Elizabeth Whitney Williams

Summary

Elizabeth Whitney Williams (born Elizabeth Whitney, 24 June 1844 - 23 January 1938) was an eyewitness to the last years of James Jesse Strang’s Mormon settlement on Beaver Island, and later one of the longest-serving light keepers on the Great Lakes. Her 1905 memoir, A Child of the Sea; and Life among the Mormons, is a primary first-person source for the Strang period and for the Irish resettlement that followed it, and is held in full by this project.

History

Elizabeth Whitney was born on Mackinac Island. Her father, Walter Whitney, a Genesee County, New York-born veteran of the Black Hawk and Florida wars, married her mother – a Mackinac Island-born widow raised from orphanhood by Captain Michael Dousman – on Mackinac Island; Elizabeth was the only child of that marriage, with three older half-brothers from her mother’s first marriage.¹ The family came to Beaver Island after her father’s shipbuilding work at St. Helena Island and a winter in Manistique.¹ The modern Northern Islander, drawing on Beaver Island Historical Society research, dates her birth to 24 June 1844 and the family’s move to the island to 1848.² Milo Quaife’s 1930 scholarly account of the Strang kingdom gives her birth as “apparently about the year 1845,” a year later and notably less precise than the newspaper’s figure.³

She lived on or near Beaver Island during the final years of Strang’s kingdom (which ended with his assassination in June 1856) and recorded her family’s flight to Charlevoix, expulsion from there, a period in Traverse City, and their eventual return to Beaver Island – “my twenty-seven years’ residence” on the island by her own account, counting from her early childhood.⁴ Her memoir names early Irish-descended residents and businesspeople active on the island in the resettlement period, including “Capt. Roddy,” “the pioneer pound-net fisherman” William Gallagher, and businessman William Boyle – independent corroboration, from inside the community, of the Irish surnames still associated with the island’s “Calling of the Clans” family groups today (see Irish settlement of Beaver Island).¹

She married Clement Van Riper; the couple briefly ran a cooperage at the Beaver Island light station, then in 1862 Van Riper was appointed a government schoolteacher to the Anishinaabe community at Garden Island, a post the couple held for two years.¹ In August 1869 Van Riper was appointed keeper of the Beaver Island (Whiskey Point / harbor) light, succeeding Peter McKinley; from 1870, with her husband in poor health, Elizabeth took over the practical care of the light and its newly installed fourth-order lens.¹ Van Riper drowned attempting to assist the crew of a distressed schooner, the Thomas Howland, whose body was never recovered; Elizabeth was appointed light keeper in his place “a few weeks after,” begining her own documented lighthouse career.¹

Her 1905 memoir, published at Harbor Springs under the name “Elizabeth Whitney Williams,” ends its narrative in the Beaver Island light-keeping years and does not itself describe a later marriage or a move to the Little Traverse Light; the book’s dedication and introduction refer only to “the many years of my life as a Light Keeper.”⁴ Secondary and reference sources state that she went on to serve 41 years as a Great Lakes light keeper in total, including a 29-year tenure at the Little Traverse Light on Harbor Point, was recognized in 1897 for the best-kept light in the Great Lakes, was one of four female Great Lakes light keepers that year, retired in 1915, and died on 23 January 1938 in Charlevoix, Michigan.²⁵ Her own book records, in passing, that her mother “lived to the grand age of one hundred years, passing away since my residence at Little Traverse Light House on Harbor Point, Michigan” – the only mention of that later posting in the primary text held here.¹

Significance

Williams is one of the few first-person narrators of the Strang period whose account survives in a full-length published memoir, and her book is the single source Quaife’s 1930 scholarly history singles out as the fullest statement of the “gentile” (anti-Strang) popular memory of the kingdom. Her subsequent lighthouse career, independent of Beaver Island, places her among the notable long-serving Great Lakes light keepers.

Open questions

• The exact date and circumstances of her remarriage from “Van Riper” to “Williams” are not established from any source held in this project; the memoir itself does not narrate it.
• Her birth year is contested between 24 June 1844 (modern newspaper / Historical Society research, matching most external reference works) and “about 1845” (Quaife, 1930, hedged as approximate).
• Her death date (23 January 1938) and her 29-year tenure at Little Traverse Light rest on an external reference source (Wikipedia) rather than a primary document held by this project, and are not cross-checked here against a second independent source.
• Her husband Clement Van Riper’s appointment as “a Government school teacher to the Indians at Garden Island” (1862-1864) is recorded in her own words but is not otherwise corroborated or explored here; it bears directly on Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago but falls outside the scope of this article.

See also

• Irish settlement of Beaver Island
• Beaver Island Historical Society

Sources

Full citations, matching the sources: block above.