the coops of port oneida, part four (dechow coops)

The next stop on the tour de coop was the Dechow Farm. This is one of the most impressive farms in Port Oneida, a status that is surely tied to the relatively good soil quality on the farm. The Dechows, and after them the Kletts, also seem to have been smart about how they used their land, devoting a lot of it to pasture for their cattle (which requires less fertile soil than field crops and which cattle happily convert to milk) and investing in a very advanced (for the day) milking operation. This farm was also in operation longer and later than many of the others, so a lot of the buildings are more "modern" and have had less time to decay. Walking around the farmyard, it is easy to "read" how the buildings were used. For views of the rest of the farm, check out the pictures at the link above. I was focused (perhaps a little obsessively) on chickens.

In addition to their milking operation, the Dechows/Kletts kept the most chickens of any family in Port Oneida. That is instantly apparent from the size of the first coop, which is variously referred to in the literature as a brooder and as the broiler (i.e., meat bird) coop. From across the yard, it is easy to spot. Distinctive coop architecture: check. Orientation to the south: check.

Coming around to the other side, lots of details confirm it as the coop.

Three pop doors in all, one peeking coyly from behind the gate to nowhere:

Another whose sill is worn in a pattern that tells of many years of chicken comings and goings:

The south-facing windows are still at least partly sheathed in chicken wire of various gauges and vintages:

Taking pictures through the windows is an exercise in approximation. The lens must be pressed flat against the glass, which severely limits the field of photographable vision. A free hand cupped around the lens helps to minimize glare. It took me several tries to capture a decent image, but finally I got an acceptable shot of what appears to be a couple of old brooder hoods:

I've never seen anything like this before, but my experience of brooding chicks tells me that this canvas(?) hood was fitted with lights for heat and would have been placed over a pen full of chicks to keep them warm. I love the slightly carnivalesque feeling of the tent-like hood. I also love the detail on the two cupolas:

A little searching yields an interesting site about the Hex Signs of the Pennsylvania Dutch and tells me the 8-pointed star proclaims abundance and good will for all. Good symbol for a coop!

The other coop stands behind the big barn and I'm embarrassed to say that on my first visit I was so taken with the first coop that I entirely overlooked the second. So much for my agri-anthro-archi-archaeological skills. But on a second visit, I make its acquaintance. Looking now at the photographs, I cut myself a little slack for having missed it. Aside from its south-facing orientation, it looks nothing like the rest of the Port Oneida coops and is practically barn-like in its scale.

It is much rougher than its mate and the pop doors are comparatively enormous. But a peek through a crack between door and jamb yields an only partially obscured view of a lovely old galvanized nesting box set-up:

While there, I paused to document the "hardware" on the door and noticed a massive number of bees swarming in through the crack.

A trans-window shot shows a rather clever roost, hinged so that it can be raised (as it is in the photo) to allow cleaning of the inevitably high-soil area underneath.

There is something especially poignant about the hardware on these old buildings. This was not on either of the coops, but I found it winsome:

Later on my first day of reconnaissance I paid a visit to the Kelderhouse/Port Oneida Cemetery. The names of the founding families appear regularly--like a rhythmic pulse--but forming different chords as they combine first with this family and then with another. I notice there are both Dechows and Dagos in the cemetery but I haven't encountered the Dagos in my research and I'm having trouble figuring out the ethnicity of that name. The mystery clears when I find a stone that combines both names:

Frederick and Fredericka Dechow travelled the same route as the Burfiends, leaving Germany in 1853 and stopping off in Buffalo before arriving in Michigan in 1857. Like the Burfiends, they started in a log cabin in a different spot on their property. Their grandson Frank, who by then had made the switch to Dago, built the current house in 1910. Twenty-five years later Frank Dago traded the farm, which then consisted of almost 300 unusually fertile acres, a lovely house, all the farm buildings and a sugar shack (don't get me started on the unparalleled deliciousness of Michigan maple syrup!)...in other words, paradise...for a gas station in Detroit. Yes, folks, you read that right.

