- Dates
- 1970 – 1990
- Eras
- Modern era
- Concepts
- demographyhistoriography
- Within
- Beaver Island
Summary
The earliest published dwelling counts for Beaver Island found so far are held here: 298 housing units in 1970, 455 in 1980, and 667 in 1990, each the sum of the Peaine and St. James rows of one federal table.
Set beside the population extract for the same years — 219, 321 and 404 — the table records the fact that most shapes the modern island: by 1970 there were already more dwellings on Beaver Island than residents, and the gap widened in every decade the two have been counted together.
Evidence and limits
The series begins at 1970 because that is when these two townships first appear with housing counts in a published federal table, not because the island had no houses before. Minor civil divisions this small fell below the small-area publication thresholds of the 1950 and 1960 Censuses of Housing, whose township tables stop at places of 1,000 inhabitants; Peaine and St. James together held 396 people in 1950 and 217 in 1960. Read the absence of earlier rows as a publication limit, not as an absence of dwellings.
The table gives total housing units only. It carries no split between occupied and vacant units, and no seasonal-use category — those begin with the Census API series in 2000, and they are what turn a dwelling count into a statement about who is actually here. Nothing here is a parcel record, a building permit series, a construction date, or a count of habitable structures: a housing unit is a Census concept, and a cabin, a trailer and a lakefront house each count as one.
See also
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Sources
- Under Charlevoix County the table gives Peaine 344 / 231 / 149 housing units and St. James 323 / 224 / 149 for 1990, 1980 and 1970, beside population counts of 128 / 81 / 58 and 276 / 240 / 161 that match the separately held population extract. The six count columns are population 1990-1980-1970 then housing units 1990-1980-1970; the column assignment was read from the PDF text layer's x coordinates against the printed column heads and then checked against a 400-dpi rendering of the two rows and of the spanner head.demographics · historical_census · 1990-michigan-population-and-housing-unit-counts
- Project-normalized historical township housing-unit table and provenance sidecar.Rows carry a source key and comparability flag. Island totals are transparent sums of the Peaine and St. James rows in the same published table: 298 (1970), 455 (1980), 667 (1990). No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.demographics · historical_census · township_housing_units_1970_1990
Added 4 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “Historical Census township housing-unit counts for Beaver Island, 1970–1990”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/historical-census-township-housing-units-1970-1990/, accessed [date], citing U.S. Census Bureau, *1990 Census of Population and Housing: Population and Housing Unit Counts, Michigan* (CPH-2-24), table 8, “Population and Housing Units, 1970 to 1990; Area Measurements and Density: 1990,” p. 19 (printed folio; PDF page 35 of 164). (and 1 further source listed on the page).
Last revised 2026-08-04. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.
BibTeX for “Historical Census township housing-unit counts for Beaver Island, 1970–1990”RIS for “Historical Census township housing-unit counts for Beaver Island, 1970–1990”