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 and Pal pose here north of the house. Note the scraggly lilacs—”That’s after we had the goat. He trimmed, ate every last lilac way up there. Oh, he really trimmed them off. Somebody told Dad that if you have a goat with your sheep, it will keep the dogs away. Well, you couldn’t keep the darn thing in the sheep pen!”
Keeping up with the goat and all the rest of the farm tasks kept the Thoreson kids busy. “My dad’s family, they weren’t into hunting or fishing — none of that. We worked.” As they grew, the kids took on different jobs. First, when you got big enough, you fed the chickens and gathered the eggs. Then when you got bigger, you’d carry wood, cut and split it, and so on. “We didn’t have to run around for exercise, we got all we needed right there.”
