Woodland Echoes: A Cottage in My Heart

By Dianna Cross Toran

For many years, Woodland Park was a best-kept secret for the residence and vacation property owners. Her lake was and still is according to a recent conservation report pristine. As with most secrets, they are not kept for long, and the word got out. People have moved in or bought the propertysome very inexpensively that went back for taxes. These new people probably wonder why there are so many black property owners in Woodland Park. The majority of the newcomers are not aware that Woodland Park was once a black resort that was created during segregation. They never stop to read the historical marker in front of the old one-room schoolhouse that tells about Woodland Parks history. They are unaware that there were once hotels and rental cottages that couldnt keep up with the summer demand or that the now-deserted beach used to be packed with many black vacationers and locals. They dont know that there was once a grand clubhouse that dominated Mayo Point. Many of these new people swim in the shallow waters of that very point where the clubhouse boardwalk once led. They havent heard of the beautiful Hallie Q. Brown, a black elocutionist, who once gave a speech for Queen Victoria. Hallie owned a humble cottage near the public beach. The new people dont know that the famous boxer Joe Louis spent lots of time in Woodland Park because his wifes family owned a cottage across the street from the old Kelsonia Hotel. Or that W. E. B. Du Bois once stood on a dock in Woodland Park with its founder, Marian Auther. They would be interested to know that during Prohibition, Dutch Anderson would be killed in a shoot-out with the police in Muskegon. Only a few days earlier, he had been to what is now the Shangri-La in Woodland Park to pick up his bootleg whisky and beer. They only know that Woodland Park has one of the most beautiful lakes in the area and that it is a wonderful place to bring the family. They know they can count on the old-timers waving to them with a smile as they pass them by. But there is so much more for them to learn about this enchanted place and so much more about Woodland Park, its settlers, and the people in the surrounding communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984537546

Dianna Cross Toran

Dianna Cross Toran has researched Woodland Park from childhood since the family cottage by a lake in Michigan has always been in her life. But it wasn’t until she began researching Woodland Park’s origins that she found out a well-kept secret about Woodland Park. That it had been a successful black resort during segregation. Her research led her to write two historical books about Woodland Park. Still standing is an old hotel that has been empty for years. It sparked her imagination to write a mystery about an Inn that has withstood time in what used to be a segregated community. Added to that was her love of cozy murder mysteries. She has read many but there were not any main characters who were African American women like herself solving the mysteries and drove her to fill that void.

Book preview

Woodland

ECHOES

A Cottage in My Heart

DIANNA CROSS TORAN

Copyright © 2018 by Dianna Cross Toran.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2018907573

ISBN:                    Hardcover                          978-1-9845-3756-0

                              Softcover                            978-1-9845-3755-3

                              eBook                                 978-1-9845-3754-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 08/09/2018

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Contents

Foreword

Dedication

Acknowledgment

Why We’re Here

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

FOREWORD

I HAVE KNOWN DIANNA (we call her Diane) all of her life. I am her father and the Dad in her book. Little did I know that when I would tell her stories about the early years at the cottage that she would absorb them and find their value to later put down on paper. She would often share with me what she wrote, and it was like living it all over again—those wonderful years for me as a young boy who was lucky enough to have parents who made it possible to build and own a place in Woodland Park, Michigan. She brought back to life people I loved who passed many years ago. She captured the spirit of my father, Ollie Cross, who had been my mentor and best friend in life. She told how we made do with what we had and how life had been in Woodland Park back during a simpler time. But it wasn’t so simple really, because there was segregation and many other challenges that were going on at the same time that Diane’s book walks us through. Her book shows us how we lived during that time but how it didn’t make us sour because we had Woodland Park, a place that always made us happy and still does. Diane’s book explains the real reason that Woodland Park existed. It was a black resort. I was fourteen or fifteen when I first started going there. What a great life for a boy, hunting, fishing, and pitching baseball for the Woodland Park team, just enjoying myself being there. Diane did a lot of research and spoke to a lot of locals. Because of this, to my surprise, she was able to reunite me with my Woodland Park catcher, Red Carter. I hadn’t seen him since the early 1950s, and now we are men in our eighties, still remembering our youthful days in Woodland Park. Her effort to recapture this history is very special and will be read for years to come. I hope that future generations and the Cross family will enjoy it as I have.