I can only imagine that in 1935, farming must have seemed awfully hard and the rewards tenuous. The automobile was the future and a gas station was probably a very sound investment. The historical record is silent on what happened to poor Frank in the big city (although his brother's 1945 obit lists Frank as living in Detroit still) but the city slicker with whom he traded (Mr. McGaughlin) lasted only a few years in Port Oneida. In the late 1930s, Elmer Klett, who had been a farmhand for the Dechows, bought the property and improved it. The Kletts were the first Port Oneida family to have electricity--in 1941!

the coops of port oneida, part three (lawr coop)

By skipping straight to Orpha’s coop in my last post, I did the imaginative equivalent of going straight to dessert without eating dinner. But I think (hope) everyone would agree that Orpha’s story warrants a special place in the telling of the Coops of Port Oneida. I’m certain that all the other coops in Port Oneida and their families have similarly compelling stories, but those are stories I have yet to learn. I already feel as though I’ve fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole in the past week. It seems I could go on immersing myself in the history and current state of this place for weeks and weeks, always uncovering new details and never tiring of it. In fact, I fantasize about what it would be like to spend an entire rotation of seasons in Port Oneida…

On the day that I set aside to explore the coops of Port Oneida, I started back at the first farm we explored when we were just discovering Port Oneida, the one built by George and Louisa (Burfiend) Lawr. The Lawrs took ownership of this 120-acre farm in 1889, acquiring part of it from Thomas Kelderhouse’s son. They farmed it until 1945, after which the farm was owned by a couple different families and then the federal government. According to the park service report, all the buildings date from the 1890s. The chicken coop is a classic shed style and on the morning I drove up to the farm it was basking in its southern and eastern exposure.

As with Orpha’s coop, the outline of the pop door is clearly visible. That opening also reveals remnants of asphalt siding; the coop was restored some years ago and I speculate that new wood siding was placed over existing asphalt in an effort to restore the look of the coop to what it once would have been. 

But that siding has now become quite weathered and warped.

The coop rests on a foundation of multi-colored granite boulders, some of which are mortared together but most of which have lost their connection to their fellows. 

Granite boulder construction is idiomatic here in northern Michigan and the same rocks show up in the foundation of the Ole Oleson barn,

the Schmidt house:

and the relatively whimsical porch of the Martin Basch house.

Small bits of the same colorful granite, rounded smooth by the water into so many little Easter eggs, wash ashore along the beaches of Port Oneida and make their way, ahem, into the bathing suit pockets and backpacks of certain boyish rock hounds.

Before leaving the Lawr farmstead, I walked around the barn and was pleased to see the roof has recently been replaced.

Looking back towards the barn and coop from in front of the house, the lines, colors and textures of the materials appear to have been artfully placed for maximum aesthetic enjoyment, but I know that in reality, their placement was purely a matter of function. Still…

the coops of port oneida, part two (orpha's coop)

I said before that the story of Port Oneida is a quintessential pioneer story. Given the nearly hundred-year scope of the formative era of Port Oneida, it is also, of course, the story of the second and third generations, which followed the original settlers in quick succession. As you might expect in a small, relatively isolated farming community where each family was dependent on its neighbors, families were knit together through the generations by marriage. Carsten and Eliza Burfiend’s children were among the main strands of second-generation Port Oneida. Magdalena, the daughter who was born in Buffalo and waited there with her mother until summoned to the shores of Lake Michigan by Carsten, went on to marry Ole Olsen, who had emigrated from Norway. Their farm can still be seen at the eastern end of Kelderhouse Road and there are several outbuildings remaining there, among them several apparently intended for poultry. Ole and Magdalena in turn gave birth to Charles Olsen, who together with his wife Hattie built the farm that stands (sans a coop) near the southwest corner of Port Oneida. Carsten and Eliza’s fourth child (and third daughter) Elizabeth Louise, married Scottish immigrant George Lawr and they built the farm my family explored on our first visit to Port Oneida (and which still retains a lovely chicken coop). Peter Burfiend, who was Carsten and Eliza’s sixth child, married Jennette (Jenny) Goffar, who had grown up on the farm at the southeast corner of Port Oneida, at the edge of Narada Lake. Together they built a cabin and farm along Basch Road. Peter and Jenny gave birth to five children of their own, including Howard, who brought into the family by marriage the individual who has captivated my imagination and whose home and coop I was most eager to see. But first, just a little more background.

The home in which Carsten and Eliza first lived when they arrived in 1852 was built of logs and stood on a bluff overlooking the lake and across the Straits of Manitou to the islands. Legend has it that their original cabin stood directly on the beach until it was dashed to bits in a storm, but the Burfiend descendents (and common sense) insist that is an apocryphal tale and I can’t imagine solid-looking Eliza consenting to any such placement for her home in the New World. Neither the apocryphal cabin nor the one on the bluff remain, although a clump of lilacs marks the spot of the bluff cabin. What does remain is the solid but largely nondescript house Peter built for the family when he and Jenny returned to Peter’s “home place” in about 1893 to help his aging parents work their land.

