Omena Village Preservation Association

07/30/2026

KNOW ANYONE LOOKING FOR A CUTE HOUSE TO RENT IN A COZY VILLAGE, WITH BEACHFRONT INCLUDED?
Lavender Lane is available October 1st, 2026 to June 6, 2027. It is located in the village of Omena, half way between Suttons Bay and Northport (both just 6 miles away) with Traverse City just a 30 minute drive. With reasonable rent of just $1750 a month, this might be just what you are looking for.
Lavender Lane is a four bedroom, 2 bathroom house situated across the street from its 160 feet of private beach on Omena Bay.
The four bedrooms are fully furnished including one with 1 king size bed, two with queens, and one bedroom with a trundle bed. The living room, also fully furnished, has a fireplace and large windows overlooking the bay. The spacious kitchen is equipped with updated appliances including a dishwasher. A washer and dryer are also included. There’s a large porch with a view of the bay, and a deck, and a small, private courtyard in the back yard, Two uncovered parking spaces are available on site. One well mannered dog is welcome with a $500 nonrefundable pet fee. There is also a $1750 security deposit.
In addition to the $1,750 rent, the tenant is responsible for the Cable/Internet fee of $220.31 per month which will be added to the rent and paid by OVPA. Gas and electric, as well as snow removal are up to the renter.
If you know of anyone who may be interested, or if you would like more information, please call Ann Mason, (630) 209-2041.

OWNED AND OPERATED BY OMENA VILLAGE PRESERVATION ASSOCIATION, A NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION.

08/20/2024

When Johnny was a little boy, growing up in Sweden, he had no idea where life was going to take him. Johnny was born in 1876. Times were hard in Sweden at that time, there was not enough land to feed the growing population and a mass migration to the United States followed. Many Scandinavians came to this area where there was a promise of “open land”. In fact, there were four John Johnson’s living right around here at that time.

But this story is about Omena’s John, John Adolf Johnson known as “Big Foot”. Johnny and his family lived in Sweden until he was 12. Then in 1888, they came to United States, looked for a logging town where his father, Peter, could find work and found the Manitou Islands. They built a little house in Crescent City on North Manitou, a logging town. Johnny didn’t go to school, but learned to read and write. He spoke Swedish at home, but learned to speak English too.

After four years on the Island, the family moved to Northport. John would have been about 15 according to the Leelanau Enterprise . Perhaps he was getting a growth spurt and his friends probably began calling him “Big Foot”. The name stuck and from then on he was known as “Big Foot Johnson” or just “Big John” for short. John did some farming, got married in 1910 and had three children. He did some carpentry work, and built a house or two. And then, in 1919, he started building boats.

His first boat was the mail boat which he built for Tracy Brosvenor. This would have been the boat that delivered mail and supplies to the Manitou Islands.

Then in 1926, he built “The Samba” for George Cook, a fishing tug. This was followed in 1927 by another tug, the “Helen S.” For Henry Steffens, and then “The Ace” for Harting and Light.

Johnson soon became a fixture in Leland, working as a carpenter, routinely repairing boats, and eventually building most of Fishtown's wooden fish tugs. Photographs of the Fishtown boat yard show the steam boiler with which he steamed and shaped the ribs out of oak. Johnson hewed the keels by hand out of a big hand-picked red beech or birch and used cypress for planking. During incredibly hard times during the next decade, Big John made fishing tug after fishing tug, many written up in The Leelanau Enterprise as they were launched as important news.

By 1930 John and his family were living in a rented house in Northport and building fishing tugs in Fishtown. He finished the “John A” that year, naming it after himself, perhaps identifying himself as an important fishing tug builder.

In 1934, the tug, “the New Deal” was launched with great fanfare in Leland. According to the Leelanau Enterprise the tug was "christened with a bottle of amber-colored liquid upon the prow”. In fact the launching ceremony was held up momentarily “while Vero, son of Capt. Oscar Price, and first mate on the new vessel, went to a near-by grocery for the purpose of getting said bottle of amber-colored fluid”, a prohibition era description for sure.

The following year, 1935, John finished “The Bonnie Lass”, and “The Manitou”, another mail boat for Tracy Grosvenor. And in 1936 “The Smiling Thru” was launched, a cheerful name for a fishing tug.

