Plat of Big Beaver Island, 1901

Summary

The single most detailed map of Beaver Island’s land ownership the archive holds for the nineteenth or early twentieth century: a double-page spread from the 1901 Myers plat book, naming the owner and acreage of essentially every parcel on the island, from the light station on the south point to the Portage at the north end. Roughly three hundred parcel labels are legible on it.

It is one image in the scan — image 30 of 46 — and two printed pages, folios 30 and 31, whose numbers are engraved in the outer top corners. It is held as a 600 ppi bitonal master at 17,561 × 10,676 px and, separately, as the University of Michigan’s continuous-tone colour scan of the same leaf.

The sheet

The title cartouche sits centre-top of the right-hand leaf, between two compass roses:

PLAT OF BIG BEAVER ISLAND OF THE MICHIGAN MERIDIAN CHARLEVOIX CO. MICH.

with the two civil townships headed separately —

PEAINE — T. 37 & 38 N., R. 10 & 11 W. ST. JAMES — T. 39 N., R. 10 W.

— and RANGE LINE. drawn down the sheet with R. 11 W. and R. 10 W. either side. LAKE MICHIGAN is set three times in the surrounding water.

No scale statement is legible on this sheet. The sibling Garden Island plate carries “Scale 2 Inches to the Mile” in the equivalent position; here that position is covered by the stamps described below, so whether one was printed cannot be determined from this copy. The volume’s cataloguing record gives the book’s scale as 1:31,680 — two inches to the mile — for the atlas as a whole.

The explanations panel

Printed at the top right, and the reason this sheet is a transport and settlement document as well as a cadastral one:

EXPLANATIONS. Section Line Farm Line Wagon Road Rail Road Proposed Rail Road Streams & Springs Churches, School & Farm Houses &c. Number of acres … 80 43 160 Section Numbers … 16 30 36 Adjacent Lands owned by same party connected by a hook thus

A wagon road is drawn as two parallel rules; a rail road as a single cross-tied rule; a proposed rail road as a single long-dashed rule; buildings as small filled squares.

What the legend promises and the sheet does not deliver

No built rail road appears anywhere on the island, and the cross-tied symbol occurs nowhere on the sheet. That is consistent with the island’s own history: the Beaver Island Lumber Company was organised in December 1902 and began operating in June 1903, moving timber to St. James by narrow-gauge railway — a year and more after this plate was drawn. A stock publisher’s legend carries the symbol whether or not the county needs it.

Nor is any line confidently identifiable as the “Proposed Rail Road.” A long route does run from McFadden’s Point south past Fox Lake and then east across the island, drawn as two parallel dashed rules — which matches neither the two-solid-rule wagon road nor the single-dashed proposed rail road. East of about the middle of the sheet the same alignment continues with solid casings and is labelled THE KINGS HIGHWAY. (spaced capitals; no apostrophe is engraved). The likeliest reading is one road drawn with dashed casings over its unimproved western portion, but the sheet does not say so and the style is not in the legend, so it is recorded here as unresolved rather than resolved the convenient way. See King's Highway.

Ownership, as the compilers recorded it

Read what follows as names the county’s records carried in 1900–01, as Myers drew them. It is not evidence of title, occupancy or residence — see the volume’s article for why.

One holder dominates the island. W. S. McCrea and W. S. McCrea & Co. appear on at least thirty separate parcels, including several whole sections marked 640 acres and further blocks of 600, 560, 520, 480, 400 and repeated 320s, concentrated through the island’s centre and west. No other name on the sheet is close. The knowledge base contains no article on McCrea and the string does not occur anywhere in it — a gap this sheet makes conspicuous, and the most useful research lead it produces.

Other holdings, by area of the island (spellings verbatim):

• North-west, French Bay and Cheyenne Point — Nathan Saunders, D. L. Boyle 160, J. H. Dormer 120, and a long run of shore lots marked State.
• West and Iron Ore Bay — E. W. Sparrow, Dormer & Miller (200, 160, 160), Neil Gallagher, J. Burchard beside the LIGHT HOUSE and SIGNAL STATION, F. L. Stevens, J. H. McCauley, G. A. Appelby.
• Centre, around Greene’s Lake and Fox Lake — the McCrea blocks, with W. W. Boyle, G. C. Sweet, Jno. W. Green 160, John A. Scott & Co. 160, C. A. Barker (400, 560), D. Preston.
• Lake Geneserath, Gable Bay and Kelley’s Arm — M. C. Donough 160, School Land, Rev. P. Gallagher 120, Jas. F. Cable and J. F. Cable, W. E. Brown, Geo. C. Sweet, Hugh Connaghan, S. Lewis, L. Y. B. Birchard, and lots held by Kelty.
• South shore, McCauley’s Bay to Martin’s Point — Peter McCauley 120, W. E. Parker 160, Owen Corrigan, A. Corrigan, Ed. Hyre, Kittie Gallagher, P. Kelty, and a family group of John Martin, Grace Martin and Jas. Martin.
• South-east, the Jordan River to Sandy Bay and Pt. La Par — H. T. Boyle, M. R. Boyle, Rosa O'Donnell 160, Dominee Gallagher 160, Vesty McDonough, Thos. Burke, Michael Gallagher, P. R. Gallagher, and a tight cluster of forty-acre parcels held by C. Gallagher, C. C. Gallagher, J. J. Gallagher, J. J. Morris and Gallagher & Boyle.
• St. James, from Bonner’s Landing round to the Portage — C. Barry, S. R. Boardman, Fred Porter 160, Jas. Mooney, Annie E. Gallagher, Jas. Kennedy, P. O'Grady, the Dunlevys, the McCaffertys, Jerry Corbett, Henry Hartwick Sr. 160, Alonzo Hingston, Pat Maloney, Jas Smith, the Malloys, D. R. Green and D. W. Green, Wm. Kerr, John Farley, Pat Looney, and Butts Est. on five parcels at the head of the island.
• Institutional entries — State, School Land (including the whole of section 16), Catholic Church, Cem., Saw Mill, Shingle Mill, Light House, Signal Station and School.