In 1926, at the age of 29, Peter and Jenny’s only son Howard married Orpha Fralick and brought her home to live with his parents (Carsten and Eliza being long gone by then). Orpha was 31 at the time of her marriage, a teacher and the first female superintendent of schools in nearby Glen Arbor. Orpha’s parents, George and Minerva, lived in Maple City where her father was a well-loved country doctor who famously, when he developed lip cancer, operated on it himself and then sensibly quit his pipe-smoking. George Fralick also owned the first car in Leelanau County, known as the “Red Devil”.

Howard and Orpha’s wedding picture shows them standing side by side in front of a cypress-sided building with a stone foundation. Howard, facing the camera squarely in black tie, looks serious but well-pleased. Orpha wears a drop-waist Battenburg lace dress adorned at the hip with a bundle of lilacs also tied with lace. She wears her cropped hair in a finger wave and a small strand of pearls around her neck. She gazes at the camera through small oval spectacles with a whimsical half-smile, her right arm angled out from her body as if to steady herself on some unseen rail.

In 1930, with daughter number two either just arrived or on the way, Howard and Orpha hired a Leelanau contractor to build them a house across the yard from Peter and Jenny’s. It came equipped with the great luxury of hot running water! 

A picture from that year shows Orpha seated on a porch holding the infant Beck (short for Rebecca) on her lap while embracing 3-year-old Agnes. Orpha’s arms form a circle around her children; her broad, long-fingered hands are fanned out, the right one cradling Beck and the left drawing Agnes to her. Orpha’s head is bowed over her children and she watches with a tender expression as Agnes appears to offer something (a cherry?) to Beck. The small wire-rimmed spectacles have been replaced with dark-rimmed glasses ala Shostakovich. Both mother and elder daughter wear thick stockings and black leather lace-up shoes. The photo has all the grace of an old master Madonna and child and captures a moment of deep contentment.

I have spent a lot of time looking at these two photos of Orpha and contemplating how this very modern, professional “city” girl chose to become a farm wife and mother. I suppose one might also ask why Howard chose to marry a professional woman two years his senior and a relative old maid in a time when women often married at 19.  In my reading, I’ve found several clues. Together, Howard and Orpha turned the Burfiend farm into “the largest and most prosperous farm in the Port Oneida area—303 acres supporting 25 Guernsey cows” and the area’s first Grade A dairy. Orpha continued to teach, even as she raised her five children (the last of which was born when she was 42!), gardened, baked seven loaves of bread at a whack and put up hundreds of cans of food for the winter—among hundreds of other, unenumerated tasks. Howard and Orpha, it turns out, were a thoroughly modern and very smart power couple. How they met is a mystery to me, but they must have recognized in each other similar drive and intelligence. Whatever chance they took in forming their alliance, it clearly paid great dividends. And despite her seemingly endless toil, the remarkable Orpha lived to be 96, dying only in 1991.

On the day that I set out to visit the coops of Port Oneida I was not sure whether I’d find a coop still standing at the Burfiends’ place. A fire in the 1980s destroyed the barn and silo but other outbuildings remain. Perhaps this is the moment for a primer in spotting disused chicken coops (the ones currently in use tend to be easier to spot) in their natural state. Chicken coops of the general period with which we are here concerned tend to follow a certain architectural model, one that will soon be familiar to all of you. It's a model which tends to leave the front wall higher than the rear with either a flat but angled shed roof:

or a peaked roof with the peak closer to the front side of the coop than the back:

As you may recall me mentioning once before, the most desirable orientation for a chicken coop is to the south and I have planned windows on my own coop that will admit sun from the couth and east. One of the many books I have accumulated, a reprint of a 1924 classic called “Modern Fresh Air Poultry Houses” advises at page 29: “As a general rule the house should face south or a little east of south, so that the interior can be well sunned at all seasons.” [just for the record, you can open this book to any page and find gems of such quality]

In my travels this week, I have been acutely aware of directionality and on the lookout, not only in Port Oneida but throughout the region, for small shed-like buildings oriented to the south. Using this formula, I have spotted many an old coop. The coops of Port Oneida did not disappoint in this regard—every single extant coop faces south and follows the same general architectural model. But you’ll see.

