This week we mark the recent passing of Port Oneida/Glen Arbor favorite son Leonard Thoreson, beginning a series based on him and his home farm along Thoreson Road. Leonard contributed countless hours of oral history interviews and a family photograph collection— all now preserved in the Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear Online Archive. The following is adapted from the chapter on the Thoreson Farm in “A Port Oneida Collection,” produced by Tom Van Zoeren in partnership with Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear.
Over the generations leading up to and through the 1800’s, the arable lands of Norway became divided into smaller and smaller plots. The government, largely controlled by the Church and neighboring Sweden, exercised firm control over the affairs of the Norwegian people. Two of the many who joined the wave and left that situation, in 1877, were Ingeborg Sakariasdatter and John Thoreson.
Although they crossed the Atlantic on the same ship, family lore has it that the two never really met there. Ingeborg “danced above” with the higherpriced ticket-holders, while John remained “down in the hole” with the lower-fare travelers, and “didn’t see sunlight” most of the journey.
Ingeborg had been promised to a neighbor when she was 6 years old. Her husband-to-be had come to America, found his way to Northport, Michigan, and sent for his then-16-year-old betrothed. They married, and produced a baby girl; but the young man died in the woods cutting timber.
Sometime later, Ingeborg and John Thoreson became acquainted, eventually married, and began a family and a life together in Suttons Bay. Within a few years, though, for reasons no longer known, the Thoresons loaded their belongings into a wagon and led their six cows to Port Oneida.
John drove the wagon, while his son Ole (rhymes with holy) “had to chase the cattle.” Ole’s son Leonard told the story he heard from his father: “They threw a little hay on the back of the wagon, and hoped the cattle would follow, you know. They didn’t.” The first day “was a terrible day.” The cattle were “fresh and ambitious,” and “ran all through the woods.”
After making it across the county, the Thoresons rented available farms for a few years before, in 1901, purchasing 160 acres including two old log cabins and a small log barn.
The property had been through a series of owners since about 1860, but those occupants are not believed to have built or left anything that is still there, and we know little about them.
The deed was marked with John’s “X”. Leonard: “Of course, he couldn’t sign his name. My grandmother could write, I guess. But when he’d sign something, they’d sign his name and he’d put the ‘X’ down.”
In addition to being a farmer, John Thoreson was “a lumberman, a wood-chopper. That’s all he ever done — worked in the woods.” When asked if he had any particular interests or hobbies, Leonard laughed: “No hobbies in them days. Just work.” John managed his work with a “crippled” hand. “They said that he burnt that hand on a power line that come down. They had a power line from Leland to Suttons Bay, a long time ago — the first electricity. A line come down and he chopped it off with a grub hoe, and that’s how he burnt his hand. But Dad said that wasn’t so. He says his hand was deformed from hanging onto an ax, chopping all the time.” ~~~ Ole Thoreson, third child and first son of John and Ingeborg, bought the Thoreson Farm from his parents and worked it all his life. He married Louise Richards, who came from a large French family in Provemont (Lake Leelanau).
In addition to building up and running the farm, Ole sold produce door-to-door: “He had his old Model T; and he’d take the back seat out and load it up with some potatoes and some carrots and whatever — cabbage, and whatever was in season. And quite often he’d even butcher a beef or a pork and cut it up. You didn’t have no meat inspection in them days. He’d sell anything that wasn’t fastened down.” Later, he sold McNess products— salves, medicines, etc. — all around the county.
Of course, people were more hospitable toward salesmen in those days, so if Ole showed up anywhere around mealtime, he was usually invited to join the family. For many years, when Leonard met people around the county, it was “Oh, yah, you’re Ole`s son.”
(To be continued)