Duane Cross

DEDICATION

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to my dad, Duane Cross, who has always been there for me and who passed down to me and my brother and sister his share of the best place in the world. His wonderful stories started my interest in finding out more about our cottage and Woodland Park’s origins and inspired me to put it down on paper. I love you, Dad!

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I WANT TO THANK and acknowledge the support and encouragement of my family, loved ones, and friends. There are so many people who have helped me with this endeavor with stories and photographs whom I didn’t know before I started writing this book that are now my friends. I can’t thank you enough. With every story and every photograph, all of you brought me closer to the past. I feel like I know these people, some of them who died before I was even born. So many, many thanks to (not in any order) Frances Johnson Bird, Russell Snyder, James Ware, Bruce Micinski, Marcia Civils, Alma Civils, Toni Rumsey, Rev. Penny Brown, Bob Griffin, Bob Phillips, Don and Venola Stanciel, Harvey Sanders, Jessica Harden, Ziyadah Shakir, Mary Ellen Tyus, Nancy Fuchs, Linda McClure, Rick Myers, Rolanda Richardson, Kathy Groff Golden, Lynn McDaniel, Daryl Cosby, Larry Carter, Raymond Doswell, Harry Dillard, Josephine Carter Tolliver, Todd Osborne, Red Carter, Larry Carter, Mark Bates, Carlean Gill, Chuck Barron, Lottie Tyson, and Jerry Rush. I thank and acknowledge the Monroe Michigan Historical Society, the Fremont Library, the Fremont Historical Society, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, the Michigan History Center, Merrill Township, the Red Rooster, the Huron-Manistee National Forest Service, Wilberforce and Central States Colleges, the SI NMAH Archives Center, the Idlewild Cultural Center, the Baldwin Historical Society, the Shrine of the Pines Museum, and the Woodland Park Schoolhouse Historical Society. I also want to thank the person who helped me more than he will know, Bill (William) Parish.

Thanks to my great-grandmother Ora, Grandpa Ollie, Grandma Lucille, Aunt Oleta, Uncle Cecil, and Aunt Louise, who made our cottage in Woodland Park possible (all are gone but not forgotten, and thank God you all had a vision that you made real for your descendants).

Special thanks to Steven Jones, whom I only knew for a year before he was tragically taken from us and is very much missed. In that short time, Steven helped me with my quest of finding out about people in my father’s memories and told me about the early years in Woodland Park long before we even had our cottage.

Some of the same memories were told by different people, and I had to capture them the best way that I could. If any stories have been told contrary to a memory, it was unintentional.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.

—Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

WHY WE’RE HERE

OUR COTTAGE IN WOODLAND Park has always been a special place for me. I often tell friends that it is my Tara from Gone with the Wind. I get my strength from her soil. I cleanse my lungs from breathing her air. I have only to pull into the dusty, sandy roads leading to our cottage, and I can feel the peace and tranquility immediately fill my soul. I never thought about why Woodland Park existed until late in life. I just loved her for what she was. My haven. My father, Duane Cross, often told me many stories about his childhood memories in Woodland Park. They were great stories of days gone by. I started writing his stories down to share with the family. Then I started looking for clues to people and places in his memories. That led me to Steven Jones, the Woodland Park historian who was writing a book about Woodland Park. A terrible accident cut our time short—too short, but by now, I had to know more and Steven was no longer here.

I continued to solicit stories from other family members and thought maybe there were people outside of the family who also had stories to share. I called our cottage caretaker of many years, Sterling Whitley, and asked him whom I should talk to. He gave me names, and they had stories too. Many stories. Not all of them came from Woodland Park but still touched upon childhood memories or events that made people who they were and, in turn, made us who we are. Some stories had a paper trail of sorts, like articles from the Chicago Defender and the Fremont Library. The Historical Societies were also a big help, but the best stories were passed down by word of mouth. People would say, You should talk to Red, or You should talk to Bob, and off I’d go. I’m so glad I did. I’ve met so many wonderful people with so many incredible stories about Woodland Park and more.

And so I pass this on to you . . .