Arriving at what I have come to think of as Orpha’s place, I stepped out of the car to the sounds and smells of Lake Michigan, which is just down the bluff from her house. Several turkey vultures perched ominously on the ridgeline of the roof and in the nearby trees but flew off as I approached. Their presence was a visible manifestation of the slight (semi-rational) anxiety I always feel about what I might find lurking around these ghost farms. I had the place entirely to myself. It being lunch time, I first settled on Orpha’s front porch with the sandwich I’d packed (I didn’t think she’d mind, although she would likely have put me to work), savoring the cool breeze off the lake. 

The sound of the waves was regular and insistent but I imagined it overlaid with the bustle of the house as it must have been in the 1930s. Lilac bushes (the ubiquitous marker of domesticity in Port Oneida) and apple trees dotted the yard and a row of large trees on the western edge of the yard marked the line where the original Port Oneida Road had run—along the bluff edge—and formed a windbreak.

Lunch finished, I headed across the road where the farm buildings were moved in 1930 when Howard and Orpha built their house. The stone foundation of the barn and silo remain,

as do a corn crib/granary

machine shed and butchering shed. And there, between the barn foundation and the machine shed, is the coop--right shape, right orientation! I was giddy with the thrill of discovery.

Walking around it and peering through the foggy windows I found further confirmation of its coop-ness:

remnants of the "pop door" through which chickens could come and go

old wooden nesting boxes

roosts and dropping boards, through ancient chicken wire

I felt deeply satisfied. This was the home of Orpha's chickens, who doubtless provided hundreds of dozens of eggs that helped keep Orpha and her family well-nourished. I was nearly ready to walk away when I spotted it, behind the machine shed:

Much smaller than the main coop, this was the brooder coop, where baby chicks were hatched or placed after being ordered and raised up until they were big enough to mingle with the existing flock. Its small size allowed it to be transported up near the farmhouse when the chicks were small, much like we kept our babies in our living room in order to keep a close eye on them. And unlike Orpha's main coop, the brooder was unlocked!

roosts in the brooder

pop door interior

pop door exterior detail

Which brings me to a complicating factor. One of the books I have pictures this exact brooder in a terrible state of decay. Today, it has clearly been restored and outfitted with a new, old-fashioned roost. Many of the buildings in Port Oneida have been or are in the process of being similarly restored. In every case I've seen, the restoration respects the original construction, but no restoration can be 100% true to the original. I am torn between relief that the buildings are being saved and dismay that in order to truly observe Port Oneida as it was I now have to "read" the original architecture through a scrim or theatrical "gel" of modern restoration that has been overlaid upon it. This is a fundamental dilemma of historic preservation, I suspect, and one that will color all of my explorations on Port Oneida. But all the same, I came away from Orpha's coop feeling I've had a visit with a great woman--and her chickens!

the coops of port oneida, part one

There is no place on earth I love more than the Port Oneida Rural Historic District. There is a small handful of places I love about as much (including the one from which I write this, overlooking Green Lake) and another handful of beloved places that exist only in memory (e.g., the attic playroom of 4405 Drury Lane circa 1971, my grandparents’ patio circa 1972, Room 424A at the Eastman dorm circa 1985). But for reasons I’m still working to articulate, Port Oneida holds a unique place in my heart.

Port Oneida is a nubbin of land that curves out into Lake Michigan, one of the fingertips of the Michigan mitten, with Sleeping Bear Bay on one side and Good Harbor Bay on the other. Directly off its western shore lie the two bear cubs of the Sleeping Bear legend, North and South Manitou Islands. Although I invited recommendations from friends for summer reading before I left on this vacation, what I have ended up actually reading has been an incredible 240-page report (407 if you count the appendices and bibliography) by the Midwest Regional Office of the National Park Service from 1995. Called “Farming at the Water’s Edge,” it is an extensive history of Port Oneida and (as the glazed looks of those with whom I have conversed this week attest) I have completely immersed myself in it and a number of other resource materials about this extraordinary place.

I have never considered myself a historian and only took history courses in high school because they were required to graduate. As a result, my knowledge of history is (severely) limited to “The Civil War” and “The Gilded Age” (thank you Interlochen Arts Academy) and even then I have only the vaguest notion of important battles and laissez-faire economics. I hate dates with a passion but I do love good stories and, in my opinion, the story of Port Oneida is a good one, albeit not the stuff of high drama writ large on the world stage. The story of Port Oneida is one of ordinary folk who traveled an ocean in search of something more, who settled in an unlikely corner of the world and applied the skills they brought with them together with some they picked up along the way, who wrested a decent life from the land and waters for themselves and their burgeoning families, and who did so in large part by working cooperatively. It’s a quintessential pioneer story and for a girl whose first chapter book at the age of 6 was Little House in the Big Woods, it’s my kind of story.

