Brimming with girlish delight, Nancy Rushmore Hooper visited her childhood vacation home Friday morning for a historic occasion.
In just over a year, Old Mission Peninsula volunteers raised funds to purchase the home built by the Rev. Peter Dougherty, a Presbyterian missionary and the region's first European settler. Dave Larson, representing the family who purchased the property from the second owners, turned over a large brass skeleton key to Rob Manigold, Old Mission Peninsula Township.
"When my parents, John and Virginia Larson, bought it in 1961, they promised Maurice [Rushmore, the previous owner] that they would restore it, so this was their dream," noted Larson, who lives in Florida.
While Larson's family never lived there and the house was vacant for decades, its historic value is unparalleled for the Peninsula and region.
Dougherty built the home, one of the earliest frame homes in the region, in 1842. He and his wife, Maria filled the ten bedrooms with their nine children while he continued his missionary work. Ten years later, the family moved to Omena with the Native Americans, where he helped them purchase land with money he encouraged them to save.
The Rushmore family became the second owners of the property and three generations lived or vacationed there over the next 100 years. Hooper, her brother, Lane, and her parents, Maurice and Mildred, visited every summer to help her grandmother, "Minnie" Lane Rushmore, with the cherry harvest.
"She was an incredible lady, very incredible," said Hooper, who played in the attic with china dolls or explored the trunk room filled with antique hats.
At one point when she was a girl, Hooper remembers meeting one of the Dougherty daughters.
"She was very old, she had a cane," Hooper said.
"Minnie" was the daughter of the Old Mission Lighthouse keeper and married into the Rushmore family in the late 1800s. A kind and social matriarch, "Minnie" lived to be 99 years old and died in 1960. Although she later lived in Monroe, she summered at the Dougherty House for years, coming up to plant a garden every spring and renewing friendships with Peninsula families.
After his mother and first wife died, Maurice, sold the property to the Larsons, who never lived there. They used the property for storage and later resisted lucrative offers to sell the 15 acres for development.
"Mrs. Larson, she held it and she cherished it and she preserved it," said Hooper. "She made this all possible and God bless her. It was a great place, a beautiful home."
Hooper's sister-in-law lived in the home with her new husband, Lane, in the early 1950s just after their wedding. The last non-summer resident, she taught for a time at a nearby two-room schoolhouse while she and her husband waited for his military service to begin. By December, they moved to Alaska and never returned to live in the romantic getaway.
"It was chilly here, there was an oil or gas space heater," she said.
Community members formed the Dougherty Historic Home Site in 2005 and are raising funds to restore the home and property. They plan to make it an educational museum for future generations to learn about the Peninsula's earliest days.
Now that the township officially owns the site, work crews will begin cataloging contents and boxing them up for storage offsite. The rooms boast much of the original furniture used by the Rushmores, from bedsteads to oil lamps to glasses on the bureau.
Then the home and grounds will undergo a painstaking restoration to recreate as closely as possible the lifestyle of Dougherty's time. Time and pests, weather and vacancy have taken their toll but organizers are confident they can restore the home to its original glory.
"This to me is a big day," said Hooper. "I want this to belong to the people."
For more information on the Dougherty Historic Home Site, contact the Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation at 935-4066.