Summary
Pine Lake is the historical name for the large inland lake at the Charlevoix end of the Pine River system, now generally known as Lake Charlevoix. During the Strang period, Latter Day Saint settlers and their newspapers called it Lake Mormon. The lake and its surrounding mainland were part of the Kingdom of Saint James’s expansion beyond the Beaver Island archipelago, and the nearby Pine River settlement was the site of the 1853 conflict with Gentile fishermen.
Geography and name continuity
Quaife describes Pine Lake as a large inland lake whose waters reached Lake Michigan through Round Lake and Pine River; he distinguishes that historical arrangement from the later dredging that made Charlevoix harbor accessible to larger steamers.1 This connects the lake to the modern Charlevoix water system without pretending that the historical channels and modern harbor are identical.
The name Lake Mormon appears in Quaife’s account of the Saints’ mainland settlement: a conference was held on Holy Island in the lake in 1853, the surrounding country was developed for farms in 1854-1855, and more than fifty people crossed from the Beavers for a July 1855 gathering.2 The underlying newspaper references are identified by Quaife but are not all held as separate issue images here.
The older name continued beyond the kingdom. NOAA’s historical chart catalog uses “Pine Lake Including Charlevoix Harbor” for 1908 and 1915 charts, and a 1923 local newspaper reports the lake’s freezing date as an ordinary community fact.34 The exact legal or customary transition from Pine Lake to Lake Charlevoix is not established in the held sources.
Relationship to Beaver Island history
Pine Lake was not part of the Beaver Island archipelago, but its mainland settlement, transport route, and political relationship to Emmet County made it an important extension of Strangite history. The lake is therefore represented as a related mainland place, not as a subdivision of Beaver Island.
Open questions
- The exact date and authority of the transition from Pine Lake to Lake Charlevoix remain unknown.
- The historical boundary of the Lake Mormon settlement and the identity of Holy Island in the lake have not been mapped from a source held here.
- This project has not retrieved a mainland GNIS join or a historical chart scan for this place, so the article intentionally carries no coordinate or feature identifier.
See also
Footnotes
-
Quaife, The Kingdom of Saint James (1930), pp. 153-154. ↩
-
Ibid., pp. 157-161. ↩
-
NOAA Historical Chart Catalog, 1908 and 1915 Pine Lake chart records,
data/federal/noaa_charts/noaa_chart_catalog.json. ↩ -
Charlevoix County Herald, 4 May 1923,
data/newspapers/charlevoix/ocr/markdown/Charlevoix_County_Herald_1923-05-04.md. ↩
Sources
- Milo M. Quaife, *The Kingdom of Saint James: A Narrative of the Mormons* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 153-154, 157-161.Described in this archive: The Kingdom of Saint James (Quaife, 1930).Describes the Charlevoix resort region as centered on Pine Lake, which drained through Round Lake and Pine River into Lake Michigan; records the Saints' 1853-1855 mainland settlement and the name Lake Mormon, including a 1855 conference on Holy Island.
- James J. Strang, *Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac*, and the *Northern Islander* references reproduced by Quaife, 1853-1855.The held secondary text identifies the newspaper dates behind the Lake Mormon account: December 1850, April 1854, June-July 1855, and December 1855. This article does not treat those references as a direct newspaper transcription.
- U.S. Lake Survey / NOAA Historical Chart Catalog, nautical charts "Pine Lake Including Charlevoix Harbor, Mich.", 1908 and 1915.Official chart-catalog records show Pine Lake remained a chart title in 1908 and 1915; the catalog entries include the historical chart filenames and bounding boxes.federal · noaa_charts · noaa_chart_catalog
- *Charlevoix County Herald*, 4 May 1923, local report on ice conditions.Local newspaper says Pine Lake froze over on 29 December 1922, documenting continued local use of the name after the Strang period.