Port Oneida was settled by Europeans in the 1850s, although aboriginal peoples occupied the area as far back as 9000 BC in temporary seasonal villages, growing corn and other crops and fishing the sheltered waters between the mainland and the islands. The topography of the land was shaped by glaciers, which receded 11,000 years ago leaving moraines and bluffs along with low-lying areas that were largely covered with water for several hundred additional years. The Port Oneida historic district is bounded by Lake Michigan on the north and west sides and by high wooded ridges to the south and east. There is one real lake and some ponds and marshy areas, which have been expanded by beavers over the years. Most of the terrain is meadows and rolling hills, a mix of woodlands and open spaces.

The engine that drove the early development of what became Port Oneida was lumbering and, to a lesser extent, fishing. Carsten Burfiend, the first to purchase land on what was then called Pyramid Point when Michigan was opened for settlement in 1852, arrived from Hanover by way of Buffalo (where he dropped off his wife Elizabeth and young daughter Magdalena) and South Manitou (where he lumbered and fished for at least a couple years before sending for Elizabeth and Magdalena). In Pyramid Point, Carsten continued to fish but in order to put food on the table for his growing family (11 children in all), he and Eliza (along with every family that subsequently settled there) also farmed the land.

In 1861, savvy South Manitou businessman Thomas Kelderhouse convinced Carsten Burfiend to cede him 177 acres on the west shore of Pyramid Point, in exchange for which Kelderhouse would build a dock. Kelderhouse was true to his word and the dock was finished in 1862. I had always assumed the name Port Oneida had some native connection but in seemingly random fashion, the settlement was named for one of the first ships to dock there, the SS Oneida. I’m sure it must have been a big day. 

The dock further facilitated and encouraged the deforestation of the mainland, largely to provide cordwood to power the shipping industry. The dock was at the economic heart of the community, with a sawmill, blacksmith shop, boarding house and general store/post office all springing up nearby. But the heyday of Port Oneida lumbering was short-lived. By the 1890s the timber resources were depleted and steamships were switching to coal. By 1908, the town-site buildings were abandoned. A school and church remained and the community members continued to farm and fish, working in other industries to supplement their subsistence farming, until about the middle of the 20^th century.

In 1860, the census reported 87 residents of Port Oneida. Population peaked in 1910 with 224 residents, dropping to 170 in 1920. Although farming was always marginal in Port Oneida, the Great Depression took a heavy toll on this community and it really never recovered. Many family members moved to more urban communities in the 1950s and 60s. Fortunately for us, this land was never a good candidate for modern large-scale monoculture so when subsistence farming became no longer viable or attractive, people simply left. In 1970, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was established and more families sold their property to the government. Some farmsteads continued to be inhabited and a couple still are today. But—and this is a huge part of what makes Port Oneida so special—the vast majority of the properties within the district are uninhabited, left as they were when the last residents departed, generally between 1940 and 1970. There is currently a study underway to determine a plan for future use of the district, but for many years the Park Service has maintained the shells of these buildings and mowed around them and in the former pastures to preserve the rural agricultural character of the community.

Which brings me to my more personal experience of the place. A few summers ago, on one of Hank’s and Max’s days off, we set off on a family outing, in search of a new adventure. I must have read somewhere about Port Oneida and so we pointed the car in that direction. With the passage of time and so many intervening visits, I’m a little fuzzy on the details of that first visit but I remember vividly the sense of having stumbled upon a place that had been suspended in time and largely forgotten. Which is what it was, for the most part. It’s a slightly disconcerting experience to pull your very 21^st century car into the yard of a farm that, aside from your presence, appears to have been completely abandoned sometime in the middle of the last century. Yes, the mowing seemed to have been magically done and yes, the paint had clearly been freshened and the roof maintained in the years since the occupants moved out, but aside from these bare-minimum efforts at preservation, Port Oneida felt (and feels) like what it is—a ghost town. In a way, the invisible presence of the mower and the roofer, like some kind of deus ex machina, only added to the spookiness of the place. Everything was locked up tight, but it was possible to stand on tiptoe and peer through hazy windows or to put an eye up to a crack between rough barn siding boards and make out the contours of the spaces within. On that first visit we explored the Lawr farm, which belonged to one of Carsten and Eliza’s daughters and her husband. 

remnants of the apple orchard at the Lawr Farm

We also, after driving around a bit, discovered a little gravel road that led straight west, ending on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Finding a rough stair of branches and roots and nothing to indicate this was anything other than part of the National Lakeshore (well, finding nothing at all, really), we ambled down on to what has since become “our” beach and one we generally have to share with only one or two other families on the days we visit. Last summer we learned for the first time that “our” beach is only a little south of where the original Port Oneida dock stood.

