Garden Island

Summary

Garden Island is the second-largest member of the Beaver Island archipelago, with a land area of 20.31 km² computed in EPSG:3078, lying north of Beaver Island. In the mid-19th century it was a distinct Odawa (Ottawa) settlement, home to the chief for whom Township of Peaine is named, and the site of a school Strang’s followers established for the island’s Indigenous residents.

History

Garden Island appears in the documentary record of the Strang period chiefly as an Odawa settlement separate from the harbor at Saint James. Elizabeth Whitney Williams, whose family lived on the island as government-appointed teachers to the Odawa in the 1860s, recorded that the harbor town of Saint James was “named in honor of the Indian Chief at Garden Island, town of ‘Peain’” — the same chief for whom the Township of Peaine (organized 1847 for the whole archipelago) is named — and that Strang, seeking favor with the Odawa, “sent a young Mormon over to Garden Island, where he taught school for three years.”¹ An 1854 account of the Mackinac–Mormon controversy separately records a law-enforcement episode on the island: a constable’s attempt to arrest one Eri J. Moore, described as “on Garden Island selling whiskey to the Indians.”² Confidence on Chief Peaine’s specific residence is probable rather than established: the 1854 account places “Peaine” among several chiefs confronting Strang generally “at Beaver” without specifying Garden Island, so the two sources agree the chief existed and gave his name to the township but are not fully aligned on where he was based.

Bishop Frederic Baraga is recorded visiting Beaver Island in 1832 and converting Odawa living along its north shore; on returning in 1859 as Bishop of Upper Michigan, he found “a Native community of devout Catholics living on Garden Island,” by then, per the same modern summary, “the center of the archipelago’s Native life,” served by a school, a Catholic church and a post office.³ The island was homesteaded by Scandinavian settlers in 1876, and its abandonment as a settled community began in 1936. This source is a 2026 popular-history article for the Beaver Island Historical Society rather than a primary document, so it is held at probable confidence pending corroboration from primary parish or homestead records. The later regional-guidebook tradition that Peter Monatou was the last permanent resident, in 1947, is recorded in the research ledger but is not treated as an established census fact. The cemetery’s National Register status is modeled separately as Garden Island Indian Cemetery.

A 1965 local travel account provides independent post-settlement observations: it describes the old Indian Village, a burial ground with moss-covered wooden grave shelters (including a latest grave dated 1938), and the remains of an abandoned school and Catholic church. It also records Larsen family graves near a former homestead. The account corroborates a visible early-20th-century settlement and burial landscape, but it does not establish when the community ceased to be permanent or how many people remained after 1936.⁴

Geography

At 20.31 km², Garden Island is roughly one-seventh the area of Beaver Island and the largest of the archipelago’s smaller members. Scott’s 1902 Coast Pilot fixes its position by tangent bearings from the Squaw Island (now Ojibwa Island) light-station and records a charted shoal, Garden Island Shoal, extending from its vicinity — evidence that the island was a routinely used navigational reference point for vessels passing north of the main group. As of the 2023 Beaver Island Master Plan, about 5,000 of the island’s 5,080 acres (roughly 98%) are owned by the State of Michigan and managed by the Michigan DNR Wildlife Division; an abandoned sawmill and several standing structures remain from its settled period.

Names

No former or variant name is recorded for Garden Island in the GNIS data held for this project; “Garden Island” appears to be stable back to at least the Phase I GNIS compilation (1976–1981).

Significance

Garden Island’s significance in this project’s sources is almost entirely as an Indigenous settlement distinct from, but entangled with, Strang’s kingdom at Saint James — the source of the name behind Township of Peaine and the site of one of Strang’s few recorded attempts to extend his settlement’s institutions (a school) to the island’s Odawa residents.

Open questions

• Whether Chief Peaine’s principal residence was specifically Garden Island (per Williams, 1905) or the phrasing “at Beaver” in the 1854 account refers more broadly to the archipelago is unresolved; no source read so far reconciles the two.
• No population, decennial-census or land-use data specific to Garden Island (as opposed to the two townships collectively) has been located in sources held.
• The 1876 homestead date and 1936 abandonment date rest on a single 2026 secondary source and have not been cross-checked against a primary land or parish record. The claimed 1947 last-resident date remains a later guidebook tradition, not an established enumeration.

See also

• Beaver Island archipelago
• Beaver Island
• Township of Peaine

Sources

See the sources: block above.