This continues a series adapted from the book, “A Port Oneida Collection,” Volume 1 of the twopart set, “Oral History, Photographs, and Maps from the Sleeping Bear Region,” produced by Tom Van Zoeren in partnership with Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear. Here we remember the Watkins Cottage next to the Manitou View Inn on the old Fred & Ellen Miller Farm just north of the Thoreson Farm on Thoreson Road.
Mary Watkins Crane remembers summers next door to the Manitou View Inn: I was two the first summer my family spent at Manitou View. The year was 1942. Terrified of polio, my parents felt the best place for their three daughters in summer was away from our suburban Chicago neighborhood. After a number of summers in rented cottages at the Congregational Assembly (a rustic resort for spiritual renewal near Crystal Lake), one day they drove north into Leelanau County, found what we still call “Michigan”, and bought it. From then on we would leave Highland Park in Red Rover, our 1941 Olds, as soon as school was out for the summer.
Driving around the lake took two days and required an overnight stop at a tourist home in St. Joseph or South Haven . . . Singing “Sioux City Sue, M-22” we began to recognize every curve and bend in the road. Excitement was high when we reached Thoreson Road. One half-mile later there it was, the arch, the fieldstone gateway to Manitou View. Once through the arch we strained to see as we drove along the two-rut road, grasshoppers hitting the windshield, until we reached the top of the hill. And finally we saw the cottage— “Michigan”!