So what, you are all wondering, does any of this have to do with chickens and why am I writing about it here?

An important part of subsistence farming, as it has been practiced in these parts and most parts of the world, really, has been the raising of chickens for both meat and eggs. As I began to think about visiting Port Oneida again this summer, I also began to wonder how many of the old chicken coops remained standing. A little research revealed that at least a few did. And so I began to think: what better way to spend a vacation day than tramping about one of my favorite places, checking out—and photographing—chicken architecture? And, of course, writing about it all here.

As with so many things I undertake, what I first imagined as a simple day-long excursion has turned into a project with multiple visits and lots of research, including the 407-page park service report. As it turns out, there is evidence of chicken habitation at many of the farms and placing the chickens in context required getting to know the families who cared for and benefitted from them. I suppose there are lots of folks who would feel put out about spending most of a vacation reading about an obscure group of farmers from a hundred years ago and poking around the moldering remains of their farmsteads and gravesites, camera in hand. But I’ve been happy as a clam this week and I can’t wait to share the fruits of my folly, er, labor with all of you! And of course, it hasn’t been all research and field visits. There has been plenty of good eating, socializing and concert-going in the mix.

Standing in the Port Oneida cemetery in front of Thomas Kelderhouse's grave, near the southwest corner of the district, the only visible signs of modernity are the paved highway M-22 and the power lines that stitch across the valley (oh, and the plastic flowers).

In anticipation of the next posts, which will detail the coops at each farm where they can be found, I leave you with this somewhat academic, but right on the mark, description from the park service report (Chapter 7: Port Oneida’s Sense of Place):

Although Port Oneida’s overall landscape character, and the array of individual landscape features that contribute to its character, have been described in detail in the preceding chapters, it is important to recognize the collective sensory impact of this landscape. The wooded ridges provide a “natural” frame for every view within and out of the district, thereby shielding the eye and mind from the contemporary landscape. The open fields interspersed with small deciduous woodlots, coniferous windbreaks, and wooded wetlands, are the manifestation of a century of human activity. The former agricultural landscape provides a sense of intimacy which is created by the close relationship of Port Oneida’s essential built and landscape features, such as its modest fields, aging farm houses, barns, and outbuildings, and the remaining orchards, sugar maple rows, and ornamental plantings. This sense of intimacy is rare in the surrounding area, which sharply contrasts with Port Oneida due to the almost overwhelming presence of seasonal tourists and their automobiles and condominiums, along with gift shops and other commercial ventures.

Next (first) stop: the Burfiend coop!

the happy hen house farm

One of the things I love best about my annual visit to Interlochen is the opportunity it gives me to check in with the local food scene. The year it was published, I spent much of my Interlochen week reading Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle from cover to cover and the rest of the time scouring the local farmers markets and turning out pretty delicious (if I do say so…) local meals in our tiny cabin kitchen. That was four years ago and the local food scene was really taking off. Food has always been an important part of local culture, from the springtime morel harvest to the fresh lake fish to the abundant orchard fruits to the marvelous lake effect vineyards on the Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas. (More on the agricultural heritage of this area to follow in another post!) These days, you can visit a local farmers market any day of the week if you’re willing to drive a few miles. The list of restaurants focusing on local, sustainable food products is long enough that you could easily get through an entire vacation of lunches and dinners and never eat local at the same place twice.

The closest of the farmers markets takes place every Sunday morning in the parking lot of Earth and Hearth, a health food/sandwich shop on M-137 south of Interlochen Corners. It generally draws only a few vendors, but Hank and I always make a point of paying it a visit on my first Sunday more as a gesture of support for the venture than as an efficient means of stocking up. There is always at least one maple syrup vendor, a honey and honey products vendor, berry growers and a guy who sells plant and worm castings. Sometimes there are a few veggies: mostly greens, new potatoes, radishes this time of year.

I can always tell what the weather has been by where we are in berry season when I arrive. Ideally, we catch the last days of strawberry season and the beginning of blueberries and cherries. This, it turns out, is a pretty ideal year.