By 1938, he was calling his operation “Johnson Shipbuilders”, and living in Omena on a farm on Overlook Road, where he would have lots of room for the bigger tugs he was making. It was there that he built “The Pal”, a 40 foot long tug powered by a big 95 horsepower engine.

Then that same year, tragedy! The well known and loved fisherman Will Carlson’s fishing boat “Diamond” caught fire near Manitou Island and sank, taking Will and his crew down with it. Only his son Lester (known as Pete) narrowly escaped, but the drama caused Pete to quit fishing. He was waking up at night with nightmares. In them he was always swimming. In his dreams he thought he was going to make it to the island, but the current was carrying him out, just like had happened that night. The village of Leland was grief stricken and rallied together to help, forming ‘The Leland Foundation’ to finance the construction of a new fishing tug so Pete could continue the families fishing business.

”Big John Johnson” of Omena, was contracted to build a new gill net tug, 35ft long with a 10' beam. It would be named “Good Will”, commemorating both Will Carlson and the kindness of the town. The September 10, 1942 Leelanau Enterprise describes the launching of the “Good Will” this way. “A large crowd was present at the christening and launching of the “Good Will” at the Schram and Bauer dock in Omena. After the boat was christened, the boat was launched immediately. The skipper was ‘hoisted aboard’ followed by its builder, John A Johnson, and selected crew, and they initiated it with a short tour in the waters of Omena Bay.” Pete, Will’s son, had “returned to the waters,” and the Carlson legacy continues to this day. The article goes on to say, “This boat, the ’Good Will’ has graceful, beautiful lines, with much roominess inside the cabin. It will, at the present time, be docked at Omena.”

In May of 1941, John finished the “Louise” at his home in Omena, and launched it in Omena as well. According to The Enterprise, “Mrs Cizek, the new owner, christened it by breaking a bottle of beverage over its bow. A large crowd was gathered to watch the proceeding. After the boat had successfully taken to the water, it was motored up to Northport where it will be one of those in service in the Nelson-Wilson trolling fleet.”

Big John Johnson continued making fishing tugs until 1949, but he was slowing down. He was 73 years old and he was tired. It was time for him to retire. He had made his name in fishing tug building during the hard scrabble 1930’s and 1940’s and had done well.

John stayed on his farm on Overlook Road, still listed as a “farmer” in the census at the time of his death in 1956. He was 80 years old and had been ill for a year. In his obituary in the Enterprise, it says, “John ‘Big Foot’ Johnson was well known for his outstanding skills in the boat building trade. He built most of the local commercial fishing boats that operated out of Leland and Northport”. Fisherman Roy Buckler remembered Johnson as "an artist with the adze." An artist and a craftsman who lived and worked up on Overlook Road in Omena..

What happened to those fishing boats John built? For many, they just quietly disappeared from sight. But for some, the Enterprise reported on their demise.

The “Pal” was doomed by a fire in 1947 two years before John retired. Captain Dan Loncar and his crew, Clyde Smith and Merrill Ginther, went down with their fishing tug. It was last seen at 10am one Saturday, ”chugging contently headed out to retrieve its nets set the day before 25 miles off shore.” It didn't return. By Monday, “bits charred wood found by beach combers carried grim hints of the “Pals” fate. Parts of a charred cabin washed up the next day which caused the Coast Guard to say “it was a fire, not an explosion, which doomed the ‘Pal’”. Eight days after they were set, the “Pal’s” nets were still waiting to be retrieved.

In 1953 the “Good Will”, Pete Carlson’s tug, began to take on water during a storm and was beached near Empire. Eventually the boat was moored in Betsie Bay, where it settled on the bottom, where it remains to this day. A sad ending for the tug that kept the Carlson legacy going at a critical time.

The “Irene”, was built for Marvin Cook, who later discontinued his commercial fishing business. It was then lifted by crane from Leland Harbor, loaded aboard a truck and hauled to Omena where she was overhauled by John Bauer. Once restored, she was used by the new owners, Whiteford and West, who fished out of Omena.

The “Louise”, built in 1941 for the Cizeks, was taken to Northport where it was a part of a trolling fleet there.

