Port Oneida — the Farms That Stayed

You're entering Port Oneida now, and this is something genuinely rare: an entire nineteenth-century farming landscape, still standing, with the fields still open around it.

Farms, barns, schoolhouse, cemetery — over a dozen farmsteads spread across these hills, listed on the National Register as a rural historic district. German and Bohemian immigrant families cleared this ground in the eighteen-sixties and farmed it for a century, and it was always hard: the soil is sand, the winters are brutal, and the market was a boat ride away.

The place got its name from a steamship. In eighteen sixty-one a settler named Carsten Burfiend struck a deal to put a dock in here, and it was named for the steamer Oneida, one of the first to call — only the second dock on the whole of Sleeping Bear Bay. Wood for the steamers went out; everything else came in.

And here's a small thing to look for: at the vanished townsite there's a clump of lilacs, and that clump marks the Burfiend family burial plot. From there you can walk down to the beach through the cut in the bluff they made for the dock — and the pilings are still in the water. A whole town, reduced to lilacs and a few posts.

That these buildings survived at all is a story in itself, and Boone will tell it.