Chapter

ONE

BACK IN THE DAY when Native Americans roamed the waterways of Michigan, the area now known as Woodland Park was one of their hunting and fishing grounds. In 300 BC to AD 1650, the Hopewell people lived in Michigan. They were known for their large burial mounds where they sometimes buried as many as twenty people at a time. They made beautiful stone-carved pipes. They were very successful farmers who grew abundant crops in the rich Michigan soil. They fished the freshwater lakes using large nets.

At around the year 1600, more tribes settled in Michigan; Potawatomis, Chippewas (Ojibwa), and Ottawas. These three tribes formed an alliance known as the Anishinabegs (the People of the Three Fires). The Anishinabegs were a peaceful and humble people. If someone in their tribe needed help, they could always depend on anyone in the alliance to help them. They believed that no one was more important or should receive more than their fellow tribesman. They believed in only killing for food—not for sport. They were not wasteful. They used every part of the animal. What was not eaten served other purposes. They used the bones for needles, beads, or weapons. They used the hides for clothing, shelter, rope, and moccasins. They were early people of medicine and knew what grew from the earth that would heal their wounds or make them well.

Nancy Fuchs, a White Cloud, Michigan, resident, is from the Anishanaabe tribe. During an interview with her, she told about her people and their rich history in the area. She wrote an article for the NCMHC Newsletter (April-May-June 2016), Anishanaabe Ways and Wisdom—Gifts of Plants that told how her people had used plants for thousands of years. We knew their seasons and their characters. We harvested them with gratitude to the Creator for their gifts and properties. With them we made things both useful and beautiful. She ended it with We strive to ‘ganawenimaa nimanmainan aki’ (respect our Mother Earth).

In the Anishinabeg alliance, the Potawatomi were mostly farmers who liked Southern Michigan’s temperatures and rich soil for growing their crops. The Chippewa were fishermen who lived in far Northern Michigan along the southern shore of Lake Superior. They lived in large fishing villages near the rapids of the St. Mary’s River (known today as the Sault Ste. Marie). Other tribes probably migrated through the area as well, but it was mostly the Ottawa who made Woodland Park their hunting ground. The Ottawa were great traders, hunters, and canoe builders. There were a number of lakes in that area, but the largest, which was around 202 acres, was known as Crooked Lake probably because it wasn’t round or oblong shape as many of the other lakes were. Just 5.5 miles southwest of Crooked Lake was a tribe of Ottawa who lived near a thirty-three-acre lake known as Benton Lake. The Benton Ottawa would hunt and fish in the many waterways in that area, including Crooked Lake. Later, when I was just a young girl, I would find evidence of them being at our lake.

In 1851, Newaygo County was established. According to information in the 1850 census, it was mostly farmers, Indians, and trappers.

Some of the Native Americans in the Newaygo area.

—excerpt from the 1850 United States Federal Census

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In the 1860s, the Native Americans were signing treaties that took away their land. This was the beginning of the lumber boom. Settlers needed lumber to build their homes and towns and rebuild Chicago, which had been devastated from the great fire, and Michigan had its own great fire of 1881. Lumbering became Michigan’s most important industry. Men became millionaires from the lumber boom and were called timber barons. More money was made in lumber than was made in the California Gold Rush. White pine was in demand for building materials because it grew around two hundred feet tall, eight feet in diameter. It was easy to cut, floated, grew straight, and grew in abundance in the Michigan forests.

The Ottawa stayed away from the loggers probably because they were not treated kindly by them. They had even been accused of robbing a stagecoach that ran from Pentwater to Big Rapids carrying $74,000 in gold, which was the logger’s payroll, making the Ottawa even more reclusive. Back then, word of mouth was the best way of spreading a story to get unwanted Indians off valuable land. There were other stories about what may have happened to the gold. One was that maybe there never was any gold on the stagecoach to begin with, and it was a way for the lumber owners to keep the money. Years later, another story surfaced. According to an old man on his deathbed, he and two other men robbed the stagecoach. They were on horseback with $74,000 of very heavy stolen gold with angry lumberjacks and the law looking everywhere for them. They knew they would be hung if they were caught. They were hiding out near Benton Lake and decided to bury it in an old cast iron stove between two tree stumps on the north shore of Benton Lake. They thought, as soon as things died down, they would go dig it up. But as time went on, they knew if they spent any of the gold, they would surely be caught, so they never went back for it. The old man went on to say that he was the last one of the gang alive who pulled off the robbery. He said the gold was still buried there. The stumps that marked where the gold was buried, however, had rotted away over time, and there was no physical landmark remaining. Many people have hunted Benton Lake looking for that treasure. Today, it would be worth almost a half-a-million dollars. It has never been recovered.

