The Schoolhouse and the Sugar Maples

Watch for the little schoolhouse along here, because it has one of my favorite details on this whole peninsula.

It's a one-room school, and it served these farm families for generations. When the school district finally let it go in nineteen forty-four, they leased it to the community club — for one dollar a year, for ninety-nine years. Which means that lease still has decades left to run. The local elementary schools still bring children out here to spend a day being nineteenth-century students, in the same room, at the same desks.

And the sugar maples standing in a row nearby? Those were planted by the schoolchildren. Who then, as they grew up, tapped them for syrup. Those trees are the pupils' own work, still standing, still producing.

There's also a cemetery in the district with around forty-six markers and rather more graves than that, and it is still in use — descendants of these families are buried in it now.

One more remarkable thing: a park ranger named Tom Van Zoeren spent years recording the people who grew up on these farms while they were still alive to tell it. One woman filled about fourteen hours of tape. He gave the whole archive to the public and took nothing for it. Nearly everything anyone knows about daily life here exists because one man thought to ask before it was too late.