No person on this sheet is identified with a knowledge-base article

Every plausible match was checked and every one failed the test this project uses. C. McCauley, Jno. W. Green, W. J. Gallagher, Owen Gallagher, Dan Boyle and M. Kane each correspond to a KB person of the right surname who was alive in 1901 — and to nothing more. An initial and a surname are not an identification on an island where this one sheet carries seven distinct Gallagher initials across dozens of parcels, and none of those articles contains a land record that could confirm the join. They are recorded here as leads.

Two cases are worth stating explicitly because they are the ones a later reader is most likely to get wrong:

• Jas. F. Cable / J. F. Cable is not evidence that James F. Cable was alive in 1901. James F. Cable carries a death date of 13 July 1896 from Sawyer’s 1911 sketch of his son. A name outliving its owner in a county record is ordinary; the plat cannot resolve it either way. What the plat does add is that a Cable parcel sits on the shore of the bay the sheet spells GABLE BAY. — see below.
• Fred Porter is not Feodor Protar. The two men would have been contemporaries in the same part of the island, and the temptation is obvious. The engraving reads Fred Porter 160 and F. Porter 40, unambiguously, at 4.5× magnification. Do not conflate them.

Names on the sheet

The plate is a dated 1901 attestation for two dozen island toponyms. Three are worth calling out.

GABLE BAY. — printed with a G. Cable Bay already records “Gable Bay” as a variant; this is an independent dated attestation of it, and the sheet puts a Cable parcel on the adjoining shore. That is suggestive of the Cable/Gable relation the place article currently leaves open. It is not proof of it, and the article should not be changed to say otherwise on this evidence.

KELTY'S POINT. — spelled Kelty here, consistently, in three independent places on the sheet, one of them the landowner P. Kelty. GNIS derives Kilty Point from Pat Kilty of the 1845 survey crew. Which cape the plat’s label denotes is unresolved: the archive holds two nearby capes, Kilty Point and Kelly Point, and the sheet has not been georeferenced.

PAGETOWN — labelled on the east shore south of Indian Point. This is the earliest dated attestation currently held for Page Town, independent of Williams’s 1905 memoir and decades earlier than the 1959 airport-plan notice. KELLEYS ARM., BARNEYS LDG., PORTAGE, LOONEYS ROCK and INDIAN BURYING GROUND likewise have no articles.

Other labels read off the sheet, all matching existing articles: FRENCH BAY, GREEN'S BAY, IRON ORE BAY, McCAULEYS BAY, SANDY BAY, LITTLE SAND BAY, MT. PIZGAH BAY, BIG BEAVER ISLAND HARBOR, CHEYENNE POINT, McFADDENS POINT, OLIVER POINT, LEFTS POINT, MARTINS POINT, PT. LA PAR, INDIAN POINT, SUCKER POINT, LAKE GENESERATH, GREENS LAKE, FOX LAKE., BARNEYS LAKE, FONT LAKE, EGG LAKE., ROUND LAKE, Jordan River, BONNERS LDG., ST. JAMES.

MT. PIZGAH BAY is spelled that way nowhere else in the archive; whether it is the water body GNIS records as Mount Pisgah Bay, now Donegal Bay, needs georeferencing before it is asserted.

Two later stamps

Struck at an angle across the engraved sub-title, in different ink from the plate, and therefore applied long after printing:

1. FULLER APPRAISALS / No. 1 VANDENBERG CENTER / GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN — dark ink, uppermost. The same stamp appears on the adjacent Garden Island leaf, so it was struck through the bound volume.
2. Beneath it, fainter and grey-violet: THE MICHIGAN TRUST CO. … MORTGAGE DEPARTMENT, recovered by isolating the blue channel of the colour scan. The middle of its top line is obscured by the stamp above it and a middle line, if one exists, is unreadable.

Neither firm has been researched. The volume therefore carries a second, later history — a trust company’s mortgage department, then an appraisal firm — which is itself a record of how a county plat book was used, and which the bitonal scan flattens to black.

Sources

1. P. A. & J. W. Myers, “Plat of Big Beaver Island of the Michigan Meridian, Charlevoix Co. Mich.”, in Plat Book of Charlevoix County, Michigan (Minneapolis: The Consolidated Pub. Co., 1901), printed pp. 30–31. Read at native resolution from the 600 ppi bitonal master held at the local_path above.
2. The same leaf in continuous-tone colour, from the University of Michigan’s scanning package — used for the two stamps.
3. kb/articles/organizations/beaver-island-lumber-company.md for the December 1902 organisation and June 1903 start of the island’s narrow-gauge railway.

Read the document

46 pages, rendered from the held scan.

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