Looking Back: A schoolhouse in Charlevoix and pigeons (to eat!)

A few weeks ago, Looking Back looked back at the vast number of passenger pigeons that blanketed the treetops south of town within an area of one by three miles. On June 22, 1872, the Charlevoix Sentinel reported: “PIGEONS—A Chicago gentleman has two hundred dozens of live pigeons confined in coops in the rear of the Fountain City House (hotel on the site of the present day Weathervane Terrace). He is fatting them for market.” 

It was illegal to shoot the birds within half a mile of their nesting place, but apparently they could be netted and confined for feeding, like the 2,400 here. Small wonder the beautiful bird was extinct within a decade. 

The same issue announced that Charlevoix’s third schoolhouse was about to be erected. $4,000 had been approved for a structure “which will be a credit to the village.  The meeting on Saturday evening last voted to have the bonds to the amount of $1,000, payable March, 1874, and to raise $1,000 the coming winter, by direct tax, and the balance to be raised as needed, either by bonds or direct tax. It was the sentiment of the meeting that a building 35 x 60, two stories in height, with a stone foundation, be erected. The site selected reaches from Mason to Clinton Streets, and is the most suitable and pleasant location that could have been selected. If the provisions made and the sentiments expressed are carried out, Charlevoix will soon have a school building surpassing any in (the) Grand Traverse (region).” 

It would contain four rooms, two up and two down. In the beginning, there were so few pupils that only the two lower rooms, presided over by two male teachers, were utilized.

According to a history of the Charlevoix schools written in 1940 by Mrs. Brayton Saltonstall, “Both the Methodist and Congregational people used this building as a meeting place until their churches could be erected.” This school stood where the parking lot of the Charlevoix Public Library is now situated.

Those of us long fed up with the loopy antics and jaw-dropping pronouncements that emerge from the mouths of some of our elected representatives will appreciate this poem that appeared in the June 22, 1922 Sentinel, titled “Billy, He’s In Trouble:”

“I’ve got a letter, parson, from my son away out west,/An’ my ol’ heart is heavy as an anvil in my breast,/To think the boy whose future I had once so proudly planned/Should wander from the path o’ right an’ come to such an end.

“I told him when he left us, only three short years ago,/He’d find himself a-plowin’ in a mighty crooked row;/He’d miss his father’s councils an’ his mother’s prayers, too./But he said the farm was hateful, an’ he guessed he’d have to go.

“His letters came so seldom that I somehow sort o’ knowed/That Billy was a trampin’ on a mighty rocky road,/But never once imagined he would bow my head in shame,/An’ in the dust ‘d waller his old daddy’s honored name.

“He writes from out in Denver, an’ the story’s mighty short;/I just can’t tell his mother; it’d crush her poor ol’ heart:/An’ so I reckoned, parson, you might break the news to her--/Bill’s in the legislature, but he doesn’t say what fer.”