I was stationed to work as a Park Ranger at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore from 1984—2005. During that time I was lucky to have the chance to get to know most of the folks around Port Oneida, the lakeside farming community within the park. I first started taping some of their recollections in 1992, when Laura Basch happily filled some 14 hours of tape with her encyclopedic knowledge of Port Oneida goings-on, gained from a lifetime near the top of Basch Road. (Her neighbor Charlie Miller later noted, “She was a talking newspaper.”) Since that time many others have shared stories, data, photos, documents, and whatever else might serve to give the rest of us some idea of how their community worked.

This gathering of information is done under the National Park Service’s volunteers program, and all of the recordings, images, and other collected materials have been given to the NPS and the public domain. Digital copies are available for public use at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor, and at the Glen Lake Library in Empire. The Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes is a partner in the project, providing ongoing support such as funding for transcription of the interviews, making the information more readily available.

The other subjects that I’ve worked on are my home town of Burdickville and my family, the DeKornes (on my mom’s side) and the Van Zoerens (of Vriesland, MI). 

Books based on this work are available at VZOralHistory.com .

If you have any information, pictures, or anything else that you’d be willing to share and have preserved regarding Port Oneida, Burdickville, etc., please contact me ( tom@VZOralHistory.com ). If you have any sort of question that I might be able to help with, submit it below!