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Going to The Cottage
By Richard E. Burney
Our family has had a summer cottage in the Les Cheneaux Islands in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for over 80 years. It has always been called “the Cottage;” it has never had another more fanciful or creative name. All such cottages, if in the family long enough, become the subject of family lore: the accumu- lation of stories passed down by word of mouth, occa- sionally embellished by imperfect memory, sometimes supported by facts and historical evidence.
What follows is an attempt to record some of our cottage history while memory serves. The family mem- bers that were there from the beginning, my grandmoth- er, my mother and father, my two uncles, have unfortu- nately all died. There are some old photographs to go on but there is very little in the way of actual historical docu- mentation.
Every visit to the cottage was an adventure, starting with the trip north.
The Setting
The Les Cheneaux Islands were formed along the southern shore of the eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan at the end of the ice age. As the glaciers receded, they deposited piles of rock and debris along
the way. The Great Lakes formed and turned these piles into rock-strewn islands, which over time became forested. After the Civil War, loggers clear-cut all the hardwood and white pine in the region. The denuded, devalued land was purchased by entrepreneurs, who built hotels, and by wealthy individuals from Chicago, Detroit, and other Midwestern cities, who wishing to escape the heat of the cities and to find air that was fresh and pollen-free, built summer homes there beginning at the turn of the 20th century. The fishing was good. The other thing that attracted people to the Les Cheneaux area was the sheer beauty of the place. Its early history is recounted in Philip Pittman’s book, The Les Cheneaux Chronicles, which he wrote in celebration of the area’s centennial in 1984.
The Trip North in the 1940’s and 1950’s
Trips to the cottage when I was growing up were always eagerly anticipated, but rarely planned. My father was self-employed in the refrigeration repair business and the normal summer vacation season, when people headed north for cooler weather and clearer air, was also the time of year when he had the most work to do. As a result, our trips to the cottage often took place after Labor Day. (The school we attended in those days didn’t
14 Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN FALL 2021