"...picked last evening..."

Last Sunday, this is what greeted us when we stepped out of the car. The vendor also had jugs of maple syrup and bins of fleshy spring onions. While he and Hank talked maple syrup (and Hank purchased a gallon jug) I photographed the strawberries and onions.

Two quarts and two bunches later, we moved along.

Looking around, we spotted her: a pink-faced, sturdy woman in an apron, standing between the bed of a pick-up truck stacked with egg cartons and a display table lain with brochures and an open carton of multi-colored (blown out) eggs! Great excitement! Hank and I made a beeline for her and immediately struck up a conversation. Lorie (short for Hannelore) told us that she had been raising chickens since last spring and had about 50 of them. I shared a little of my sad tale with her and she reciprocated with some stories of her own.

The Happy Hen House Farm is based in a barn that once housed Clydesdales. Lorie has turned over four stalls (so far) to her girls. She also built them a fenced run much bigger than most chickens ever enjoy, but when her flock quickly devoured all the grass in the run, she let them range freely in the surrounding pasture as well. Which was fine, except the girls also liked to “play” in the adjacent woods, eating bugs and tender understory plants. One afternoon, Lorie heard a commotion and went out to check, arriving in time to observe a coyote lunge out of the woods, grab a bird, and leap back into the dark of the woods, all within about 15 feet of where she stood. Lorie realized that the coyote now had its dinner and was unlikely to kill again that day and she despaired of ever getting all the chickens back into the barn (herding them is not so easy, although they do naturally “come home to roost” at nightfall). So she left the flock where they were and went off to consider what to do about giving them the grazing they needed while keeping them safe. Not too long after, she heard another commotion. This time, she arrived to see what she described as “the most beautiful red fox” execute, essentially, a repeat performance of the coyote’s act. I guess word gets around when there’s a new restaurant in town. 

[Side note: Hank and I have encountered a few red foxes both in the wild and on our evening perambulations and have been completely blown away by their beauty and unique energy. In fact, one crossed the road in front of me today as I left Lorie's place and I stopped to look after it as it trotted into the woods, eyeing me with a kind of wary bravado. So I completely understood how Lorie could be so glowing in her description of the fox while recounting his destruction of one of her birds. And hearing her talk about it that way, I knew Lorie was a kindred spirit.]

So, Lorie related, she and her husband rented a trencher (!) and spent a thousand dollars (!!!) on fencing to give her hens about an acre and a half of fully fenced pasture to call their very own. This is when I really knew we were kindred spirits. The final dollar figure for my total investment in coop and run will follow me to my grave, although, as Hank exclaimed (with some relief), “Wow! She’s got us beat!” Of course, she’s also got a lot more birds. Naturally, I asked Lorie if I could pay her a visit and check out her set-up. And just as naturally, she warmly encouraged me to come out. After picking up a dozen eggs and a quart of fresh local blueberries, Hank and I headed back to the cabin for breakfast:

Yum!

This morning, after calling to confirm she’d be there and up for visitors, I headed south through Karlin, toward Copemish. The Happy Hen House brochure included a handy map that made it look very convenient. What the brochure doesn’t reveal is the fact that the last couple of miles are travelled on a winding dirt road over rolling hills that had me thinking apprehensively about what the winter driving must be like. The views, of mixed pasture and woods, are lovely and the sense of isolation and calm are extreme. It’s not for everyone to live like this, but, as Michael Pollan says, describing a scene of “meadows dotted with contented animals, the backdrop of woods, a twisting brook threading through it all” in his excellent book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (this summer’s reading),  “[o]ur culture, perhaps even our biology, disposes us to respond to just such a grassy middle landscape, suspended as it is halfway between the wilderness of forest and the artifice of civilization.” Personally, I think we’re hardwired to be drawn to such a mixed landscape because we intuitively know that’s where we’ll likely find the greatest diversity and abundance of foodstuffs.

As I pulled in, I could see the barn and chicken pens ahead. Lorie showed me around her vegetable gardens first: beds full of cabbages and potatoes; rows of tomatoes growing side-by side with basil and parsley; sequential rows of cucurbits with cucumbers giving way to scallop squash giving way to acorn and butternut squash; a row of poblano peppers and one of sweet peppers; and more cabbages! 

