A chapter excerpted from The Colony: The history, families, society, architecture, and economics of a 1908 traditional American Cottage Row BY HAYWARD DRAPER.

This book sets out the history and people of Fountain Point and the cottage row directly across from it, including how the idea of vacationing first developed in the United States. After a year as a Carnegie Teaching Fellow in History at Yale Graduate School, Hayward Draper pursued a career as a litigation attorney in Des Moines, Iowa, and later also Traverse City, Michigan. He has vacationed with his family in Leelanau County since 1978 and now lives there in a new home a few houses north of The Colony. He has been a Board Member of the Leelanau Historical Society since 2016. While conducting research for his book he utilized the collection and resources available in the LHS Research Center as well as those available from fellow historical societies and libraries across the country. Copies of his book are available in the museum gift shop.

“Draper weaves together interesting stories of a diverse cast of characters with factual and charming appeal. This original research sheds new light on the history of Lake Leelanau, Fountain Point, and the interplay between original settler families and newly arriving vacationers. Since it ties this in with similar developments across America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it merits reading by anyone.” -Kim Kelderhouse, Executive Director, Leelanau Historical Society

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Chapter IV. THE PROMOTERS OF INDUSTRIAL GROWTH

In August 1859 Edwin Drake drilled the world’s first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, setting off an “oil rush” reminiscent of the California gold rush ten years earlier. The oil was refined into kerosene, which served as a fuel for lighting homes and businesses at a fraction of the cost of the whale oil Americans had used until then. In very short order, America’s huge whaling industry died off, Western Pennsylvania was overrun with oil wells and refineries (that were later bought out by John D. Rockefeller, based in Cleveland, Ohio, during his consolidation of the new industry), and wildcatters hoping to make a quick buck began to search for oil in Texas and many other places.

This is the context for the unusual story of a commodities speculator from France, a nobleman named Marquis Aymar Ludovic de Belloy, who in 1860 purchased from Antoine Manseau the property later known as Fountain Point. From an account that was published at the time of his death in 1873, we learn that de Belloy was heir to a large estate but managed to dissipate most of it in Europe. Bringing with him the $100,000 that was left (still a huge sum back then, being over $4 million in today’s dollars), he initially arrived in New York in 1853 on the ship Baltic, accompanying a well-to-do New York family whose acquaintance he had made in Paris. After dissipating much of this remaining sum, de Belloy went on to Utica in upstate New York, later hooking up with one of the original settlers of Suttons Bay to trade with Indians in Leelanau for one year. He then moved on to Chicago where he found the excitement he craved by engaging in grain speculation and, as the article reported, “was soon satisfactorily bankrupted.”

The death of a relative back in France brought de Belloy an additional $80,000 ($3 million today), and he used a portion of that that he had not promptly lost in more speculation to pay his way back to Michigan in 1860, where he married a local woman named Harriet Campbell, purchased the Fountain Point property, had a log home built on the property, and set up there a country store. He even registered for the Civil War military draft as a Michigan resident. Schaub family descendants relate a story about how Simon Schaub had bought from Marquis de Belloy’s store a Waterbury clock in a rosewood case that Emelia Schaub still owned a hundred years later.

Not content to simply operate the store and raise the four children born during the seven or so years that he stayed in Leelanau, de Belloy decided to dabble in the new speculation of drilling for oil and started to drill a seven-hundred-foot shaft on his property. Jakob Schaub and other local farmers were hopeful that a new industrial venture of this sort could advance their lives as well, and therefore were present when de Belloy hit not oil, but rather sulfurous mineral water in the form of an artesian well that gushed up the pipe, bubbling over the top and creating a permanent stream over to the lake.

The significance of de Belloy’s artesian well to our story about The Colony is that, when the property was later developed as a resort in 1889, the owners drove a wood two-by-four into the pipe in a manner that caused it to spray up like a fountain, and they therefore named their new resort Fountain Point. As late as 1881, there is no mention on the official plat map of anything called “Fountain Point”, but it does show an “oil well” at that location. However, the 1900 plat map has “Fountain Point Resort” in large letters. So it appears that the geographical feature was named after the resort and not the other way around. The wood was replaced with metal by a new owner who took over in the 1930s, and the fountain continues to spray to this day.

Although the Schaub family history suggests that the artesian well at Fountain Point was drilled in 1863, it might be that it was not drilled until 1867, that being the year that de Belloy formed the Grand Traverse Mineral Land Association. Or maybe, as some have suggested, forming that entity was just part of a fraudulent effort to sell the land (which had by then been mortgaged to a Mr. Hitchcock in Traverse City), with de Belloy spreading oil around the artesian well to suggest that there was more than just mineral water to be found there. That would be consistent with the plat map showing an “oil well” there in 1881. As a commodities speculator, de Belloy lacked the foresight or inclination to consider marketing a mineral spring for its supposed health benefits, or a fountain for its beauty.

