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My older sister, Mary, cooking on an oil stove circa 1950 before the cottage had a kitchen. Note oilcloth table covering and pails for well water behind her.
washing hands. Dishes washed in rainwater were rinsed in scalding water that had been heated in a kettle on the stove. We couldn’t (and didn’t) turn the trough over in the winter but covered it with something. The makeshift covering was not always effective in keeping out vermin. If we found a dead bat floating in the trough, a regular annual occurrence, we would dose the water with Clorox rather than waste it. It was never again used for drinking or cooking.
The main rooms in the cottage had small windows attached by hinges and fitted into 2x4-framed openings. You couldn’t really see much through these windows. To look out, you really had to go out onto the porch. These windows could at least be opened to allow better ventilation if the weather was warm. Sometime in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s, my brother decided we needed to replace the small window in the front of the living room
with two large casement windows, which brought in more light. Unfortunately, this didn’t improve the view from inside all that much because when you looked out the new, larger window, what you saw was mostly the under- side of the sagging porch roof and the side of a large cedar tree.
Electricity
Electricity came to the island in the 1950’s around the time the Mackinac Bridge opened. It was installed by the Edison Sault Electric Co., which operated a hydropower generation plant in Sault Ste. Marie using the flow from a canal that diverted water of the St. Mary’s River around the Soo locks and rapids. I haven’t been able to find the actual date the cottage got electricity, but I did find an Edison Sault notice of past-due charges dated September 1956. My guess is that my father, who could fix just about anything mechanical or electrical, was the one who electrified the cottage and installed the little fuse box, which had four screw-in 15-amp fuses. There also must have been a 220-volt line to the electric stove. He ran wires nailed to the joists with large brads to supply the lights and outlets in the four rooms. The attic got two overhead receptacles for bulbs and one outlet for plugging in a lamp. Lying in bed at night, we could now read the old magazines that had been brought to the cottage and left there: Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and a few Hollywood glamor magazines. I remember reading in particular the science fiction story in which, thanks to time travel, a hunter is taken back in time so that he can shoot a dinosaur, who was expected to die anyway. He accidentally kills a butterfly. When he returns to the present day, he finds that everything has changed as a result of the loss of that butterfly millions of years ago. I also remember reading up there the famous story, “I-80 Nebraska,” about mysterious things that happen to a
was covered with moss and quite slippery in the rain. As the shed settled or shifted, this back door would only open about 60 degrees before getting stuck on the wooden platform underneath. We didn’t have the energy or inclination to remove the boards and try to shift the underlying rocks to rebuild the platform so the door would open fully. Once wedged open, the door was equally hard to close. There was no doorknob or door frame, nor was there a proper latch to keep it closed. Instead, it was held closed by hasps both inside and out. We put a 10-penny nail in the inner one to hold the door closed and locked from the inside. A combination lock was used in the hasp on the outside when we closed the cottage up for the season. (This is the lock that suffered the bullet wound.)
Behind the cottage there was always a brace of 2x4’s nailed into two X’s to make a sawhorse on which logs were cut into firewood. Most of the time when I was growing up there was also a large, rustic worktable outside, its work surface consisting of 1 x 8” rough surface boards warped by the sun and rain. This was used for cleaning fish, making small repairs, and for holding the washtubs in which clothing was washed and small children were given baths in the sunlight.
Somewhere along the line, while I was fairly young, Uncle Bill installed a wide, shallow porcelain sink into the counter over the wood box in the shed. We replaced one of the rain barrels with a cattle trough, which we put on top of a wooden frame built high enough that we could attach a hose to the trough drain and thread it through the wall to a spigot over the sink. This would give us running water if we had enough rain to fill the trough. The arrangement worked for a few years, at least for
20 Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN SPRING 2022