Lost for a century, area divers discovered a missing link in Traverse City history this spring.
Students in an Underwater Archeology class at Northwestern Michigan College taught in the spring semester by Dr. Mark Holley located the site of the original dock that served Old Mission, the first white settlement in the region. Spearheading the effort was Dan Harrison of Farmington Hills, who has immersed himself in the budding array of classes and training opportunities locally for underwater archeology, a facet of the larger endeavor to establish the Grand Traverse Bay Underwater Preserve.
Harrison chose for his term paper the original settlement and dock site. Since the class also included a field exercise, his project was a natural fit and other students helped sleuth out the long-lost location.
"We are uncovering the missing link between Mackinac and here,” said Harrison, a historian and librarian at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn.
Reflecting on the Rev. Peter Dougherty's home a short distance away, which had its own archeological dig last week as part of preservation efforts there, Harrison noted that the dock is also part of that home's history.
"All the windows and doors for that home were brought over on Mackinaw boats and birch bark canoes to the dock,” he said.
Over multiple sessions concluding Saturday, Harrison, Holley and other local divers marked and documented the major structural components, including stone cribs and pilings. They made a three-dimensional survey of the original dock, which Holley estimated as 100 feet long. This dock served the original settlement and the Old Mission Store, which according to local history was later dragged up the hill to its current location. Holley, who deemed the effort an "archeological fantasy camp,” believes that the dock dates to the late 1840s to early 1850s.
"It's pretty exciting that you can go out and see timbers, big timbers from the original dock,” said Holley, who is one of only five Ph.D.s in the nation in freshwater archeology. "Timbers that have original tool marks, Reverend Dougherty's tool marks. Pine logs were used before anything had been lumbered.”
Working at a site about a half mile south of Hasrot Beach in Old Mission, based at a private beach of a sympathetic homeowner, the divers worked quickly to document the find.
"This is a site under threat, there are pieces missing just within the past couple of weeks,” said Holley of logs that have been dragged out of the shallow water and used for firewood.
Harrison and his classmates had trouble at first finding the dock, which had been replaced in the 1890s by a pier at Hasrot Beach. This one was what people remembered — everyone had forgotten the previous dock sunk into ruin a bit south of that location.
"We interviewed the locals and many of them who as children had seen the [Hasrot Beach pier,]” said Holley, who helped turn a few clues into a find. "We were finding these little nuggets of information that people have that they don't even know they have, it's kind of like detective work.”
Another question tugging at Holley and his fleet of underwater archeologists in training is the location of the shoreline when the original boats landed.
"Shore levels really fluctuate throughout time and that's a whole different research question for another time: where was the shore level on the first contact,” he said.
Dr. Mark Holley will present a talk about research on the original dock of Old Mission at a meeting of the Old Mission Peninsula Historical Society on Thursday, September 6, at 7 p.m. The meeting, which will be held at the old Town Hall at 13235 Center Road, is free and open to the public.