This past Thursday we visited the Hanka Homestead Museum near Pelkie, Michigan (up here in God’s country – Michigan’s gorgeous Upper Peninsula) on the Western Upper Peninsula Heritage Trail, about an hour’s drive from our Keweenaw Peninsula farm. I know this has nothing to do with publishing, but it was a fascinating excursion. Brings back recollections of the research I did for my historical novel Devil in the North Woods, set in 1908 in the Metz, Michigan, area.
The 40-acre homestead, situated on top of Askel Hill, is now on the National Historic Registry and open to the public during the summer months. A lot of restoration has been completed on the house, barns, and other outbuildings. They now represent the farm as it was during the 1920s. The Hanka family, originally from Finland, worked this farm for 70 years beginning in the late 19th century.
Hunt’s Guide has a good description and history plus very specific (and helpful) driving directions. Pure Michigan has a good overview map to get you oriented.
The Homestead and museum is staffed by volunteers four days each week during the season – Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday – from noon to 4 pm. Nobody was there when we arrived at about 1:30 pm, and the buildings were all padlocked. While we wandered around, peering in windows, an elderly gentleman – Clarence, one of the docents – arrived on an ATV and volunteered to go get his keys and open everything up for us, even though this wasn’t his scheduled day. He’d seen us come down the road in front of his house.
Here are a few photos I took on our guided tour.
Farm from end of driveway
House and root cellar
Inside the root cellar
Hanka well beside house
Horse barn behind house
I’ll post a few more pictures tomorrow for those of you intrigued by rural history.
What a great place! I can just see myself, living in that house, writing a book at the kitchen table…while Indians crept around outside the window, lol. (What tribes lived in the area?).
Love the root cellar. I wonder if they filled it with jars of blackberry cordial for Christmas? Quince jam for their biscuits? Pickled peaches?
Do you lnow if the archaeologists ever did a dig in the trash pit to see what old bottles and other stuff might be there?
Thanks for sharing! Janelle
Probably blackberry, blueberry, and the thimbleberry jams, all of which are common throughout this area. Also, there’s an apple orchard in the field beyond the horse stable.
Not likely to have been any peach anything, as peaches don’t grow near the shores of Lake Superior.
I didn’t think to ask the docent about any digs through trash pits, but there is a lot of old stuff adorning the shelves, counters, and walls of the house and outbuildings. Maybe I’ll post a photo of the old workshop, that’s filled with all kinds of cool tools — from a blacksmith’s anvil to a manually operated (?) drill press.
We stumbled across the Hanka Homestead last Sunday when we were in the area picking up a boat motor my husband bought from someone. What an amazing place! I’m so glad to hear that it’s being maintained. There was nobody there, so we just walked around the looked in the windows. We really enjoyed it, and we want to come back for a guided tour this summer.
If he’s home, the part-time caretaker (who lives just up the road from the homestead) usually spots incoming traffic and rides over on his ATV to open up the buildings and provide a guided tour. So, I guess he wasn’t home that day.