Forty years have elapsed since Leland’s lakefront harbor was completed.

It was a project that had been contemplated for more than 40 years prior to its actual construction. Some harbor improvements had taken place decades earlier, but they were of limited value.

Pierheads were built out into Lake Michigan during the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. One of the Roosevelt administration’s many “alphabet soup” agencies, the WPA provided jobs when as many as one in four Americans didn’t have one.

“The letters also stood for ‘We Putter Around,’” Northport’s George Anderson commented a few years ago.

But if some of the federal projects were dubious, the Depression-era project at Leland was useful. It was also, however, never considered fully adequate.

The old harbor entrance to Leland is seen
in an aerial photo taken a few years before construction
of the new lakefront harbor began.

The small “arrowhead” breakwaters jutting out into the big lake were considered not only inadequate but dangerous by the state Waterways Commission and the Corps of Engineers.

Entering the harbor in big seas generated by a north-northwest wind was particularly hazardous, with the chance of boats being driven onto the south pier.

“The fishermen had to time the swells,” recalls Matt Schwarz of Elmwood Township, who has worked as an engineer on Great Lakes freighters. Schwarz, who grew up in Leland, is part of a family that has deep roots in the village.

Furthermore, there was only limited dockage available in the Leland River, and most of that was taken up by commercial fishing vessels. The fishing fleet was much larger then, compared to what it would dwindle to following World War II and the predation of the parasitic lamprey eel.

Leland offers the only “harbor of refuge” between Frankfort to the south and Northport or Charlevoix to the north and east.

Transient craft could, and did, enter the old harbor, with its very limited docking, but they did so at their own peril. All that changed with the completion of the expanded harbor and its 40-some transient slips.

To Karl Detzer, a former publisher of the Leelanau Enterprise (1948-51), it was a community “dream come true.”

“For forty-two years, the community has worked to secure a harbor for its commercial fishing fleet, its lumber boat, island mail boat and passing pleasure craft,” he wrote in an article about Leland’s harbor project. The article appeared in the Grand Rapids Press on July 17, 1966.

Detzer added that the project, “before it is completed next year, will have cost federal, state and township governments, and several hundred individual donors, more than $800,000. The 1,500-foot-long breakwater, nearly 500 feet offshore and parallel to the beach, will enclose some five
acres of still water.”

Detzer conceded that there had been some bitter opposition to the project but reported “objectors who were most vehement several years ago now admit they are pleasantly surprised.”

Detzer also wrote “the fishermen and boatmen wanted a safe harbor and were not deeply concerned by the picturesque quality of the old, hazardous entrance. The fishing fleet and the gray old fish shanties‚ will remain, untouched by the breakwater out in the lake.”

The Enterprise published ongoing reports on the Leland project, one of which appeared July 14, 1966 – just three days prior to Detzer’s article in the Grand Rapids Press.

“A Leland Harbor Corporation official said, the Enterprise reported, “barges carrying stone will come from Wisconsin to be dumped along the line of piles which are positioned to mark the location of the 1500 foot breakwater. A total of some 90,000 tons of stone are to be deposited and will be surfaced with blocks of stone weighing not less than 7 tons and not more than 40. To present the same finished appearance, the rebuilt south breakwater will also be sheathed with large rectangular stones.”

The major contractor for the project was the Roen Salvage Company of Sturgeon Bay, Wis., and it was one of that company’s last big projects. About a year after Capt. John Roen’s death in December of 1970, his heirs sold off the firm’s equipment as purchasers could be found.”