We continue observing 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.
Leonard Thoreson’s grandfather, John Thoreson, and John’s son Fred, started building the Thoresons’ home around 1906, when Fred was 16, and finished it four years later. The family had been living in the old log house that was on the farm when they bought it nine years earlier.
What Fred really wanted to make was a boat. Leonard told, “Grandpa said, ‘Fred, you can build a boat after you get the house done.’” Fred eventually finished the house, built his boat (a 14’ inboard), and motored off to South Manitou Island where he found work loading cordwood (firewood to fuel steamships).
