This image of a cherry orchard at the crest of a sand dune comes from a commission to photograph the Herman family farms, fifteen to twenty miles north of Traverse City, Michigan, on the Leelanau Peninsula. This particular orchard grows on the family’s Gill’s Pier farm to the east of Leland, a few miles north of the Suttons Bay homestead. I had not remembered nor apparently noticed there was also late summer clover (hard to see in this little image but there nonetheless) still blooming along the tractor path.

A brief mention of the area’s history may help contextualize, at least geographically and ethnically, the location and local significance of the orchard. Less than a mile up a steep gravel road sits St. Wenceslas Church, a historically significant institution in the settling and development of the northern Leelanau Peninsula. A Catholic church, St. Wenceslas was constructed to attract Bohemian (central European, now Czechoslovakian) immigrants and laborers to the peninsula’s thriving lumber industry of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The forests survived only until the early twentieth century, however, the nearby orchards and church remain. Most of the early Bohemian immigrants migrated to the state’s industrial centers by the 1920s, and only the few remaining purchased the cheap land where they established farms and cherry orchards. Wenceslas is still perched on Leelanau’s highest dune at the intersection of East Kolarik and Gill’s Pier roads.

The turns in history over the next century have left the post office closed, small village abandoned, land recast as orchards, with its greatest asset an almost 360-degree view of Lake Michigan to the south as far as Sleeping Bear; west to the horizon, finally crowning to the north where it rounds abruptly into the Grand Traverse Bay to the east.

An extraordinary lack of foresight, or simply avarice, stripped the area of its rich forests by 1910, leaving a landscape of dunes in its wake. Gill’s lumber mill, the magnet for an influx of the Bohemians (Czech/Slovak, eastern European immigrants), found itself without natural resources (white pine, cedar, maple and hemlock) to sustain the community.

Year: 2014
Location: Gill’s Pier, Michigan
Collector’s Edition of 10
Dimensions: 16" x 24"