News

On Leelanau, Omena celebrates historic designation

By |

By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — The Leelanau Peninsula hamlet of Omena — with its remnants of a once-popular summer resort, an 1853 church and the pilings of long-gone docks that once welcomed boatloads of tourists — has earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Designation of the Omena Historic District reflects its legacy as a resort area, a mission to convert Native Americans to Christianity, a productive agricultural area and a Lake Michigan harbor. “Most of Omena’s buildings are still in use as originally intended, some still in the same family ownership since the 1800s,” according to the nomination documents. “Omena’s changes have been adaptations built upon its existing structure, and the village has not suffered the eradication, wasteful misuse of resources and reconstruction that is so common in this country.”
Marsha Buehler, an Omena Historical Society board member who spearheaded the nomination, said, “We’ve got this little gem, a cluster of buildings on a bend in the road. It looks very much like it did at the turn of the 20th century.”
The National Register is “the official list of the nation’s historic places worthy of preservation,” says the National Park Service, which administers the program.

Agriculture

Two sites in UP classified as Historic Places

By |

By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — Two Upper Peninsula sites have been added to the National Register of Historic Places– one culturally important to members of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and the other related to a strike important to labor and women’s history. Rice Bay in Gogebic County is a traditional wild rice-growing area covering a quarter-mile-square on northeastern Lac Vieux Desert, a lake straddling the Michigan-Wisconsin border. And the 128-year-old Braastad-Gossard Building in downtown Ishpeming served as a department store and a factory that manufactured women’s undergarments before being renovated for an interior mall and offices. “The National Register is the official list of the nation’s historic places worthy of preservation,” according to the National Park Service, which administers the program. Lac Vieux Desert is the headwaters of the Wisconsin River, and most Michigan wild rice sites are within 10 miles of the state border.