there.  Since it was cool and drizzly today we decided to check out the eastern end of the park which took up the afternoon.  

The first overlook was at Grand Sable Lake.  There’s quite a drop off to the water so getting to it isn’t possible.  It’s a beautiful lake.  We were surprised not to see anyone on it.

The Hurricane River emptying into Lake Superior.

The second stop was the Hurricane River.  Since hurricanes don’t come this far north the name is a puzzle.  Maybe it’s named for the hurricane of mosquitoes and flies which attacked us.  The combination of long pants and hooded rain jackets protected us fairly well until we were able to get back to the truck where we grabbed the bug spray.  We’ve had so little trouble with bugs so far we forgot to use it before we walked down to the river.  The hordes of flies appeared to be ordinary house flies, not the dreaded northern stinging black flies which we haven’t seen yet.

The 1874 Au Sable Light Station, three miles west of the Log Slide overlook where this picture was taken.  The light station was built to warn ships of the Au Sable reef which is a mile long and only 6 feet below the surface.  The reef caused a lot of ship wrecks before the light station was built.  The light operates now by solar power rather than kerosene.  We drove to the trailhead but didn’t do the 3.5 mile hike which is more distance than we can handle.  It’s a good thing because we might have been carried off by mosquitoes and would definitely have been rained on.

The Log Slide overlook was created to give a view of an area of the Grand Banks where timber was slid down the dunes to the lake to waiting log ships.  There are numerous warnings about going down the slide which is very steep and ends in drop-offs which can’t be seen from above.  The signs say it will take just a few minutes to go down but over an hour to climb back up and that it shouldn’t be done by those who aren’t physically fit. Duh. 

These wheels are about 10 feet tall.  This contraption was invented to move log sleds in all weather conditions so logging could continue all year round.  The logs go on a sled which is attached under the axle.  Before this was put into use logging could only be done in winter when everything was frozen.

The Grand Banks are an area of massive sand dunes west of Grand Marais.  I overheard someone saying they looked much bigger than the dunes at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on Lake Michigan. I wanted to go to Sleeping Bear but couldn’t find an available space, so now we know what it looks like without going. The dunes are really impressive. The top is 300 feet above the lake.  The Log Slide goes down these dunes right in front of where this overlook was built but vegetation has grown up to where it’s impossible to see the actual slide area.  The wooden flume is gone now but the large crease in the sand is still there.  Logs going down the dry flume created so much friction it set the flume on fire.  Apparently it was rebuilt but has since deteriorated to nothing.

The log slide was the site of a horrible accident during logging operations.  A very large piece of timber (25 feet long and 20 inches across) came down the slide so fast it didn’t go in the water when it hit the bottom, instead skipping about 200 feet over the water and the raft of logs which was being secured for transport.  It hit and instantly killed the captain of the schooner which was going to move the raft as well as a logger from Grand Marais.  Logging was very dangerous business from one end to the other.

Our last stop was at Sable Falls at the east end of the park. The falls are much higher than they look in the picture. They are really beautiful as is the forested area around them.

The Sable River below the falls.  Every river we’ve seen around Lake Superior has been heavily colored by what I’m guessing is tannin.  It’s all the color of strong tea.

A section of the 168 steps down to the falls viewing area.  Fortunately the falls were worth the climb back up.

Amazing woodpecker cafeteria tree. We’ve seen a lot of trees with woodpecker holes but never such large ones. The most surprising thing was that the tree split into two trunks above this area and one trunk was still very much alive. 

We got back to the RV just as the sky opened up. Perfect timing. A fog bank is rolling over us from the lake now and is covering the campground.  No wonder navigation on this lake is so tricky.