Traverse City, Michigan: A Historical Narrative, 1850 – 2013

One hundred-sixty-five years ago the Boardman River emptied its waters into the West Arm of Grand Traverse Bay amid a vast forest of white pines, red pines, and oak trees. But for occasional villages of Odawa Indians, the area was largely uninhabited, the currents of history taking white settlers to places south and west of this isolated place at the end of a long peninsula. Sixty years later, the forests had disappeared, replaced by factories, vast retail stores made of brick, an Asylum, churches, schools, and residences as a primitive settlement grew into a small town. In time, the community shrank as residents moved away in search of better lives elsewhere in Michigan, many of them moving to the more prosperous southern part of the state. Still, change was not done: people began to return, seeking the grace the land and water offered them as they reinvented the basis upon which their lives were built. is is the story of Traverse City, Michigan and it is the story of this book.