Manitou County

Summary

Manitou County was a Michigan county made entirely of islands. Act No. 92 of 1855, approved 12 February 1855, organized “the several islands in Lake Michigan, known as the Beaver group, the north and south Fox Islands, the north and south Manitou Islands” into a separate county named Manitou, and divided it into four townships: Peaine and Galilee on Beaver Island, Patmos on the Fox Islands, and Manitou on the Manitou Islands. The act ordered the first county canvass at the village of Saint James, left the county seat to be fixed by the county’s own board of supervisors, and gave the county concurrent jurisdiction on Lake Michigan. An 1874 state compilation reports the seat of justice as Saint James.

The county lasted forty years. Local Act No. 362 of 1895, approved 4 April 1895, repealed the organizing act, attached the Beaver group to Charlevoix County and the Fox and Manitou islands to Leelanau County, and set out how the property and debts were to be divided. The debts outlived the county. In 1897 the legislature directed the Auditor General to cancel the unpaid state taxes of what it called “the defunct county of Manitou,” and Charlevoix County was still levying a judgment tax and paying “Manitou County” claims as late as 1912.

History

The archipelago before the county, 1847–1855

The Beaver Islands received their first civil government in 1847. Section 8 of Michigan Public Act No. 69 of that year set off “all that part of the county of Mackinaw designated as the Beaver Islands in Lake Michigan” and organized it as the township of Peaine, with the first township meeting appointed at the store of A. Cable, Beaver Island Harbor, on 1 May.¹ The archipelago was then in Mackinac County.

It moved once before Manitou County existed. Act No. 18 of 1853, approved 29 January 1853, organized the county of Emmet. It ordered Emmet’s first county canvass at “the village of St. James in said county,” and provided that until Emmet’s officers were elected and qualified the officers of Mackinac County would perform Emmet’s duties. Section 5 extended “the boundaries of the township of Peaine in the county of Emmet” to take in the rocks, bars and land under water contiguous to the Beaver Islands. Section 6 then divided Peaine for the first time: the part lying in towns 37 north of ranges 10 and 11 west, and the south half of towns 38 north of the same ranges, became “a separate township by the name of Galilee,” with its first meeting at the store occupied by Ludlow Hill. Section 8 annexed to Emmet every island, bar and rock contiguous to Emmet and Charlevoix that no earlier act had placed in a county.²

That act matters for reading anything about the townships. The Township of Galilee already existed, by statute, two years before the county did, and the 1853 act describes its territory in the same terms the 1855 act would use.

The organizing act of 1855

The move to detach the islands is recorded in a 1912 county-name history by William L. Jenks. Jenks writes that James J. Strang was then a member of the House of Representatives from Newaygo County, to which the Grand Traverse region was attached; that several petitions asked that the islands be detached from Emmet County; and that the committee to which the matter went, after stating “that a feeling of deep distrust and repugnance approaching warlike hostility exists between different classes of people inhabiting the islands and the mainland in that part of the State,” recommended a separate town and county organization for the Beaver and Fox Islands. The Manitou Islands were added in the bill as reported, and “the name of the new county reported by the committee as Beaver County, was, upon motion of Strang himself, changed to Manitou.”³ That is a retrospective written fifty-seven years after the fact; the committee report and the legislative journals behind it have not been read here.

The act itself is Act No. 92 of 1855, printed at pages 197 to 199 of that year’s session laws and approved 12 February 1855. Its eight sections run:

• Section 1 organizes the Beaver group, the north and south Fox Islands and the north and south Manitou Islands as a separate county named Manitou, with the inhabitants entitled to the rights of other organized counties.
• Section 2 orders all county officers elected “on the third Tuesday in April next,” with the canvass at the village of St. James on the Monday following, and provides that until those officers qualify the duties are discharged by the persons elected for the county of Emmet at the last general election.
• Sections 3 to 6 organize the four townships. Peaine takes the Beaver group except towns 37 north and the south half of towns 38 north, ranges 10 and 11 west, meeting at Saint James. Galilee takes that excepted part, meeting at the school house at Galilee. Patmos takes the north and south Fox Islands, meeting at the district school house on South Fox. Manitou takes the north and south Manitou Islands, meeting at the store house of Pickard and Brother on North Manitou.
• Section 7 leaves the county seat to be fixed by the county’s board of supervisors.
• Section 8 gives the county concurrent jurisdiction on Lake Michigan with the other counties contiguous to it.⁴

