CHARLEVOIX — One hundred and fifty years ago, Charlevoix Sentinel editor Willard A. Smith showed his true colors once again when he lambasted an area editor for stealing one of Smith’s articles for use as his own.
Smith had previously raked over the editor of the Cheboygan paper for having done so more than once. Now it was the turn of a paper to the south. March 28,1874: “Another Thief—Godwin, the whiskey-sucking editor of the Manistee standard, recently published an article in his paper as original, which he purloined from the columns of the SENTINEL. If the thieving skunk repeats the act, Northern Michigan will be heard from.”
Sounds like a journalistic version of the Wild West.
Smith also excoriated party or parties unknown who were supplying alcohol to Charlevoix’s youth. “Where Does It Belong—Of late, drunkenness has been on the increase in Charlevoix, and to such an extent as to be not only unpleasant but alarming. On Thursday evening last a most startling and sorrowful case came under our notice, at the mere thought of which we shudder. When the poison liquid is dealt out to young men in such quantities as to rob them of their reason and render them maniacs, it is high time that public opinion should be directed against the evil in an emphatic and effective manner. We know not at whose door this flagrant sin lies, neither do we care; but the individual or individuals who are guilty should be visited with the most severe penalty that the law will allow. Who is the man?”
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In the same issue, Smith brought up again the question of how a replacement bridge would be funded, as mentioned in recent Looking Backs. The question was how much the country should be expected to appropriate versus how much Charlevoix Township, of which the settlement was then a part, should be obligated. Their thinking was poles apart. The county vote was no, backed up by the Board of Supervisors. Smith kept trying to convince everyone that everyone in the county benefited from a bridge, even if it didn’t look that way to many who lived miles away and never saw it for months, if ever. One man in particular, a Mr. Keat who lived down by East Jordan, was adamantly against having to contribute, and had written the Sentinel of his beliefs.
“The Bridge Question Again. In the height and fullness of our amazement,” Smith wrote, “we know not whether Mr. Keat, in his communication of last week, reflects a disposition to be unfair, or expresses his ideas with a degree of sincerity which comes from—we will not say ignorance, but misapprehension—of the true bearing of the case.” Following this came a questioning of exactly how much Mr. Keat, who apparently had a very self-interested reason for not wanting a bridge, and not wanting anyone in his neighborhood to feel the need for one, understood about the relation of the county’s voters to exactly what the Board of Directors was supposed to do.
It was definitely a headscratcher, but Smith persevered as best he could, “... shows plainly that he (Keat) regards the bridge only as a portion of the highway for the use of teams (of horses) and pedestrians. This argument—if an argument—is so lame as to be senseless. By virtue of a highway existing across the stream, a bridge must also necessarily exist, and must be kept in a passable condition by the highway authorities of Charlevoix. But under this bridge passes another highway—a highway over which must pass the products of the lake townships, and to which South Arm (toward East Jordan) furnishes the greater portion.” The question would soon be resolved without the interference of Mr. Keat and like thinkers.
Fifty years later, the March 27, 1924 Charlevoix Courier devoted more than a column of the front page to the passing of 88-year-old Capt. Alanson G. Aldrich, allegedly the fifth white settler in Pine River, later to be named Charlevoix. A portion of this lake captain’s obituary related a fact of life during his early time here that most people alive today would find too difficult to think of, if not impossible. “Captain Aldrich, during his long and eventful life in this region, saw many hardships that will happily never fall to the lot of his descendants nor their contemporaries. He often used to tell of packing flour and pork on his back over the 55-mile trail through the woods between Traverse City and Charlevoix, when pork was worth $50 a barrel and flour $25 a barrel. We may be sure that the difficulties they (his family) encountered and courageously met as a matter of daily course were of a nature completely unknown and unrealized by its younger generation today.”
That meant having to walk to Traverse City (to Oleson’s?) to buy groceries, then back, especially in winter when Lake Michigan was frozen.
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