After failing to strike oil, de Belloy was soon back in Chicago, where he was set up by an acquaintance from Utica as a broker/trader on the Chicago Board of Trade. Unfortunately, he lost his stake in “the great wheat corner” of August 1872, and committed suicide in April 1873. The other members of the Chicago Board of Trade raised a fund of $1,100 (about $28,000 today) to donate to his destitute family, who were then living in Geneseo, Illinois (where de Belloy is buried). This French nobleman’s life was recognized as unusual enough that a newspaper account was circulated (albeit with his first name wrong) and was reprinted in many newspapers around the country. His Michigan wife moved on with her family to South Dakota, where she is buried, and several of the children later moved on to San Diego and other places on the West Coast.

Even before de Belloy tried drilling for oil, a much less speculative and more industrial business was taking off across the whole state of Michigan; namely, commercial logging. Most of the state was covered with pine forests that provided ready, raw materials for the rapid construction of new Midwestern cities. Sawmills like Antoine Manseau’s operated all along the west shore of the state of Michigan, and huge rafts of logs were floated down the lake to Chicago for milling there. In 1847, Horace Boardman came from Chicago to build a dam in Traverse City and set up a company to harvest lumber. When he developed financial problems, he was bought out in 1851 by the Hannah Lay Company, headed by Perry Hannah and Albert Lay, who also came from Chicago. While Lay returned to Chicago to handle marketing, Hannah stayed in Traverse City to handle production, and he soon became one of the more successful lumber barons in the Midwest. All the trees up the Boardman River past Kalkaska in central Michigan were removed, cut in the winter and then floated down the river in the spring.

When the great fire swept over Chicago in 1871, Hannah Lay’s lumberyard just south of the city was spared. So Hannah and Lay found themselves in a good position to play a primary role in providing lumber for the rapid rebuilding of Chicago over the next several years. Hannah subsequently diversified the Traverse City economy into other industrial fields as well, building a soda ash plant down by the waterfront, bringing in multiple rail lines starting in 1872, and building up a specialty brick business. Other local businessmen built an iron foundry and the Oval Wood Dish factory, among other ventures. Serving as a Michigan state senator, Hannah also convinced the governor to locate the state mental hospital in Traverse City, and to purchase all the bricks for this large complex of buildings from Hannah’s own brick business.

Most of Leelanau County did not share in this construction lumber boom because the trees in this area were mostly maple and beech hardwood rather than the firs in demand for construction lumber. Still, there remained a significant demand for hardwood for such things as the construction of boats, and for making furniture and flooring. It also was used to burn in the steam boilers of the ships and tugs that hauled lumber and other goods on the inland lakes and on Lake Michigan.

In 1860 the original dam and sawmill at Leland were both re-built and enlarged, and a grist mill was added. In 1881 a new, steam-powered sawmill was built in Bingham, on the east shore of the South Lake. Finished product was hauled over a plank road to Grand Traverse Bay. Around the same time that de Belloy drilled his artesian well in a search for oil, the French Canadian settler Louis Mosier returned to the area, married Antoine Manseau’s daughter, and in either 1884 or 1887 (accounts vary) built another large sawmill on the east side of the Narrows. By the 1893 peak of the lumber industry in Leelanau, the county had thirteen steam-powered sawmills, five shingle mills, and four others. Two steam tugs named Sallie and Tiger would haul rafts of logs along the South Lake to the mills there.

Local farmers could supplement their subsistence farm income by cutting and selling lumber to the local sawmills, although the mills only paid the present-day equivalent of sixty dollars a cord. However, some of their children obtained cash employment on lumber industry work crews, or in the sawmills. And those lumber industry work crews also required food that the local farmers could help provide. A special example of this latter economic benefit of the lumber industry involved Simon Schaub, who had built a winery next to his barn on the shore of the South Lake just south of where The Colony would someday be built. He essentially became the first bar owner in the area, selling his own wine to the lumberjacks to drink on site.

The availability of this local hardwood proved one of the key factors in convincing some Detroit investors to further industrialize Leelanau in the manner that Hannah was doing in Traverse City, in this case by constructing a large, iron-smelting operation in Leland. This proved to be the key to Leelanau’s transition to a successful, modern economy, but not at all in the manner that these Detroit investors envisioned.