Did you ever hear of Manitou County?

You can easily find it on a map – a map of Leelanau County, that is.

And a Charlevoix County map, too, for that matter.

“This county was organized by an act of the Legislature on February 12, 1855, and named Manitou, probably by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft after the Manitou Islands, which formed part of the county,” Roy Dodge wrote in 1970.

Dodge is probably correct about the defunct county’s name derivation and Schoolcraft is credited with naming Leelanau County, as well as suggesting names for other Michigan counties as well.

Other “Schoolcraft counties” include Alpena, Alcona, Iosco, Arenac, Isabella and Tuscola.

The county seat of Manitou County was St. James, on Beaver Island, which is now part of Charlevoix County.

When it existed, affairs in Manitou County appear to have been poorly managed. Upon his leaving office, in 1877, Gov. John J. Bagley made the following statement:

“I submit herewith petitions and correspondence relative to the affairs in the county of Manitou. They show that the laws of the State and the United States are violated with impunity, and that there is no safety or protection to persons or property in portions of this county. No courts have been held for years. The county offices are vacant a large portion of the time, there is no jail, debts cannot be collected by process of law, nor are any of the forms of law complied with. I recommend the county organization be discontinued and the territory be attached to the county of Charlevoix.”

Bagley’s suggestions went unheeded – at least at that time.

But, finally, on April 4, 1895, the Legislature took action with the following act:

“To repeal Special Act No. 92 approved February 12, 1855, titled ‘An Act to organize the county of Manitou‚’ and attach the territory comprising said county to the counties of Charlevoix and Leelanau, and to apportion the property and debts of said county of Manitou.”

This, then, accounts for the lack of inclusion of the Lake Michigan islands in early maps of Leelanau County in county atlases, which were forerunners of the now familiar “plat books” and modern county maps.

“The 19th century county atlases were quite accurate,” said Steve Harold, a northern Michigan historian and director of the Manistee Historical Museum, adding that at least a couple of them were compiled for Leelanau County between 1870-1900.

“Most northern Michigan counties had at least one atlas, although it appears that one for Lake County never got completed,” he said.

He went on to say that a complete old county atlas could be quite valuable, because many copies were taken apart for the individual, township and otherwise, maps they contained.

Leelanau atlases were compiled by E.L. Hayes and C.O. Titus (1881) and Charles E. Ferris (1900).

“Undated atlases can be accurately dated by seeing who the property owners of various parcels were and checking them against public records,” Harold said.

The atlases could never have been compiled without the work of surveyors who originally worked in wilderness areas.

“The task of the surveyor was to run a line exactly straight in a given direction and to measure that line in units of one mile,” Michigan historian Willis Dunbar wrote.

“He required two chainmen to measure the line and an axeman to clear the line of brush and to mark corner,” Dunbar continued.

The life of a surveyor in early Michigan was an arduous one.

“Working eight months a year, living in the open, and providing his own food, a surveyor might earn as much as $3,000 out of which his assistants had to be paid,” Dunbar wrote.

A chain 100 feet in length was commonly used and a conscientious surveyor might retire a well used chain. If there was wear of even a few-thousandths of one inch where the links met, this could, given enough distance, ultimately result in an erroneous reading.

A compass was another important tool of the surveyor, but were found to be unreliable in portions of the Upper Peninsula where there were considerable deposits of iron ore.

Accordingly, a government surveyor, William A. Burt, invented a solar compass in 1835.

Eventually, the entire state was surveyed into townships and sections.

An early act of the Legislature, in recognition of the need for education, stipulated that the proceeds of the sale of “Section 16” land in each township be set aside for schools.

Even today, there are a few lakes known as “School Section Lake” in the state, and this points out what was once a problem.

What if the Section 16 land was actually water or a swamp? The solution was to simply collect all the proceeds from the sale of section 16 land across the state and reallocate it, thus balancing the funds out.

It is interesting that the old systems of measurement are still used in a world that, with the primary exception of the United States, has otherwise gone metric.

The metric system, a product of the French Revolution, had originally intended that a meter be one ten-millionth of the Earth’s quadrant (one-quarter the Earth’s circumference) but because of technical difficulties, this definition was abandoned for an International Prototype Meter – a platinum-iridium bar kept in France.

The bar was the “yardstick” for the metric unit of measurement until several decades ago, when a whole new approach was taken.

Today, a meter is officially the length traveled by a beam of light in a vacuum in an extremely small fraction of a second – 1/299,792,45 of a second, to be precise.

Whatever became of the older and slower “blink of an eye?

Perhaps, in an ever faster modern world, it has gone the way of the “horse and buggy.”

Or Manitou County.