Spent many happy hours in the UP. Mother in law grew up in the Stonington Peninsula, the eastern side of Little Bay de Noc. Used to tell about walking across on the ice to sell butter and eggs in Escanaba, and taking the trip by boat in the summer. A neighbor went through the ice with his sleigh and horses.
Mother in laws family came from Sweden when she was two, in 1904. That was wild country in those days. Her father died when she was still a little girl, and her mother was left with three daughters and a little farm to make a life on. My wife has the little notebook where the gifts from the neighbors are listed when her father passed. Fifty cents from Ole Knutson, Twenty-five cents from so and so, and five dollars from Skaugg Brothers, the general store and lumber operators. Five dollars was a lot of cash in those days, several days pay for the men working in the woods. Typically, the lumberjacks would work out of camps in the UP and northern Wisconsin, but in Stonington the farms were close enough to the timber areas that the men and big boys could stay at home and work in the woods. Much more of the pay made it home that way.
I always thought about moving to the UP when I retired, but the wife, who had the connections up there indicated I would be moving alone. It's no place to live if you don't have someone to warm your feet on at night!
