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.”
Leonard remembered one winter when neighbor Lyle Miller was alone. “And I can remember he got sick. My brother John was about the same age. They was good friends. Mother says, ‘I haven’t seen Lyle out.’ So John went over. He was sick in bed with the flu. And I guess he darn near died. So Mother says, ‘John, go take the team and sleigh and go over and get him.’ He stayed the winter at our house.”
At one time Herman Prause and his son Wilmer were staying at the nearby Brammer Farm. “Old Herman would do chores, just to stay in the house, because the house was empty. They didn’t have nothin’! Wilmer used to come down to our place about 4:30, 3:30, something like that: ‘Well, Ma, what can I do?’” (Wilmer always called Mrs. Thoreson “Ma”.) “She would say, ‘Oh, Wilmer, you can churn butter,’ or something like that. She’d take a twoquart jar and put cream in it, and he’d sit there and shake it. In fact, Wilmer — when he married Betty — ‘Well, Ma’, he says, ‘Betty and I want to get married. Can we get married?’ He asked my mother!” ~~~ Like most Port Oneida farms, the Thoreson Farm had many fences so the various field areas could be used differently, and uses could be rotated. Each field could be accessed and isolated to keep the cows in or out. “It all just depended on how you swung your gates.”
It was particularly important to keep the cows out of the apple orchard. “In the fall of the year they’d go down under the apple tree, eat apples, and they’d choke. Some of them were greedy. They’d gobble them right up [without chewing them adequately], and choke.”
Leonard’s brother Rudy saw this happen on another farm. “And the way my brother explained it to me, he could feel the apple in the yearling’s throat. He put a block of wood on one side, and hit it with a block of wood on the other side, and smashed the apple. A couple blocks of wood, put one on each side of the throat and ‘tunk’ ‘em together. After it crushed the apple, he coughed it up.”
Typically, the main fields might be planted to corn, followed the next year by oats, then hay for a couple of years, before going back to corn. The cattle might be allowed into these fields in the fall to clean them up after the grain was harvested. The rest of the year the cows were normally pastured on the hillier fields in the southern portion of the farm, since that land wasn’t as good for cultivating.
Speaking of hills in general, Leonard noted, “That land was a little light [sandy]. The wind and water and everything—It eroded, washed off the top, and it all ran down into the lower parts. That’s why the lower spots was better land than on the knobs.”
You can still find most of the old fencelines around Port Oneida, even where the wire has been removed and the posts have fallen over: “You go up on the farm, and you can tell where every fence row was because there was grass that would grow by the fence row, and the wind would blow sand up in there, and there was a hump that grew.”
You also can still see the small dugway that neighbor Fred Miller let Ole carve into the bluff on his farm so Ole could access some property he owned along the lake, and collect driftwood and whatever might wash in. (In those days, a lot of timbers and other stuff continually washed up all along the shore from the many wooden ships that sailed by.) The dugway, which can now be seen from the south end of the more recently built Sunset Shores road, was made by repeatedly pulling a plow down the bluff, pushing the soil off to the side.
To be continued…