The bones of Oscar Price's Nu Deal, launched with great fanfare in 1934, lie somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.

The “Etta” was placed in front of a Frankfort, Michigan, restaurant until she rotted away.

The “Smiling Thru” was dropped from marine registry records in 1972, listed as “abandoned”.

And now, like John “Big Foot”, it is time for me to retire. There are only so many local people with a paper trail I can track down for their history. It is a small village. And when I find someone interesting like "Big Foot Johnson", it’s hard to keep these posts short and appropriate for Facebook. This will be my last article here, but others will take it up and history will continue. All of my posts are preserved on OVPA’s website. Omena Village Historical Association will continue to work to preserve the history of our little village. Thank you all for being a valued reader!

Lynn Spitznagel Sutton

Courtesy Leelanau Historical Society, Northport Area Historical Association, Omena Historical Society, MILive.com, Jim Malewitz and “The Story of the “Good Will” and the Carlson’s” from Laurie Kay Sommers “Fishtown, Fish Boats of Wood and Steel: Leland, Michigan’s Historic Fishery” 2012; Leelanau Enterprise, 8 November, 1956, 13 December 1956, 22 May, 1941, and 10 September 1942; and the United States Federal Census.

Be sure to visit the fishing exhibit at Omena Historical society. They have information about many of the fishermen of this area.

All of the past posts from this site can be found at https://omenapreservation.org

07/17/2024

When Patty was 11, her grandfather built her a treehouse ten feet off the ground. Because he loved her very much, he put tall chickenwire fencing around the outside of it so even if she or her brother got to tussling, they wouldn’t fall out. Patty had a brother, and just so he wouldn’t feel left out, her grandfather made it a two room treehouse.

Now this was in 1934, in the heart of the depression. Money and materials were scarce. Can you picture what this tree house must have looked like? Probably made from scrap wood, with those chicken wire sides for safety. Pat remembered the ladder steps went up between the two trunks of a V-shaped tree, and the treehouse was held up by three other nearby trees. “Getting the mattress up the ladder and into the entrance hole was a real job!” she said. But some of Pat Taylor Kulick's most pleasant summer memories came from nights spent up in the tree house.

Sleeping in the treehouse was a much desired privilege. “My brother Charles and I took turns having friends stay overnight in the treehouse, provided we had done our chores,” said Pat. "My guests were usually Martha Fisher, Jeanne Matscheck, Joan DeVore and Janny Graf."

Up there she and her friends had a chance to listen to the sounds of the woods and the water, to sink into the sense of summer in ways even the simple Ingalls Bay cottages did not allow. “You could see the moon as if it were right over your head, and you had the sun to wake you up as it shone through the trees from the East Beach at about six o'clock in the morning.” Martha Fisher Klitgaard says she remembers identifying a loon call for the first time in Pat’s treehouse, and learning to sing, “It's a Sin To Tell a Lie.” And all the while the treehouse swayed back and forth like a cradle when the wind blew.

The treehouse was the perfect place to retreat from all forms of summer enemies. “It was too high for mosquitoes, and high enough that if boys tried to climb the ladder, it was easy to defend from above.” The little boys were actually supposed to be in bed by the time Patty and her friends went up in the treehouse for the night. The big boys knew that retaliation would be fast and furious the next time they had a turn, so after a few half-hearted attacks, it was pretty much peace and quiet. “There's really nothing finer than a tree-house,” according to Pat.

The boys, in the meantime, were trying their hand at camping. Bill Graf recalled, “I’ve been coming up here 70 odd years and I’ve never seen a campout that was a successful one.” Bill and 3 or 4 friends would camp out on Kalchik’s hill, which had a commanding view of Ingall’s Bay and even across to Omena Bay, but was quite a long walk from home when you were lugging a tent, lots of blankets and probably pillows, and of course, food for a cookout. Sounds wonderful, but Bill says the campouts were “fraught with multiple, multiple problems that usually involved several kids coming in in the middle of the night covered with sand and wanting to sleep. Then, because they had camped on top of that hill which faced east, the morning sun would come up usually around 4:00 to 4:30am, and everybody would get up, clamber out of their tents, and cook something for breakfast, all the while dead tired. Then they would go home and go to bed.”

