The following is an excerpt from “Some Other Day” (Remembering Empire), collected by the Empire Area Heritage Group and told by Frank Fradd.
In the mid and later 1840s, reports were circulated in the eastern states of the great opportunities to be found by migrating to many places in the center and western part of the United States. One from Sheboygan, Wis, interested my great-grandfather, Charles Shauger, and his brothers of Morris County N.Y., so in 1848 two of Charles’ sisters, with their husbands and families, and his brother William and his family, came by boat through the Erie Canal to Sheboygan, Wis. They picked a location about 15 miles west, near Plymouth, to build their homes.
In 1864 reports came to the Shaugers in Wisconsin about the fine virgin timber homesteads you could own in Michigan by filing a claim on the land and living on it about six months each year. Al so you could pick out your homestead by taking a sailboat to Grand Haven, Michigan and looking over the land that was available.
