David Vivian-Qua has spent summers at a cottage along Little Traverse Lake for most of his life, part of a shoreline that’s stayed in the same circle of families for nearly 90 years.
His husband, Andrew, married into that history.
So, in a roundabout way, did Andrew’s college friend Allison Skinner, who grew up more than 2,000 miles away in northern California, raised on her grandfather’s stories about a cherry farm on Old Mission Peninsula, with no idea her own family’s roots ran through the same shoreline.
Andrew and Allison met in college years ago at St. Louis University before Andrew ever met David. It wasn’t until a text message 10 years ago that anyone realized Allison’s family history and the ground under David and Andrew’s cottage had already crossed.
“That’s literally where our cottage is,” Andrew told Allison, after she sent him an old plot map she’d dug up on Ancestry. com.
David has spent years piecing together the land’s history. It starts with Harvey Danforth Pheatt, a retired steamship captain who built what amounted to an empire in Leelanau County in the mid-to-late 1800s. Pheatt and his brother, Isaac Tischner Pheatt, bought up most of the land around Lime Lake and Little Traverse Lake from the federal government and logged it, supplying fuel for the steamships running between Chicago and Milwaukee. The plot map Allison found, dated to the 1880s, still carries their names “H.D. Pheatt and I.T. Pheatt” stamped across parcel after parcel.
“There used to be a cable that ran across Little Traverse Lake that they would use to bring the logs across,” David said.
The Pheatts hauled timber over the hills to a pier that once welcomed ships in Good Harbor Bay. The pier has long since washed away, though pieces of the pilings still turn up.
By the early 1900s, the Pheatts had abandoned the logging operation, sold the land back to the government and left for Ohio. Family lore holds that Harvey Danforth Pheatt, who’d spent his career on Lake Michigan, later drowned in just a few inches of standing water in Ohio.
The land changed hands again when the Bank of Cedar failed during the Depression. David’s grandfather and 10 of his friends — university administrators from across the Midwest, known locally as “the Educators” — bought parcels on the north side of Little Traverse Lake from the bank’s liquidation corporation. The land has stayed with those families ever since.
“This is where my mom grew up. This is where I grew up,” David said.
His mother’s ashes are scattered in the lake.
Allison’s connection to that same ground came through a different door.
She grew up hearing her paternal grandfather talk about growing up on a cherry farm on Old Mission Peninsula after he and his younger brother were orphaned young and taken in by an aunt and uncle. Her grandfather enlisted in the Navy at 19; his younger brother served in the Air Force, and both brothers’ names are on the war memorial obelisk at Mission Point Lighthouse. Her greatuncle is still living, at 101.
It was a conversation between Andrew and Allison — old college friends catching up — that cracked the mystery open. Allison asked exactly where Andrew’s family cottage was located in the county, mentioning that her great-great-greatgrandfather had once owned land up there. She sent over the 1880s plat map. Andrew recognized the location instantly.
A neighbor still has an original of that platted map hanging in her house.
Allison didn’t fully connect the pieces until February 2020, when she and her husband, Brian, visited her great-uncle in Arizona. He pulled out a portrait of Harvey Danforth Pheatt and a copy of “100 Years in Leelanau” with the same plat map visible in the background of an old photo.
Allison, Brian and their sons, Carson, 7, and Cameron, 4, have been up multiple times since — including a 2018 visit to the Cleveland Township Cemetery, where Allison walked straight to her ancestors’ graves among rows of unfamiliar headstones.
She returned three years ago with her father and sisters, giving him his first chance to visit his own grandparents’ resting place; they had died young, at 39 and 42, before he ever knew them.
Two weeks before this trip, Allison and her sisters, Kelly and Kendra, each got their maiden name — Pheatt — tattooed on their arms, copied from their grandfather’s 1941 draft card signature.
“So if anyone tries to ask about my family history, I can show them,” Allison said. “I can prove it.”
This visit carries its own weight: 150 years after Harvey Danforth Pheatt’s family left the county, Carson and Cameron are spending time on his old land for the first time. Between boat rides, a walk to Good Harbor Bay, a smallmouth bass catch, and rock-skipping lessons that topped out at three skips, Allison and her family stopped at the Mission Point war memorial and drove past her grandfather’s old farmhouse at the corner of Center and Old Mission roads.
“It’s these simple days,” Allison said. “It’s the art of doing nothing, but loving every second of it.”
Her family’s last name is Skinner now. But her sons will grow up knowing where it came from.
“I wish I was your age again, and I could talk to my grandpa and hear the stories,” Allison told them. “And you’re at the age now where you’re learning the importance of family.”