Not all Omena Kids get to experience sleeping out doors. Little Gertrude Goebel stayed in Omena as a child in her grandfathers cottage in the early 1900’s. Her grandfather, Lewis Voight, along with several of his friends, had purchased the former Mission School up on the hill in 1884, converted the school into the Hotel Leelanau, and built himself a cottage on the land. Gertrude had fond memories of her childhood in her grandfathers cottage, and wrote a memoir about it later. Here’s what she remembers about a particular morning in the summer of 1912:

“That day, the sun rose splendidly over Grand Traverse Bay, awakening me in my little room in the front of my grandfather's cottage. Hurriedly, I slipped into my short trousers and blouse. I tiptoed down the stairs and out into the grove of trees, which grew to the very brink of the cliff, below which the waters of the bay sparkled like jewels. A scamper up the well-beaten path brought me to the hotel dining room, where we all took our meals.

Plump, middle-aged Nellie, in her high-necked shirtwaist, black skirt and starched white apron, lifted me into my chair and pushed me to the table. She retreated to the kitchen for my boiled eggs, toast and cocoa, and in addition brought the sweet-grass Indian basket which contained my mother's breakfast. Carrying this back to the cottage was one of my daily duties.

Outdoors, on the large verandah, some of the gentlemen were discussing politics. The election of 1912 was fast approaching and friendly battles were raging over the three candidates, Taft, Roosevelt and Wilson. They were always nice to children and would give us the red and gold rings from their ci**rs, and the nice cigar boxes were just the thing for holding collections of pretty stones.

But I knew my mother would be waiting for her breakfast, so I walked sedately down the path, holding my basket carefully, pretending that I was Red Riding Hood going to visit her grandmother. My mission accomplished, I was now free to enjoy my day.”

Quite a different childhood from the children in the cottages below. But at the end of the day, the same stars and moon appeared to children in treehouses, boys on the Kalchik hill in their tents, and to little Gertrude in her grandfathers cottage on the hill. “Outside, beyond the foot of the cliff, the water laps gently against the shore, the breeze rustles the branches of the pine trees, and one by one, the faithful stars appear.”

Courtesy: “Omena, A Place In Time” by Amanda Holmes for Pat Kulick’s treehouse story, the Bill Graf interview which included the camping memories was in the Omena Historical Society Archives, and quotes by Gertrude Goebel, whose grandfather owned the Leelanau Hotel were in an old OHS newsletter

Explore Omena and her rich history at https://omenapreservation.org

This photo of the Hotel Leelanau ws on a postcard, and you can see the post mark in the upper right corner. Gertrude Gobble spent her childhood summers in her grandfathers cottage nearby.

Courtesy Omena Historical Society

06/28/2024

Giving your cottage a name gives you “dominion over a part of your world, and gives you a sense of stability,” according to Mike Curtis in an article last November. In other words, it makes your cottage your own, and says something about how you feel about it.

There are a lot of interesting names in Omena: Idyllcrest, Idyllwild, Sandlapper, Robin’s Nest, Pioneer, and Birchwood Terrace are a few of them. But what about “House by The Side Of The Road”? That was the name on the sign attached to a little yellow house across from the cottages on Ingals Bay Road. Hmmm. Pretty plain and boring compared to the others, isn't it? Here is it’s story:

Mr and Mrs Edwin Lay, from Marshalltown, Iowa were among the earliest visitors of the Wheeler’s Sunset Lodge around 1905. Leonard Wheeler regularly took guests with his horse and wagon to Ingals Bay for swimming, since the sandy beach there was superior to the other area rocky beaches, and the water there was shallower and warmer. It was on one of those trips to the beach that the Lays discovered Ingalls Bay, fell in love with its beauty, bought two lots, and in 1910 built their cottage.

In 1911 the Lays' friends, Ira O. Kemble and his wife Caroline came from Iowa to visit them at their cottage, and they, in turn, bought two lots west of the Lays. With the help of two Indians, the Kembles built their own cottage the following year.

