Don't roll past these old farms too fast — because in the nineteen seventies the government was pulling them down, and the only reason you can see them out your window is a woman with a camera and a phone call that came on a Friday.
Here's how it happened. When the Lakeshore was created, the Park Service bought up the farms in it. And the thinking at the time was that a national park ought to look like NATURE — so the barns and farmhouses and sheds were regarded as clutter. Structures were being systematically removed. Torn down, hauled off, bulldozed. Quietly, one after another, all through those years.
And a summer resident out on South Manitou named Sylvia Kruger started documenting it. Photographs. Records. What was there and what had gone. And she took it to the park's own advisory commission and made them look at what was being lost — that these buildings weren't clutter, they were the last complete farming landscape of its kind in the country.
In August of nineteen seventy-seven a new superintendent, Donald Brown, ordered the demolitions stopped. A moratorium. And the Park Service's own history says it plainly: his order came just in time — scores of Port Oneida buildings were slated for removal.
Here's the piece that gets me. One family's barn — the Mason barn — had already been SOLD for salvage. The crew was coming Monday to start tearing it down. And on the Friday, three days before, the Park Service telephoned and said hold it, we want to buy that back.
Three days. That's the margin. Every one of these buildings you're driving past was three days, or a month, or one memo away from being firewood — and they are still standing because one person refused to let it happen quietly. Look at them properly. They very nearly weren't here.