The lumber business provided much-needed jobs. Young single men came from all over to work at the lumber mills. These young men were called shanty boys. In the early years of lumbering, most of the cutting down of the trees had to be done during the cold, harsh Michigan winter because there wasn’t an easy way to move those heavy logs except sliding them across the thick snow that fell every winter on horse-drawn sleds. These young men worked long hours in freezing cold weather with only axes. They would chop down trees from early in the morning until dusk so that they could move as many pines as possible during the winter. Hands were raw and backs ached. They worked long, hard hours, and although the owners made millions, the lumberjacks themselves were paid very little. They lived away from their homes and families, and worked in rough, dangerous conditions.

The demand for wood was so high that better ways to harvest the wood had to be created, so the crosscut saws were invented. By 1869, Silas Overpack of Michigan had invented the big wheels, a cart with large wheels that could move logs across dirt and grass. This was one of the biggest inventions for the lumber mills and very unfortunate for the forest. Lumber companies no longer had to wait for winter to glide a sled over snow to move the cut trees. They also replaced horses with oxen that could move heavier loads and could become food if they were injured and died. Michigan was producing more lumber than any other state. Sadly, the invention of the big wheel quickened the devastation of Michigan’s beautiful white pines forests. Progress sometimes comes with a cost.

Just north of what would be known first as Brookings and then Woodland Park is Bitely, Michigan. Stephen Bitely started a mill in 1872 and began the town that is still named after him. With his lumber mill so successful, he then started a shingle mill too. When the little village of Bitely (or sometimes it was spelled Biteley) was starting to form into a community, there were Native Americans living there in wigwams near a lake. Their leader was Chief Mowby. Shortly after the town began to grow, the natives were scared off by whites who wanted that land by the lake. The lake was later named Mowby Lake after Chief Mowby and is still called that today.

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Crooked Lake shown in the 1880s map before the Brookings Mill or railroad.

—sketch by D. Toran

Sketch by Dianna Toran

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Just north of Bitely is the town of Baldwin. In 1884, brown trout were planted in the United States. Michigan is well known today for their trout fishing, but trout were not native to the United States until that planting. There is a historical marker that reads as follows:

On April 11, 1884, the first recorded planting of brown trout (Salmo fario) in the United States was made into the Pere Marquette River system by the Northville, Michigan Federal Fish Hatchery. The trout eggs from which the planting of 4,900 fry was made had been obtained from Baron Friedrich Von Behr of Berlin, Germany, by Fred Mather, superintendent of the Cold Spring Harbor Federal Fish Hatchery at Long Island, New York. Some brown trout eggs had been shipped to the United States and distributed to various fisheries in the country for observation in 1883, but the Northville station was the first to stock American waters with the fish. From this beginning, the species (known in Germany as Bachforelle) has become widely established throughout the United States.

Just south of where the trout were planted in 1884, Merrill Township was established. It was made up of part of Monroe and Beaver Townships.

Years later in the 1890s, a lumber mill was built on the sandy shores of the beautiful, crystal-clear, pristine Crooked Lake. The woods surrounding Crooked Lake was as perfect as a forest could be, with its many different species of trees that included the much sought-after white pine. The location was handy, too, with the new Pere Marquette Railway only a mile away.

Harry L. Spooner, a writer, was born in 1882 and lived in White Cloud, Michigan. Sometime in the 1920s, he would write about this area in his publication, "Woodland Park, South of Bitely, Unique Resort Owned, Operated by Colored People." In this article, he told how in 1894, while the property was owned by Thomas R. Lyon, he allowed the timber to be moved out by the Chicago & West Michigan Railway Co. to be sold for $380,000 to Hovey & McCraken. That is how they started their lumber business.

