Strang's biblical toponyms

Summary

Between 1848 and 1856 James Jesse Strang renamed the landscape of Beaver Island after the geography of the Bible. His capital was Saint James; the largest inland lake became Lake Galilee, later Geneserath; its outlet became the Jordan; the village at the Jordan’s mouth was Galilee; a dune above the harbour was Mount Pisgah. The programme was not decorative. It asserted that the island was the promised land of a kingdom, and it was applied at every scale, from a single dune to a civil township.

Most of it did not survive. But three names still stand on federal maps — Lake Geneserath, the Jordan River, and Mount Pisgah Bay as a superseded variant of what is now Donegal Bay — which makes the surviving toponyms the most durable physical artefact of the Kingdom of Saint James. A separate and modern renaming, Squaw Island to Ojibwa Island in 2022, is often mentioned alongside these but has nothing to do with Strang.

The renaming programme

The best evidence is Strang’s own. His Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac (1854) contains a gazetteer of Emmet County written as a settler’s prospectus, and in it the biblical names appear as ordinary working geography, without comment or apology:

Jordan, discharging the waters of the Lake of Galilee into Lake Michigan, is the largest stream, and has a fall of twenty-six feet in one mile.

At the South-East extremity of the Island is the new village of Galilee. The only business yet opened is that of getting out wood for steamboats.

Lake Galilee is the largest Lake in Beaver Island, being two miles long and three quarters of a mile wide.

Strang describes two principal roads, “one extending from Saint James due South to Galilee”. The renaming therefore tracked the actual axis of settlement: a capital at the north harbour, a road down the island, and a wooding port at the south end.

The naming reached into civil government as well. Emmet County was divided into three townships, of which two — Peaine and Galilee — comprised the Beaver Islands (Quaife, p. 159 n.). A chronology of the archipelago’s township history published in the modern Northern Islander — drawn from local historian Joan C. Vyse’s 2002 research — dates Galilee Township’s creation to 1855, with its first township meeting to be held at the school in Galilee, and its vacation to 1897, when its territory returned to Peaine. On that account the name outlived the kingdom by forty-one years.

The graph now represents both levels explicitly: Galilee is the vanished village/wooding port, while Township of Galilee is the civil township that existed from 1855 to 1897. Neither has a modern GNIS geometry.

The same source tradition extends beyond the archipelago. Pine Lake, called Lake Mormon by the Saints, was the mainland lake and settlement region around modern Charlevoix. It is related to the kingdom’s history but is not treated as part of Beaver Island itself.

Strang’s island list in the same gazetteer also includes Patmos and Paros among the “habitable Islands” of Emmet County, each described as carrying a Mormon settlement. In his table they sit adjacent to the Fox Islands rather than the Beaver group. Which modern islands they correspond to is not established here — see Open questions.

Galilee, Gennesaret, Geneserath

The lake now called Lake Geneserath has been called by three different biblical names for the same body of water. Strang, writing in 1854, uses Lake Galilee and the Lake of Galilee. Elizabeth Whitney Williams, who grew up on the island and published her memoir in 1905, writes Lakes Genessarett. The Rock Island Argus of 12 April 1912 reports that “the Mormons called it Lake Gennesaret”. The Sea of Galilee and the Sea of Gennesaret are the same lake in scripture, so all three are the same act of naming; what drifted was which biblical synonym stuck. GNIS today records the official name Lake Geneserath (feature 626719) with the variant Geneserath Lake.

The 1912 traveller adds the crucial observation that the rest of the system had already gone:

Its outlet they called the Jordan and a little settlement which they made at its mouth they called Galilee. All that has disappeared and only the old maps retain the names.

Fifty-six years after the kingdom fell, then, only the lake and the river had held. That is still the position: the Jordan River survives in GNIS (629391); Galilee does not.

Mount Pisgah

Mount Pisgah is the biblical height from which Moses is shown the promised land and forbidden to enter it. On Beaver Island it named a dune inland of the harbour. Williams describes it as “a high sand mountain” from whose top “one can look down into the harbor”. Quaife’s index records “Mount Pisgah, hill at Beaver Island, 136”.

The name was current enough by the early 1850s to be used by the kingdom’s enemies. Both Strang’s own account and Quaife’s later narrative record the episode in which a young man at Mackinac was persuaded to allege that the Mormons ran a counterfeiting operation “in an artificial cave in Mount Pisgah”; a search party landed, asked children the way, “and after a thorough examination, concluded that the cavern was somewhere else.”