It’s not that the women in these two families didn’t like to cook, or were lazy. Feeding a family was tough in those days, what with cooking on wood stoves and trying to keep things cool in ice boxes, and having no cars for running to the grocery store. So it happened that in 1915, these two families built a dining facility across the road from their cottages which became known as “The House By The Side of the Road”. Why across the street from their cottages? One advantage was so that the wood stove cooking the meal wouldn’t heat up the house. Another was that if there was a fire, only the dining facility would burn down. Their cottages were safe. Fires were common.

The first summer a cook came from Chicago to cook for the two families in the yellow dining facility. The following year the Garthe girls came down from Northport to cook for them. As the Ingalls Bay summer colony grew, so did the interest in dining in the “dining hall”. Soon most of the Ingall’s Bay cottagers were dining there too. The dining facility became called “The House By The Side Of The Road” and as time went on was the gathering place at meal time for these families, much to the relief of the wives.

By 1920, other cottagers were naming their cottages on Omena Point. The Hartley’s “Pioneer”, the Reed’s “Sandlapper”, and the Santo rental cottages: ‘Homewood”, “Shorewood”, ”Idlewild”, and “Idlecrest” to name a few.

Hector Carmichael built a summer cottage on the bay that year for his family and named it “Birchwood”. He bought several other cottages on the point as the depression hit and times got hard. Eventually he owned all of Santos property, which included the Omena Point cottages named Homewood, Shorewood, Idlewild and Idlecrest. He lived, for a time, in the cottage named “Homewood”, (Now the Bosco/Flett house), and built a long dock and a boathouse for his boats, which Hector and Jessie’s little son loved to play in. Charlie was their only son, and he had an incurable lung disease. He was not expected to live past childhood. Their lives pretty much revolved around Charlie. You might say he had unusual liberties. As a teen, Charlie caused them a bit of a problem when he furnished the boathouse with furniture from Gull’s Island without the owners permission and was arrested for stealing (however charges were later dropped). It is said that in 1932, Charlie won a hotly contested boat race between Ingalls Bay and Omena Point teens with somewhat dishonorable tactics: that he used his father’s money to purchase a very fast motor days before the race. He was going as fast as 42 miles per hour in his daddy’s boat that day, and easily won the race. Charlie died when he was in his twenties from his lung disease and is buried in the Omeena cemetery.

Hector and Jessie were heartbroken. Hector, perhaps for sentimental reasons, wanted to move Charlies boathouse down to their winter residence at the end of the bay and attach it to their house, but Jessie, whether for emotional reasons or because she thought it would look strange to have an old boathouse attached to one end of their pretty farmhouse style home, was bitterly against the idea. Much to the fury of Jesse, Hector had his way however, and the boathouse was dragged over the ice one winter, up on the shore and attached to the west end of their house where it is today. The Carmichael’s winter house became the Silverman’s house, and is now the Kemper’s house…but is still known as “The Boathouse”.

Not far down the road from the Kemper's Boat House is a house named “Lavender Lane”. It is now owned by Omena Village Preservation Association as a summer rental, but has had a checkered past. OVPA rescued it, restored it, and continues to repair it after an unfortunate rental experience by the previous owner. Prior to that it had been a dried flower boutique, and featured many items involving dried lavender…thus the name “Lavender Lane”. Cottage names stay with the cottage, it seems. Forever. Does your cottage have a name?

Courtesy a Nov 6, 2023 article by Mike W. Curtis on medium.com, Omena Historical Society, “Omena, A Place In Time” by Amanda Holmes, and Linda Kemper for the photos and story of the move of the Carmichael boathouse.