Brookings was the last established lumber mill in the most northern part of Newaygo County. Back then, it was considered the Monroe Township but would later be in Merrill Township. According to the 1900 census, settlers came as far as Ireland, Sweden, Canada, and Norway. Sometime after the settlement began to grow, the community was renamed Brookings, after the Brooking Lumber Company. The name of the lake remained Crooked Lake on many of the old maps, but most of the old-timers in the area called it Brookings Lake after the mill. Single-family homes, boarding houses, a general store, and a post office sprung up to support the lumber workers. Eventually, there were school-age children, too, so a one-room schoolhouse was built, the only building still standing today from that time period. The Brookings settlement was supported by the Brookings mill, and the mill in turn supported the settlement.

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1900 map showing the Brookings sawmill and the railroad. Also shows the school and the boarding houses. The real map actually had a little schoolhouse drawn.

—sketch by D. Toran

Life was good and work was plentiful for the Brookings settlement. Every day, more and more precious white pines were cut down. The loggers worked all year round cutting and clearing white pines. But by 1902, over a decade later, most of the Brookings white pine was gone. The forest was no longer beautiful with what once stood the proud white pine trees. It was littered with old rotted stumps that held no value to anyone in the lumber business. And just as the white pine had disappeared, so had the Brookings community that lived there. The loggers had to leave Brookings and move on to other forest where the white pine was still plentiful. The families soon followed the loggers. They only left behind a few buildings, a wooden bridge, and the one-room schoolhouse. And what happened to those children when they became adults? The 1880 census did show school-age children in Monroe: Francis B. Shilill (age ten), Frank Holester (eight), Cora Holester (five), Lavinia Elwell (fourteen), Mary Elwell (nine), Lorribeth Spalding (fourteen), Frank Spalding (fourteen), Ella Spalding (twelve), Hattie Spalding (nine), Edna Chapman (seven), Mary Bessey (ten), Lilla Barnes (eleven), and Mical Ralyhan (seven), to name a few. Did they ever come back to see their old school as many of us do?

The once-thriving village had become a ghost town. No one stayed behind. The land held no value to Brookings Lumber Mill, so the taxes were no longer being paid. The land was turned back over to the state, and for a while, Brookings was the place no one wanted. Then the Branch family from White Cloud, who would be instrumental in the purchase of Idlewild’s property, bought most of the Brookings property. They wanted to farm the land, but they found that it really wasn’t good farmland, and so the vast majority of the land went untouched for almost two decades.

Chapter

TWO

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION WAS issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863. After many long years of serving masters, the slaves were free. Booker T. Washington remembered when slavery was abolished and wrote about it. He was nine years old and recalled how the days leading up to the freedom of the slaves. There was much singing, mostly songs about freedom. Then one day, a white stranger came to his plantation and told them they were free.

But what sounded good to the former slaves in writing was not exactly what they thought it would be. Although they were free on paper, the color of their skin kept freedom still a quest that they would search for, for many years to come. The white South was still reeling from the loss of their free labor. They resented and hated the now free slaves. They made it as difficult as they could for them, and although the slaves were free, they found that they had no rights. They didn’t feel any safer because of their freedom. They could still be beaten or lynched for any made-up reason. The jobs they were able to find were few, and many were the same jobs they had as slaves. They were paid very little for all their hard work and always walked in fear of harm or death. The Jim Crow system was created to make sure that whites were always considered superior to blacks. This meant that although the blacks were considered free on paper, they were still under the jurisdiction of the white people. It was their rules the blacks had to follow. Their rules meant that no person of color could have any interracial relationships, couldn’t eat or drink at the same places white could, and couldn’t do anything that would possibly sound like they were equal to whites. Any infraction, either real or made up, would be paid with night visits from the KKK, being burned out, pain, or even death without any repercussions to the whites who inflicted the punishment. There was no one to stop them.

The South was especially hard on the black people. The southern whites were still reeling over losing the war, their way of life, and their free labor. They blamed the newly freed slaves for all their problems. Black people started leaving the South and heading north.

