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April 1, 2002Volunteers, park employees restore Port Oneida-Groups have helped preserve many historic barns around areaBy MIKE NORTONRecord-Eagle staff writer EMPIRE - A few years ago the National Park Service was prepared to raze nearly 200 old and dilapidated buildings along the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Once part of a German and Bohemian farming settlement at Port Oneida northeast of Glen Arbor, the buildings were abandoned in the 1970s when the Park Service bought the lakeshore. With little money to preserve the structures, the Park Service planned to tear them down. But concerned citizens and history buffs had other ideas. Calling themselves Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear, they offered to work with the park service to find modern-day uses for the historic buildings. Now, three years since park officials agreed to an ambitious restoration plan, park employees and volunteers have stabilized nearly every structure. "We're making tremendous headway," said park ranger Bill Herd. "It's getting pretty hard now to find a building anywhere in the park that's on the verge of collapse anymore." The park has received so much help over the past two seasons - from community groups, teen-agers, Boy Scout troops, retirees and others - that it has nearly exhausted its list of buildings in need of stabilization. Barn aficionados from the Michigan Barn Preservation Network have been regularly coming in to shore up and repair the park's remaining century-old barns, and they'll be back in the park for a two-day workshop June 22 and 23. Park employees and volunteers have spent the past two summers stabilizing buildings with paint, masonry and new roofs, and several of them are already in use. The Shielding Tree Nature Center has restored the former Lawr farm on West Harbor Highway (also in Port Oneida) for use as a nature center, where it conducts programs and activities for families, individuals, schools, clubs and organizations. The Glen Arbor Artists Association has been working to transform the nearby Thoreson farm into a community art education center. The Glen Lake Community School District has restored the exterior of the former Port Oneida schoolhouse. Just west of Glen Arbor, in the former port of Glen Haven, the Park Service is working on several projects of its own. This summer the former village blacksmith shop will be ready to open as a working smithy, and by the summer of 2003 the former Glen Haven general store will also reopen for business. The upstairs will serve as the area ranger station, while the ground floor will be a store where visitors can buy books, souvenirs, art and other items. One other project, a plan to convert the former Burfiend farm at Port Oneida into a youth hostel, has been stalled by bureaucratic red tape. The park service has a working agreement with American Youth Hostels that requires Park Service employees to provide labor and materials for restoring old buildings for hostel use. But the park has no money for such a project, and the agreement places the youth hostel in a different position than that of local groups that have been raising funds and providing volunteers. "We're still greatly interested in having them, but we're in a sort of Catch 22 and we're trying to figure out how to get around it," said Herd. Building preservation efforts got another boost this month with a $35,000 grant for restoration of the 19th century Charles and Hattie Olsen farm complex. Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear has been awarded the grant from the Porter Family Foundation of Ann Arbor. The funds will be used in tandem with a grant given earlier this year by Rotary Charities of Traverse City to convert the Olsen farm into a "cultural resource center." According to Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear spokeswoman Susan Pocklington, the proposed center will serve as the group's headquarters and fund-raising center and will also include a display area and library highlighting the history of human settlement and activity within Sleeping Bear. Like other buildings in the Port Oneida Rural Historic District, the Olsen farm is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Port Oneida area will be the site of a communitywide "rural arts and culture festival" this summer. For two days, on Aug. 9 and 10, the Leelanau Historical Society and 10 other community groups will feature demonstrations of rural art, music and crafts from quilting to woodworking at four different farmsteads in the district.
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