The dune itself carries no GNIS feature. What survives instead is Mount Pisgah Bay, recorded in GNIS as a superseded variant of Donegal Bay (feature 632831) — the bay on the north-west shore below the dune. The Irish name that replaced it is itself a marker of the settlement that displaced the Strangites: Donegal, after the county most of the incoming Irish families came from.

Caution for searchers: Mount Pisgah is also the name of a Mormon waystation in Iowa on the road west from Nauvoo, and hits on that name in the Gospel Herald (1847-1850) refer to Iowa, not to Beaver Island.

What the corpus shows

A concordance over the 57 books and roughly 1,080 newspaper pages held on disk (a derived index, data/integrated/concordance_counts.csv, regenerable from the OCR) counts the three surviving names:

These are counts of where to look, not measurements — OCR is noisy, and a large share of the Geneserath hits are from the 2023 Master Plan and the modern island newspaper, where the name appears in fishing-tournament notices and boat-launch minutes. That is itself the finding worth stating: the name is not an antiquarian survival but a live, ordinary word on the island today.

Squaw Island → Ojibwa Island: not Strang

The island at roughly 45.83 N, 85.59 W is Ojibwa Island today and Squaw Island in every historical source. Scott’s Coast Pilot of 1902 devotes an entry to “SQUAW ISLAND LIGHT-STATION … On the northerly end of Squaw island, the most northerly of the Beaver Island group”, and uses the old name in the sailing directions as well.

This change has nothing to do with the Strang period. It is a federal action of 2022: the U.S. Board on Geographic Names voted on 8 September 2022 to replace nearly 650 names containing a term the Department of the Interior had declared derogatory, under the Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force established by Secretary’s Order 3404. The GNIS record for Ojibwa Island (feature 638673) is dated to the same day and retains Squaw Island as a variant.

The practical consequence is a research trap rather than a historiographical one: searching modern sources for “Squaw Island” and historical sources for “Ojibwa Island” both return nothing, and both absences look honest.

Significance

Strang’s toponyms are the only part of the kingdom that the expulsion of 1856 could not remove. The buildings were taken, the press was looted, the people were put on boats — but the names were already on the charts and in the county records, and three of them are still in the federal gazetteer. Their distribution is also a map: Saint James at the harbour, Galilee at the south end, the Jordan between, Mount Pisgah above. Plotted, they trace the extent of the settlement Strang actually built rather than the one he claimed.

Two cautions follow for anyone using them as evidence. First, a surviving name proves the naming, not the theology behind any particular instance — Saint James Harbor and the Township of Saint James may equally preserve the saint or the king. Second, the derived layer data/integrated/strang_toponyms.geojson that assembles these eight features is a heuristic built from a hand-curated list, not a source; cite GNIS and the 1854 gazetteer instead.

Open questions

• Which islands are Patmos and Paros? Strang lists both as habitable islands of Emmet County with Mormon settlements, describing Patmos as “a mountain rising abruptly from Lake Michigan, to the height of two or three hundred feet” with clay bluffs suitable for brick. His table places them beside the Fox Islands. No identification is attempted here. The 1855 Lake Survey chart or the GLO plats would settle it.
• Was there a formal renaming instrument? No proclamation, revelation or township resolution establishing the names has been traced. All the evidence is of names already in use.
• Was the lake ever officially “Galilee”? Strang uses Galilee in 1854; Williams and later sources use Gennesaret/Geneserath. When and by whom the official form changed is unknown; the earliest GNIS citation for Lake Geneserath is a 1976-1981 compilation, far too late to answer it.
• Where exactly was the village of Galilee, and what remains? Strang places it at the south-east extremity with a large wharf. Nothing in the datasets held here locates it, and no GNIS or NRHP feature carries the name.
• When did Mount Pisgah Bay give way to Donegal Bay? GNIS records the variant without a date. The sequence of USGS topographic editions would show it, but published coverage of the islands begins only in 1955.

See also

• James Jesse Strang
• Kingdom of Saint James
• Lake Geneserath
• Jordan River
• Donegal Bay
• Ojibwa Island
• Squaw Island Light Station
• Saint James
• Garden Island
• Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago
• Historiography
• Scott's New Coast Pilot for the Lakes