Demography

Summary

Beaver Island’s population has moved through three orders of magnitude in 170 years, and almost none of the movement is visible in the federal series this project can query. Strang’s kingdom claimed roughly 2,600 residents in the mid-1850s — from Strang’s own newspaper. Quaife found 779 in the two townships at the census of 1920. The local county-subdivision series retrieved through the Census API begins in 2000 and reads 551 (2000), 657 (2010), 525 (2020). That is a boundary of the API dataset used here, not a claim that earlier population records do not exist; printed federal volumes and Michigan state-census material extend the research horizon further back.

The island today is old and mostly empty of people for most of the year. The 2019-2023 ACS puts the median age at 66.1 in Peaine and 59.5 in St. James, and finds 578 of 966 housing units vacant — about 60%, dominated by seasonal homes. A place with 525 usual residents and 966 dwellings is not depopulating so much as it has become somewhere people are from and come back to.

A May 1972 local obituary supplies a qualitative bridge between the historical and modern series. It remembers Lloyd McDonough’s lifetime on the island as a period in which fishing and farming gave way to population loss, mainland work, and then tourism as the main economy. That is a community retrospective, not a replacement for a population count or an independently dated economic series.

Which number is which

This is the trap that governs the whole article. The 2020 decennial count of 525 and the ACS 2019-2023 estimate of 752 are not in conflict. They measure different things:

Never present any of the three as “the population of Beaver Island” without saying which it is. Small-area ACS estimates for a place of this size carry margins of error large enough to swamp the differences between census years.

The two townships — St. James in the north and Peaine in the south — together cover Beaver Island and no mainland, so their sum is the island’s population. That makes the county-subdivision geography exactly right, and it is why the series exists at all.

The Strang-era claim

Quaife, writing in 1930 with the Strangite records in hand, reaches his figure this way:

A census taken in the autumn of 1854 disclosed 2,608 residents on Big Beaver Island. There was undoubtedly a considerable increase during the year 1855, and the gentile population of the island was but a handful. … we arrive at the conclusion that approximately 2,600 people were driven from the island following the shooting of Strang.

His footnote for the 2,608 is Northern Islander, 2 November 1854 — Strang’s own paper. confidence: contested. Elsewhere Quaife puts “the Mormon population of the islands and the adjoining mainland” at the 1856 dispersion “in excess of 2,500”, again on Strangite evidence.

Two things support the order of magnitude without confirming the figure. Quaife notes a contemporary letter recording that 490 people were taken to Chicago on a single boat after the expulsion, with 300 more having already left on the Iowa and the Louisville carrying “all she could stow” to Detroit. And Strang’s paper in early 1851 reports the federal census of 1 June 1850 for Mackinac County as 3,598 while asserting that Peaine township alone then held 300 more inhabitants than the marshal returned — an admission, in the kingdom’s own voice, that its numbers and the government’s did not agree.

An honest statement is therefore: the island’s population in the mid-1850s was probably in the low thousands, on evidence produced by the party with the strongest interest in it being large, and no independent enumeration survives in anything held here.

Who was not counted

The 1850 census figure Strang reprints carries the qualification “This is exclusive of Indians.” That is not an aside. Strang’s own gazetteer of the same period puts about two hundred people on Garden Island and about two thousand across the five Indian villages of Emmet County. None of them are in the federal number.

Any population series for this archipelago that begins from census returns therefore begins by omitting its longest-resident population. See Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago.

The long fall

Between the expulsion of 1856 and 2000 the project holds one federal figure: Quaife’s footnote that “The census of 1920 showed a total of 779 residents in the two townships into which the island is divided.” Set against his own estimate of 2,600 in 1856, that is a loss of roughly 70% over sixty-four years.

The narrative around it is well attested even where the numbers are not. The Irish settlement that followed the Strangites was built on fishing (see Commercial fishing); the lumber industry added population briefly in the early 1900s and its end date is disputed (1915, 1916 or 1917; see Lumbering); the fishery collapsed in the early-to-mid 20th century. The outer islands emptied: a later regional-guidebook tradition places the last permanent Garden Island resident, Pete Manatou, in the 1940s, and High Island’s community dispersed after the November 1940 storm. Both claims need primary corroboration. Beaver Island became the only inhabited island in the archipelago. The 2023 Master Plan describes the island as having “struggled to maintain population until the 1970s, when tourism emerged as the economic anchor of the community.”

The modern series

Three points is not a trend, and the 2010 peak is the kind of movement that a handful of households can produce at this scale. What is more robust is the composition. From the 2019-2023 ACS:

A median age of 66.1 means more than half of Peaine’s residents are of retirement age, and the two townships differ from each other about as much as either differs from the state. Peaine, the southern and less built-up township, is older, has more housing, more vacancy, higher incomes and higher home values than St. James, which contains the village and the harbour. That pattern is consistent with Peaine being disproportionately seasonal and St. James disproportionately year-round, but the ACS margins at this size do not let the difference be asserted firmly.

Open questions

• The 1860-1990 series. County-subdivision population is available through the API used here only from 2000, while a published 1870-2020 county-subdivision series and older printed federal/state-census material still need to be normalized into this KB. Michigan state-census years identified for follow-up include 1864, 1874, 1884 and 1894. Filling the gap would convert an anecdotal decline into a measured one.
• Is there any independent count of the Strangite population? Everything traces back to the Northern Islander. A Michigan state census, a county assessment roll or a church membership record would break the circularity.
• 1856 itself. Quaife’s ~2,600 expelled is a reconstruction from a claimed 1854 base plus assumptions. Passenger lists or vessel manifests for the summer of 1856 would test it.
• The outer islands. No population figures at all are held for Garden, High or Hog Islands in any period, despite Strang’s ~200 for Garden Island in 1854 and the existence of Garden Island Township (1859) and Chandler Township (1861).
• Seasonal population. 578 vacant housing units imply a summer population several times the resident one, but nothing held here estimates it. Ferry and air passenger counts would.
• Ancestry and origin. The Arranmore-dominated Irish settlement is central to the island’s identity but is not measured in anything held here; ACS ancestry tables at this geography would carry very large margins.

See also

• Township of Saint James
• Township of Peaine
• Irish settlement of Beaver Island
• Kingdom of Saint James
• Commercial fishing
• Lumbering
• Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago
• Historiography