Explore Omena and her rich history at https://omenapreservation.org

06/12/2024

There were many ways to move a building back in the 1900s. You could put it on rollers and roll it. You could saw it apart at the corners and move it wall by wall. You could take it apart and use the materials to make a house of your own choosing. Or you could do what we did, and carefully take it apart, numbering the parts, and then put it back together again on a new spot just the same as it had always been.
The Spitznagel family was going to move the Barth barn down the road from where it was in the village piece by piece, beam by beam, and then put it together again like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Janet Barth wanted it out of her back yard before it fell down. And she wanted the spot left swept clean. With Tom Mastick’s help, we had taken off the roofing, taken down the siding, dropped the old beams safely, and moved it on Tom’s truck, stacking it carefully in our woods so air could get around it and it would keep dry. (see previous post). Tom was going to put it back up again, we would help, and Janet would watch. My husband made the decision early on to bow out of the project and work from home, keeping watch over our two grade school age boys. So what I mean is “I” would help, and Tom, as it turned out, would teach me the skills I would need as we went along.
First, the foundation and the basement walls went up, and the sub flooring was nailed down so we had a place to stand while we worked, (me learning how to hold a hammer so I wasn’t hammering “like a girl”, and learning how to use a skill saw without holding my ears).
Then we rolled the beams up on the sub-flooring on large pipes, pushing the beams ahead, and running the left-behind roller up to the front as we progressed. Then we faced the problem of how to raise those weighty posts and beams, and get them back exactly as they had been before so the mortice and tenon joints would fit. Tom joked about needing a “sky hook” to raise the heavy beams, and came one day with a triple block and tackle that he thought could do the job. The first time we tried it though, we barely got the beam off the ground when the old rope broke. Off to the Northport Boat Yard to get a stronger, newer, rope.
We needed something to attach the block and tackle to. Something that could hold the weight of those heavy beams. We used a movable pole, called a “Gin Pole”, sinking it into the sandy soil next to where the next post was going to be raised each time there was a post or beam ready to raise. Tom secured the block and tackle to the top of the Gin Pole. This was not going to be a speedy process!
Before this was going to happen however, Tom had to make sure the posts were the same length as several of them had rot at the bottom and had to be shortened. He also had to shave down the base of them to ft into a square he had cut into the sub-flooring so they wouldn’t move. And then he made sure each beam went in the right place…exactly as it had been in the Barth barn. I had carefully numbered each beam with screen tacks, and then made a diagram of how they were in the barn before we took it down, so we wouldn’t get this wrong. Every mortice and tenon joint had been hand made to fit in just one particular mortice, every wooden pin kept them tight.
When Tom was ready to raise a post or a beam up, he would holler to me from where I was washing beams below to come help, and the two of us pulled the rope on the block and tackle with all our might, slowly and carefully raising the beam into place. Then I would hold the rope steady, while Tom nailed diagonal supports to the flooring to hold the post up until he fitted the cross beams in place, and pounded in the wooden pin that would hold them together forever. One post came crashing down as we were raising it, sending us scrambling to get out of the way, but it didn’t split, and we escaped with our lives. It was a tremendous relief each time we successfully raised a beam without incident!
While Tom was getting more and more comfortable with the necessary heights, I was not. He jokingly called it his “Flying Wallendas” act when he climbed up to fit the cross beams on the posts, and later even higher to fit the rafters in place. The Flying Wallendas were a seventh-generation family of wire walkers who worked without a safety net. They experienced several falls over the years, including one in Detroit in 1962 during which they were in a pyramid formation on a high wire when it collapsed, sending two members to their deaths, while three others survived by hanging on to the wire. Those who survived returned to the wire the following night! This is the kind of bravery and confidence that Tom Mastick had!
The following spring of 1981, the third year we worked to move the Barth barn, Tom and I were finally ready to nail up up the original barn siding which had been stacked up in the woods with spaces for air around them under tarps for the last 2 years.
Again I was Tom’s ‘go-fer’, measuring the siding, cutting and handing it up piece by piece to Tom who stayed on the ladder, nailing it in place. He did that in a “reverse board and batten” pattern so the boards could dry out after it rained from both sides, rather than being nailed next to the underneath layer. (Later we found bats loved to hang out in there and had to make corrections). I came across one board with the initials R B that Janet’s father, Robert Barth had carved in the siding one day long ago, and saved it for the front corner. He had branded it as his own and it stayed that way.