Two other printings of the act are held, and they behave differently. Strang’s own Northern Islander printed it in full at Saint James, spelling the name “Manitue” throughout and carrying the enrolment signatures of the Speaker, the President of the Senate and the Deputy Secretary of State.⁵ The state’s 1874 Michigan Historical Collections printed only sections 1, 2, 7 and 8, omitting the four township sections entirely — so that compilation supports the county’s creation and its island membership and is silent on the townships. It adds two things the statute does not: a gloss, “Manitou — An Indian name for the ‘Great Spirit,’” and the statement that “the seat of justice is at St. James, a village at the northern extremity of Beaver Island.”⁶

Five townships, not four

The county did not keep the shape the organizing act gave it. Local Act No. 194 of 1859, approved 15 February 1859, set Hat, Hog and Garden islands off from Peaine and organized them as the township of Garden Island, with the first township meeting at the school house in the village of Peaine on Garden Island.⁷ Two years later Act No. 86 of 1861, approved 1 March 1861, replaced that arrangement with Chandler, a township taking in the north end of Beaver Island above the quarter line through sections 27, 28 and 29 of town 39 north, range 10 west, together with High, Trout, Whiskey, Squaw (now Ojibwa), Garden, Hog and Hat islands.⁸ From 1861 the county had five townships, four of which were on or around Beaver Island.

Government, and the limits of it

The county’s own machinery was thin, and the legislature repeatedly propped it up. Act No. 23 of 1861, approved 2 February 1861, extended the time for collecting and returning taxes “in the unorganized territory in Manitou county” to 1 June each year “until said territory shall become organized” — the county contained ground that its township system did not reach.⁹ Act No. 262 of the same session, approved 16 March 1861, attached the whole county to Mackinac County “for the purposes of the jurisdiction of the district court for the Upper Peninsula, sitting in said county, over the same, until other provision is made by law for holding a court in said county of Manitou.” Manitou’s own sheriff still served process and was to charge mileage from his county seat.¹⁰ A modern local-history timeline, summarising Joan C. Vyse’s 2002 research, says the islands’ county affiliations moved between Mackinac and Leelanau and back between 1861 and 1869, and that the county’s government “collapsed” after Strang’s assassination in 1856.¹¹ No statute for the Leelanau leg of that sequence has been found here.

The clearest description of the county at work is a visitor’s account from the Petoskey Record of 19 September 1879, reprinted in the Beaver Beacon in 2002. It calls Saint James “the capital of Manitou County,” puts the village population at about 350 and the island’s at 1,200 to 1,500, and reports “the county offices located at various points of the village, the court, which is held by Judge Goodwin of the 11th district at the Boyle & Dunleavy store.”¹² On that account the county transacted its business in rented rooms and a shop, not in a courthouse.

Disorganization, 1895

Local Act No. 362 of 1895, approved 4 April 1895 and printed at pages 132 to 136, repealed Act No. 92 outright — with one exception. It provided “that the township organization of the townships of Manitou, Patmos, Peaine and Galilee, as described and organized in section three, four, five and six of said act shall not be affected by this act so far as the township and school organization, officers and records of said townships are concerned.” Section 2 then attached “the territory embraced in said township of Galilee, viz., the Beaver group of islands” to Charlevoix County, and the Manitou islands and the Fox islands to Leelanau County. Section 3 detached the territory from the thirty-third judicial circuit and attached it to the thirteenth, transferring pending suits to Charlevoix. Sections 5 to 10 wound the county up: its real property was to be sold by the Charlevoix County treasurer, its clerk and treasurer were to meet the Charlevoix and Leelanau officers and audit the accounts, and its debts were to be apportioned between the two counties by the relative assessed valuation fixed by Manitou’s board of supervisors at its October 1894 session. Any excess over Charlevoix’s own debt ratio was to “remain as a separate obligation and indebtedness against the territory so attached,” paid by taxes spread on that territory alone.¹³

Two features of the repeal are worth stating plainly. Its saving clause names only the four townships of 1855, so Chandler — created six years later, and by then the northern township of Beaver Island — is not mentioned anywhere in the act. And its description of Galilee’s territory as “the Beaver group of islands” is broader than the territory section 4 of the 1855 act had actually given Galilee, which was the southern part of Beaver Island. The act is quoted here as printed; no source held here explains the discrepancy.