The garden is only for her and her husband’s consumption, she tells me, and for her girls. For a moment I think she must be referring to adult daughters who live nearby but then I realize she is talking about the hens. When I ask her whether she plans to make sauerkraut with all that cabbage, she says no, they can get excellent artificial preservative-free kraut locally but she plans to try putting the heads of green cabbage in her cellar and storing them to use as winter “toys” for the chickens. Winters are long up here and bored hens apparently love nothing more than an entire head of cabbage or a halved winter squash to occupy them when the snow (which they disdain) has covered their regular forage space. A winter squash will be reduced to a paper-thin shell when a flock of hens has finished with it, she tells me. We stand in the garden, discussing animal manure as fertilizer, companion planting and Eliot Coleman. After admiring the raspberry bushes and the herbs, we move on to the main event.

Let me just say this up front: if I ever have the opportunity to return to this earth as a chicken, I dearly hope I’ve earned the privilege of doing so at the Happy Hen House Farm. “House” really doesn’t do it justice. As a former home for Clydesdales, Lorie’s two-story barn is capacious and each former stall is a “house” unto itself. Lorie has three stalls on the south side of the barn dedicated to most of her flock and a fourth on the north side for her “broodies”, the hens that want to sit their eggs and hatch them. One stall is set aside as the infirmary/nursery, where the less-well-adjusted and arthritic mix with the newly-added juveniles. A second stall is the quiet room, outfitted with an impressive array of nesting boxes and perches.

The third stall is an all-purpose day room with a cut-out door to access the quiet room.

From these rooms, the hens can range freely out into the enormous pasture and are safe from ground predators thanks to a 6-foot fence, sunk one foot into the ground. There is no barrier to protect against aerial predators like hawks, but Lorie has that covered with two guineas, which she refers to as chicken police. Guineas will sound the alarm at the first sign of an aerial predator and send the entire flock running for cover in the barn. It must work, because Lorie hasn’t lost a bird to a hawk yet.

A beautiful Golden Laced Wyandotte

In addition to her chickens, Lorie and her husband Harold, both retired from management jobs with Chrysler, are raising ten pigs “for the freezer” for themselves and several friends. They have been assigned yet another stall and a pen of their own, although they get visits from a couple of the hens, the Araucanas in particular. The pigs, too, look utterly contented, snuffling and rooting in the soft dirt of their pen.

At Chrysler, Lorie and Harold helped set up new manufacturing operations and change-overs from one product line to another, so it doesn’t surprise me that she has a very methodical approach to raising chickens. She has read extensively on the subject and keeps track of their production. She calculates that based on the breeds she has, she should be expecting an average of .67 eggs per hen per day. At a rate of about 30 eggs a day for her flock of 50, she’s about on target. We talk frankly about how long her (and my future) hens are likely to lay (2-5 years, depending) and what to do with them afterwards (some live to be 15!). Will they be too old to eat by the time they're done laying, I wonder. “I imagine a chicken of any age would make a pretty good soup,” she observes. I think she’s right, although I expect I’d have a very hard time butchering one of my own hens. But when the time comes, I hope I will have the fortitude to do so, and to make an exquisite broth with her.

With any luck, that broth will be as good as the one that infused the risotto Hank and I enjoyed last night at the Cook’s House in Traverse City. We finally set aside an evening to celebrate our 19^th wedding anniversary and lucked into a reservation at this tiny, "90% local and sustainable" restaurant. We were seated next to a refrigerated display case separating the kitchen from the dining room and brimming with cartons of local eggs, small deep red strawberries and glass bottles of Shetler’s milk and heavy cream ("Our cows aren't on Drugs, But they are on Grass"). We opted for the five-course tasting menu with wine pairings and never looked back. Although it was all exquisitely done and delicious, highlights included a pureed asparagus soup with bits of shitake mushroom, the afore-mentioned risotto with shreds of slow-roasted lamb and spinach chiffonade and a duck egg crème brulee. The wines, a mix of far-flung unique varietals and local gems, were also first rate.

After dinner, we walked off a few of the calories and a bit of the wine by meandering around the neighborhood of mostly Victorian-era homes to the south of the restaurant. In the course of that walk, I spied, from across a street and through a fence (that’s just how good--or obsessed--I am these days), the tell-tale signs of chickens in the backyard of a particularly grand Victorian dame. In a coop outfitted to match, reside at least a dozen mixed young hens, all clearly hatched this spring and still growing.

The sight of it made me itch to get back to work on my coop and run, readying it for our new flock. As I told Lorie when I left her idyllic spot this morning, I look forward to visiting with her again next year and seeing her progress. And perhaps I’ll have some happy hen house stories of my own by then!