My paternal father’s great-grandfather Thomas W. Cross was born on the Cross plantation on February 1, 1826, in Louden County, Virginia. His father, Mr. Lee, had been a merchant in England who had come to America and bought the Cross plantation. Thomas W.’s mother was a quadroon slave (one-quarter black). Mr. Lee cared enough for his mixed-blood son to take him to Hocking County, Ohio, to free him. Thomas was twenty-five then. Thomas W. married Catherine Harper on October 7, 1852, and together they had eight children while living in Ohio. Thomas joined the army on June 22, 1863, when he was thirty-seven. He was in the colored infantry of the Civil War. Two years later, he mustered out of the service and returned home to his wife and children. In 1869, he and a group of other black families decided to go further north. Thomas and Catherine settled in Mecosta, Michigan, where land was cheap through the Homestead Act. Thomas bought forty acres for the price of a horse. Michigan was good for growing crops and children. The Crosses had four more children after moving to Michigan.

Thomas was a very religious man. In 1879, he started holding group worship in the Gingrich School and the Cross School that he built. Eventually, he built a church and called it Disciple of Christ Church but was often referred to as the Cross Church. The church still stands today, and services continue every Sunday. It is called the Wheatland Church of Christ, and there is a historical marker in front of it that reads,

WHEATLAND CHURCH OF CHRIST

Wheatland Church of Christ, also known as the Cross Church, is the oldest Disciples of Christ church built mainly for and by blacks in western Michigan. Thomas Cross (1826–1897), who with five other members founded the church in 1870, was its first elder. Early services were held in the Gingrich and Cross schoolhouses. When the congregation decided to build a church in 1883, Cross donated the land and loaned it the funds. In 1968 the church became an independent nondenominational organization.

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Thomas W. Cross family portrait. Thomas W. Cross (my great great grandfather) is seated in the middle. His wife, Catherine (Harper) Cross is sitting to his left. Seated to her left is my great grandfather Thomas Ulysses Cross holding his firstborn. Standing to his left is his wife, my great grandmother Mary Catherine Cross.

-courtesy of the Cross family private collections

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Uncle Joe Marsh in Munising.

—courtesy of the Cross family private collection

The house Thomas built is still there near the church. One of Thomas W.’s children was named Thomas Ulysses Cross, who was born on January 16, 1864. He married Mary Catherine Myers on April 13, 1890. They had eleven children, one of whom would be my grandfather, Grandpa Ollie Cross. Grandpa and his many brothers and sisters grew up in Mecosta. They were farmers and lived off the land. Thomas W. Cross made a good life for his family and his descendants by leaving the South. He passed his determination on to his descendants.

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Uncle Joe Marsh was Great-Grandmother Mary Catherine’s half brother. He was very fair in color, and most people thought he was white. Uncle Joe moved to Munising, Michigan, (Upper Peninsula) in 1896, when he was thirty-three. He trapped beaver and fished and was a guide for hunters. He had a boat that earned him money by taking tourists where they wanted to go. In the nineteenth century, Munising was still somewhat of a wilderness but just beginning to be a tourist attraction. People wanted to see Pictured Rocks and the copper mines.

Uncle Joe was quite a fearless man. There was an article published about Uncle Joe that told a story about him deer hunting in 1905 with a group. They had not been successful during the day, and at the time, there were no restrictions for hunting at night. Uncle Joe decided to go out alone one night and see if he could find the herd. One of his fellow hunters told him that there was no way they would go out alone at night, but Uncle Joe was not discouraged. He was positioned in his blind, as it became dark. He was waiting for the moon to come up when he heard a wolf howl right below him, and then another and another. He had only an oil lamp called a bull’s-eye and his eight-gauge shotgun. He climbed down from the blind and ran for the camp with a pack of wolves chasing after him. He reached camp, yanked the door open, and slammed it shut behind him. The wolves howled outside his door and then left when their prey didn’t appear. In the morning, there were so many wolf tracks in the snow Uncle Joe thought there may have been about fifty wolves. He was lucky to have made it back alive.