The county’s afterlife

The remaining pieces were disposed of over the following three years. Local Acts Nos. 363 and 366 of 1897, both approved 18 March 1897, vacated Galilee and Chandler and attached their territory to Peaine, fixing the reorganized township’s polling place in the village of St. James.¹⁴¹⁵ On 15 October 1897 the Leelanau County board of supervisors, sitting at Leland, resolved that “unorganized territory formerly a part of the late Manitou county attached to Leelanau county” be attached to that county’s townships: North Manitou Island to Leland, South Manitou Island to Glen Arbor, and the north and south Fox Islands to Leelanau township, all to take effect on 27 March 1898.¹⁶ Charlevoix County’s board formed the Township of Saint James out of Peaine at the end of the century; the date is unsettled, and that article carries the competing evidence.

The county’s obligations lasted longer than its offices. Joint Resolution No. 19 of 1897, approved 29 May 1897, recited that the state had for many years failed to collect the taxes apportioned to Manitou County, that the Auditor General had charged the arrears to Charlevoix and Leelanau, and that the officials of those counties “have no means of compelling the defunct county of Manitou to pay the same”; it directed him to cancel the accounts.¹⁷ Private creditors were more persistent. The Charlevoix County Herald of 3 October 1902 noted that “the Manitou County order case is on for hearing before the Supreme Court at the October term.” The county treasurer’s published statement for the year ending 1 October 1911 lists receipts of $1,249.01 from a “Judgment Tax for Curtis & Wylie” and a disbursement of $1,350.00 to “Curtis & Wylie, Manitou County Claims”; the statement to 1 July 1912 carries a further $360.00 to “Curtis & Wylie, Manitou County Judgment.”¹⁸¹⁹²⁰ Seventeen years after the repeal, a tax was still being spread on the former Manitou territory to pay the old county’s debts, which is what section 9 of the 1895 act had provided for.

Geography

The county was islands and water. It contained the immediate Beaver group — Beaver Island itself with Garden, High, Hog, Hat, Trout, Whiskey and Squaw islands and their neighbours — together with North and South Fox and the North and South Manitou islands, which lie off the mainland shore south of Leland. Section 8 of the organizing act gave it concurrent jurisdiction on Lake Michigan with the counties contiguous to it, which for a county with no mainland was the only way its authority could reach the water between its parts.

No boundary geometry for the county is held here. Its former territory is divided today between Charlevoix County, which holds the Beaver group, and Leelanau County, which holds the Fox and Manitou islands — the division made by the 1895 act and still the reason the Fox Islands sit in a different county’s records from the rest of the archipelago.

Names

The statute spells the name Manitou. Strang’s own paper spelled it Manitue throughout its printing of the act, including in the county’s name and in the names of the Manitou Islands and the township of Manitou.⁵ Both forms are contemporary.

The name was chosen late. Jenks reports that the committee reported the bill under the name Beaver County, and that the change to Manitou was made on Strang’s own motion.³ No source held here records his reason.

Two glosses of the name are held, and both are compilers’ statements rather than evidence from Anishinaabe speakers. The 1874 compilation gives “Manitou — An Indian name for the ‘Great Spirit.’”⁶ Jenks in 1912 calls it “an Algonquin word, meaning Spirit, but it refers rather to the mysterious and unknown powers of life and of the universe,” and attaches a tradition about two warring bands and seven survivors from which, he says, the Manitou islands take their name.³ Neither is sourced to an informant, and the name attaches in the first instance to the Manitou Islands rather than to the archipelago the county governed. See Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago.

Significance

For forty years the archipelago was not the edge of a mainland county but the whole of one, with its seat on Beaver Island. That is a filing fact before it is anything else: county-level records for 1855 to 1895 — deeds, court files, supervisors’ proceedings, tax rolls — were made under Manitou, and a search of Charlevoix or Leelanau records for that period finds nothing, while a search of Manitou records finds nothing before 1855 or after 1895.

It also fixes the scope of island government in the period. Four and then five townships, not two, and a jurisdiction that reached from the Beaver group to the Manitou Islands. Reading the modern two-township arrangement backward across that interval loses Galilee, Chandler, Patmos and Manitou, and loses the county that contained them. See Island civic governance and public institutions and Law, courts, and external government.

Added 20 August 2026. Recent changes