"There are boxes of documents in our vault that after 27 years of being here I'd never even looked at before. The amount of paperwork that must be retained under the law is just incredible."
- Michelle Crocker, County clerk

SUE C. STOFFEL, Leelanau County Register
of Deeds, displays field notes taken during an
original 1855 survey of Leelanau County.
Among other historic records being transported
from the Leland courthouse to the new
Government Center in Suttons Bay Township
are tax rolls from the last century, below.

As Leelanau County employees pack up and prepare to move the county seat from the courthouse campus in Leland to the new Government Center in Suttons Bay Township beginning this weekend, extra attention is being paid to some special cargo.

Among the most precious items to be transported to the new facility are a collection of hand-written field notes compiled by federal surveyors in 1855 as they created detailed maps of a peninsula that would become known as Leelanau County.

“There are people who still come in to research these old survey notes,” said Sue Stoffel, the county’s Register of Deeds. “So, they’re still relevant, and they’re very valuable.”

They’ve also been electronically scanned, so the notes surveyors made as they laid out township, section and property lines more than 150 years ago are preserved in two forms. The originals have been stored in a walk-in vault in Stoffel’s office in Leland – and will be similarly preserved in the new Government Center.

Stoffel said she is also taking special care with some atlas books from 1881 and 1900, as well as historic plat maps from throughout the county. In addition to preserving a number of books containing old documents from the mid 1800s, the Register of Deeds office is safeguarding microfiche and rolls of film from older documents dating from 1972 to the present.

Similarly, county treasurer Vicki Kilway said she has old tax records going back to the 1800s.

“We’ve made a point of making sure everything is on microfilm,” Kilway said. “We have tax records going back to Day One – which in our case is sometime in 1867.”

She said her office does maintain some old tax record books – abstracts that have not all been microfilmed. But the originals are in the most secure location imaginable, Kilway said.

“The master copies of all our most important documents are in underground storage near Grand Rapids – literally way down deep in a salt mine,” Kilway said. “But there are a number of historic and sensitive documents we have retained here which we will take to the new Government Center,” she added.

Kilway explained that state law dictates how long county governments must hang on to records before they can be destroyed – and which records must be preserved by which method.

“The Records Media Act spells it all out,” Kilway said. “The State Archives determines which documents must be microfilmed or scanned.”

Tax rolls, for example, are considered permanent records, but paper copies may be destroyed after a specified number of years as long as the State Archives has a copy,” Kilway explained. “This is a process we’ve been working on for years now in anticipation of the move.”

In fact, for many months now, the hallways inside the county courthourse have been lined with plastic bags-full of shredded documents. Most the bags of shredded documents have been turned over to local farmers for mulch or animal bedding.

County clerk Michelle Crocker looks at historial
records in the vault at the county courthouse.
Croker and othe county officials ate preparing
to relocate old records to the new Governmental
Center.

County clerk Michelle Crocker believes that her office has accounted for the largest volume of documents that must moved from Leland to the new facility. In addition to birth and death records and marriage licenses dating from 1867 forward, the clerk’s office is also responsible for all the court records dating back almost as far.

“There are boxes of documents in our vault that after 27 years of being here I’d never even looked at before,” Crocker said. “The amount of paperwork that must be retained under the law is just incredible,” Crocker said. “Everybody knows we’ve run out of room here, and more of the documents will be scanned or put on microfilm – but it’s good we’ll have more room in our new facility.”

She said the county will “still have a lot of microfilming and shredding to do” after the move.

Crocker said the most interesting item she came across in her walk-in vault recently was a box left on a high shelf in the back corner by a former county clerk, Elmer Dalton – remembered as a huge fan of local baseball teams in the 1930s through 1950’s.

“We’ve got photos of every championship baseball team in Leelanau County during that period,” Crocker said. “Back then, the big award to win in baseball in Leelanau County was The Dalton Cup. I think we’d like to put some of these photos on display after we move and see if people can help us identify who’s in them. I can see a lot of family resemblances in those photos.”