Before coming to the Upper Peninsula, Uncle Joe had become a river hog with a lumber company. River hogs are men who ride on large rafts called floats and gather up floating logs. Always there were white pine log jams, some being fifteen miles long. A river hog will live on the float for about a year. Uncle Joe’s experience as a river hog helped him earn a living in Munising. Grandpa and his brother, Uncle Lee, went to Munising to work for Uncle Joe on his boat on Lake Superior when they were young unmarried men. Their job was to corral logs that had drifted over from Canada. Some time in his life, Uncle Joe had accidently shot himself in the hand and lost use of it, but he never let anything slow him down. He was always a hard worker. He taught Grandpa how to safely take down trees, clear land, and survive in the woods. That would all become very useful later in Grandpa’s life.

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Great-Great-Grandmother Nancy (Conner) Seaton was on my father’s mother’s side of the family. She was born in September 1844 in Snow Hill, North Carolina, where there wasn’t any snow, just white sand. Her parents were free blacks who were living in a very prejudiced South. Being free and black didn’t mean things were easy. The free blacks were often harassed. They had to be sure to have their free papers on them at all times or they could be sold into slavery. They were also taxed higher than the white people as a discouragement. The southern whites did not want their slaves to get any ideas that the free blacks lived better lives and giving the slaves more incentive to be free. Sometime around the early 1850s, Nancy’s parents and some of their relatives decided they were tired of racism and decided to go north. Their good friends, the Tyler family, who were also free blacks, decided to go too. They had one wagon and a team of horses. There wasn’t much room in the wagon, since it held everyone’s belongings and provisions for the long trip north. Only the elderly rode, while everyone else, including little Nancy, who wasn’t much older than six, her older brother, William, and the Tyler children, walked.

Even though they were all free blacks, it was not safe. There were raiders out looking to make money on selling them, free or not, into slavery. One time while on the road, they were stopped by some white men, and one of Nancy’s aunts could not find her free papers. She wasn’t given much of a chance to look for them either. The white men dragged her away. The black men were angry, the women were heartbroken, and the children were frightened. The family, deeply saddened, watched as she was taken, not able to lift a finger to help her for fear of jeopardizing the rest. They could hear her cry and beg for a long time, but the cries became more faint the further away she went. She was never to be seen again. So afraid someone else could be taken by raiders, they decided that they would only travel at night using the stars as their guide. They traveled many nights through all kinds of weather and unfamiliar lands. Many frightening animal sounds were often heard, and there was always the fear of being discovered.

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Nancy (Conner) Seaton.

—courtesy of the Cross family collection

After a very long journey of many long nights, it was almost morning when they finally heard the rapids from the Ohio River. They all began to dance around and hug each other and laugh. The children ran around their parents, and the elders smiled and looked to the sky with prayers of thanks on their old wrinkly lips. They all could feel true freedom close by, just on the other side of the river. But, suddenly, their celebration came to an end when they all heard the sound of horses running hard, coming from the woods. It was too late to hide. Three white men on horseback appeared. The white men circled around the group and told the black travelers that they wanted to buy their horses. They refused to sell, and being free blacks, they carried guns. The riders, clearly outnumbered and angry, rode away.

A short time later, one of the riders returned. He told the group that the other two white men were coming back with more men in the morning to destroy their free papers and sell all of them into slavery. He told them that if they wanted to escape that fate, he would come back for them at dusk and take them to another crossing. They watched him as he rode away. They didn’t know if they could trust this man because he had been with those men earlier and because of their distrust of white people. He may be trying to trick them and sell them himself. Or maybe he was lying about the return of the other white men. They had to make a decision very quickly on whether to take a chance in crossing on their own in the morning and risk the raiders enslaving them or to go with the lone rider at dusk. Either choice could put them and their families in slavery.

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Ora Eliza (Seaton) Clark shown to the right with her friends in Covert, Michigan, in 1896.

—courtesy of Oleta Clark

The decision was made, and at dusk, they began their journey with the lone rider. He told them to keep quiet, and the parents had to keep the young ones quiet because sound traveled. They traveled all night through the woods, all the time worrying that they made a mistake and that this was the end of their freedom. Finally, they came out to where the river was shallow. The rider told them to follow him, and they crossed the Ohio River to freedom at last. As they were crossing, they could see the other crossing where the men were and could hear their angry voices yelling about how they had been cheated out of their easy money. They thanked the lone