Sorting beans and stories:
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.
One of Ole Thoreson’s (Leonard’s father) wintertime occupations was sorting the beans he had grown the preceding summer. Leonard: “I remember, if it was storming, you couldn’t do nothing outside. After he got done doing chores, he’d take a bag of beans and carry them up to the house and sit there and sort beans all day. They was a little green bean. I don’t know what they called them.”
