This week we continue marking the recent passing of Port Oneida/Glen Arbor favorite son Leonard Thoreson with a series based on him and his home farm along Thoreson Road. Leonard contributed many 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 about the Thoreson Farm in “A Port Oneida Collection,” produced by Tom Van Zoeren in partnership with Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear.
The Thoresons always seemed to have a full house. “We always had somebody there, staying there. Always somebody stayed there. Ma was a good cook. Everybody liked her cookin’, I guess.”
Neighbor Laura Basch remembered, “One of the things that I always remember — we’d go and help one another. Like if he couldn’t get his cherries off the trees — didn’t have the help — my husband and I went over and helped him. But this one time, Mrs. Thoreson made carrots. And this good old cream that we had from our cows — not like we get now — she fixed carrots and cream. And boy, they were the best carrots that I ever ate! Yeah—and this thick old cream that we had—that was really cream! She was a wonderful cook.”
