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 on the Thoreson Farm in “A Port Oneida Collection,” produced by Tom Van Zoeren in partnership with Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear.
The earliest settlers on most Port Oneida homesteads built log cabins for their first homes. Some were eventually added onto and became incorporated into houses that still remain. On other farms, new frame houses were built separately, and the old cabins were adapted: “They used ‘em for shops and sheds and storage until they finally fell apart.” Leonard’s grandparents, John & Ingeborg, and their six children, first lived in such a cabin after buying their farm in 1901. After building the big house, John cut a large door in the old cabin so he could back his grain binder in for storage. It was eventually torn down and used for firewood, leaving only the cellar. “For years in that basement we used to throw our tin cans and glass and junk.” ~~~ Like most farmers, the Thoresons were intimately familiar with the utilities on their farm — they had designed, installed, and maintained them. Well before electricity came to Port Oneida after WWII, around 1920 Ole developed this windpowered water system.
The windmill could be set to pump water from the well to a spout right there, or it could pump it up the hill to the mortared- stone cistern (underground storage tank) south of the house. From there the water gravity-fed the pipes supplying the house, outbuildings, and water trough. A check valve (one-way valve) prevented the water from running back to the well when the wind was still.
The Thoresons laid all their pipes into four-foot-deep trenches (below frost-line) they had dug through the tough clay soil under their farmyard. Leonard remembered the year when one of the iron pipes rusted through, requiring the boys to dig them all up until they found and repaired the bad part.
Branches supplying unheated outbuildings had “check-&waste” valves in the pipes underground, worked by reaching a rod down into a hole. When you closed one after filling your bucket, a small hole opened in the valve to drain the remaining water from the pipe above. This prevented it from freezing and cracking.
The windmill was clearly a great convenience when it came along. Many of the Thoresons’ neighbors, such as the Brunsons, never had the cash to purchase a windmill. Like earlier farmers, they hand-pumped and carried all their water from the well until they were able to obtain a gasoline motor to power their pumps.
Like most farms, the Thoresons had a separate cistern to catch water from the roof of the house. Rainwater, free of minerals, made excellent wash water. Unfortunately, one year when Ole applied creosote to the wooden shake shingles, its runoff water turned dark and toxic. That rainwater cistern was then replaced by a new one next to the granary, which caught the runoff from that roof.
Sometimes during summer, Ole used a tank of cool groundwater to chill fresh milk that he was going to sell — thus effectively using the wind to provide a sort of refrigeration, as well as energy for distributing water around the farm. With a little ingenuity, farmers like Ole Thoreson made good use of the winds that blew across their lands.