I really wanted to finish the roof shingles before we quit for winter and November was coming. I knew it would go faster if I helped but heights were never my thing, so with some persuading by Tom (“You wouldn’t ask us to do anything you wouldn’t do, would you?”) I climbed up the ladder, without looking down, and hammered away right along with Tom right up to the peak of the three floor building. The snow was starting to fall. We swept the snow off the roof as we went, cut holes in the fingers of our gloves so we could hold the nails, and took warm up breaks when our fingers got numb, banging those nails in the wood shingles, knowing this was the last work until spring.
The following spring there was interesting finishing work to be done. First of all, I wanted to lay the stone so I wouldn’t have to look at the cement of the first floor walls anymore. Where would we get the stone? Tom offered to haul any we collected from the stones tossed to the side of the fields near his house as the farmers once did as they plowed their fields long ago. I needed helpers picking up all the stones I’d need. Everyone helped: family, visitors, and friends alike. I hired my two little boys and their friends to find buckets of “fist sized rocks” for me, paying “a nickel a bucket “ for each they gathered. They were hard workers for 7 and 9 year olds and they were happy as they raked in the cash. It was hot sweaty work, but doing it together and making ice cream money made it more fun.
We were lucky to have gotten some stained glass windows from a local farmer who had several stored gathering dust in his barn. After the Northport Methodist Church merged with Trinity Church in 1968, the Methodists moved many of their stained glass windows to Trinity before the building was taken down, leaving space for the new school. There were some windows that were leftover however. This good man, not wanting the remaining windows trashed, had saved them in his barn, but now needed the space. He practically gave them to us, bless his heart. They were tall and slim… and had cracked panes. Judy Mastick, Tom’s wife, was an artist who worked in stained glass. She was able to take the two broken windows and using the good glass from each, repair them so we had one beautiful window, which Tom carefully secured in place in the peak of the tall ceiling.
The front porch, (the manure pit on the barn once,) was rebuilt and did indeed make a fine front porch just as Tom had said it would. Tom then moved on to another barn reconstruction project, and it was up to me to finish the porch off. My sons, who had been following the project with interest, moved in to help. Mark was just 10 years old, but insisted he wanted to help put the wood shingles on the porch roof, and did, amazing me with his lack of fear of heights and sklll at hammering.
Just about the time we were wondering what to do about a kitchen, we got another treasure from our neighbor, Bob Bauer, nephew of the Bauer and Schram fishing partners, who once fished Omena Bay. They shipped their fish on ice in wooden boxes down to Chicago regularly, making their own boxes from the ample supply of timber in Omena by cutting the wood up in the sawmill they had built on their property next to their little house. The sawmill was tumbling down, and one day when Mr Bauer came up to sit and watch us work for a while, he told us about the piles of wood he had made tearing down the sawmill and said we could come down and help ourselves to anything we needed before he burned it. We were running out of siding at that time, so I gratefully went down to see what was there with my wheelbarrow, not expecting much. To my surprise, besides the siding we needed, I found a whole pile of old butcher block wood. I later found out, that they had gotten it from the ruins of the bowling alley floor after Omena Inn 1 burned, and had used for their flooring in their sawmill. I wanted it! Tom hauled it up to our building site in his truck.
I gave Andy Thomas the bowling alley wood and asked him to plane it and see if it would make a good counter top. Andy and Gloria were just starting up their Milling business in Northport. Andy got back to me with bad news. The old bowling alley wouldn’t make good counter tops because there was dirt ground into the cracks of the butcher block….but the good news was he could pull it apart, plane it, and make me kitchen cupboards out of it. So he did!
Life went on, my first husband died, and eventually I remarried to someone who grew up on a farm and loved my barn house. Ron Sutton planned a newer bigger kitchen for me, and our builders, Randy Gilmore’s crew, Coby Wilson and Ray, took the old butcher block boards apart, sanded them, and used the wood again (the 4th reincarnation) in my new cupboards. It was beautiful!
And that’s not all. There were 9 pitchforks in the barn, some with broken tines but most intact. Ron created a railing for our front porch out of them. The clever man also figured out how the old granary addition Randy Gillmore had put on the north side of the barn house (creating a mother-in-law room when it was needed) could be excavated and a couple more guest rooms and a bath added underneath. It meant more stone work for me, but made a wonderful needed addition
We never hung a swing from the loft like Janet had in the barn as a little girl, but we did have Janet over for dinner that first summer in our barn cottage. She looked around in disbelief, not saying a word. Then sat down to dinner. Thank you Janet!

All photos and quotes courtesy Lynn Spitznagel Suttons journal.

The Barth Barn and other interesting buildings that were moved will be featured in the coming exhibit at the Putnam Cloud Museum in Omena this summer. They are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the move of the museum itself from Villa Marquette to its location in the village.

Explore Omena and her rich history at https://omenapreservation.org