Introduction - The Historic Gorman House

The 125 year history of of the Gorman House, the Gorman House Beach House and the land, involves a interesting and varied cast of characters that are connected to major events in the history of  the small village of Ontonagon, Michigan located on the south shore of Lake Superior.

    Involved were eastern capitalists, lumbermen, miners, fisherman; government officials including:  one judge, a county supervisor, a county surveyor, a county register of deeds, and two prosecuting attorneys,  Major  executives including: a businessman who opened one of the country's largest underground copper mines, and a mine president that closed the mine, a lumber company president who had bad luck with fire, a publisher who published the Upper Peninsula's first area-wide telephone directory, the business manager of ship building company, and a paper mill president.

    One land owner helped to start the White Pine Mine, a mine that produced 4.4 billion pounds of copper, developed 13 square miles of underground works and reached a depth of 2,700 feet.

    Two owners of the Gorman House went to Federal prison, and one owner, a professional librarian, worked as a law librarian.

    The wife one one owner was a model for her feet and used her kids as models.

    It is said the the wife of one owner never went in the kitchen.  That was where the cook worked.

    At least two owners were member of Rotary.  One owner was member of Rotary One, the first Rotary Club in the United States.

    One owner published the first area-wide phone book and yellow pages in the Upper Peninsula and developed one of the first yellow pages web site;

    The son of one owner became a renown transportation and maritime attorney in New York City, retired, and built a house across from the Gorman House where he lived as a child.

    The Gorman House beach house building housed Ontonagon's first public library was moved by a owner who moved the building from downtown Ontonagon to its present location on Lake Superior.

    The most prominent visitor was probably Michigan's governor Mitt Romney Sr., his son and wife.  Many extra phone lines were installed in the house.

    Two owners also owned Ontonagon's historic courthouse which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.   One of these owners turned the court room into s basketball court.

    The Gorman House was built twice.  A fire destroyed it before it was lived in and it was rebuilt. 

    One owner turned the “gun room” into a sauna and put a hot tub in the garage.

    One owner used the house as Ontonagon's first bed and breakfast.

    One owner never allowed the help to come through the front door.

    One owner helped to move valuables from the house while the FBI was closing in. 

.    The general structure of this site is based on the the 34 page Gorman House abstract by Judith D. Roehm of the Ontonagon County Abstract Office.  It has 75 entries beginning with entry 1 when the land is obtained from the United States government.

                     

    The 165 year history of the Gorman House begins in 1851.

    Millard Fillmore, a Whig, is the 13th President of the United States.  The yacht “America” wins the first America's Cup race.  The New York Times starts publishing at 2 cents a copy.  A fire devastates the Library of Congress.  35,000 volumes are destroyed.  A Baltimore dairyman sets up the 1st ice-cream factory.  Michigan had been a state for only 20 years.
    On December 2, 1851, the United States of America issued to Simon Mandlabaum of Houghton, Michigan, a land patent to lot Three (3), Sec. 19, T. 52  N. R. 39 W. in Ontonagon County, Michigan.

    This patent includes the land where the Gorman House would eventually be built.

    A land patent is an exclusive land grant made by a sovereign entity in this case the United States government, with respect to a particular tract of land. To make such a grant “patent”, a sovereign must document the land grant, securely sign and seal the document (patent), and openly publish the documents for the public to see. An official land patent is the highest evidence of right of title and interest to a defined area.

    This land was once part of the territory of Wisconsin.  As the result of the so called “Toledo War.” of 1936 a strip of land was in given to Ohio so they would have a port on Lake Erie.  In return the top of Wisconsin was conseded by congress to the new State of Michigan.  This created the “Upper Peninsula,” of Michigan.

    At the time most people considered the Upper Peninsula as completely worthless.  But as James Jamison documents in This Ontonagon County, people soon realized the value of he the vast mineral resources and vast forests of White Pine.  It is said that the U.P. produced more wealth than the California Gold Rush.
   
    Simon Mandelbaum, was an early mining pioneer in the Keweenaw Peninsula and Ontonagon area. In 1840's he applied for and was granted Lease 36 for land in Ontonagon County in the name of the Silver and Copper County of Ontonagon Rapids. In 1851, he was on the original board of directors of the Phoenix Mining Co. and was agent-in-charge of the Phoenix Mine from 1850 to 1853.  As agent-in-charge he was instrumental in finding some ancient mining pits for the New Phoenix Mine and five other Keweenaw mines.

    Evident suggests that he attended The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and studied engineering.  He was very successful.  This name appears in a Ph.D. Dissertation from the Wayne County University in Detroit by Alexandra McCoy on “economic  elites.”  In 1880,  Simon Mandelbaum had an annual income of $10,000.  In today's dollars it would be nearly $280,000.

    He worked to the end of his life.  The June 8, 1876, edition of the Portage Lake Mining Gazette reports “the death of Mr. Simon Mandelbaum has interfered with certain explorations on Isle Royale which were to have been carried out this season.”

    In 1929, a Simon Mandelbaum Scholarship was established by the late Mary S. (Mandlebaum) Madelle of Detroit for those attending the University of Michigan, in memory of her father, Simon Mandelbaum.

 

    The August 2015 issue of American Philatelist has a picture of a rare envelope addressed to Simon Mandelbaum.  “This 1853 3-cent stamped envelope”,” says author Petoskeyl, “was carried outside the mail system by ship to Simon Mandlebaum, Eagle River, Lake Superior, Mich. The notation of which ship carried this piece was torn away during its opening.”   This 3-cent stamped envelope is from 1853 and is one of the early government stamped envelopes to be manufactured.

    In 1851, the rush to mine copper in Michigan's Upper Peninsula was underway.          Samuel Knapp discovered what was to become the very profitable  Minesota Mine.  (The Minesota mine was supposed to be spelled like the state – Minnesota – but a secretary misspelled it when typing the incorporation papers, so it remained that forever.) In four years of operation, the investors who were mainly Boston capitalists doubled their investment ion the mine.  The American Civil war resulted in a great need for copper, and it said that Ontonagon County mines provided over 50 percent.  The copper rush was on.  People rushed in to Ontonagon County.  According to James K. Jamison in his classic book, This Ontonagon  County, Jamison says that no one probably ever know how many mining companies were organized to exploit the mineral resources of Ontonagon County.    One careful search discovered one hundred and twelve corporations with mining property existed.

    Not far away in Ontonagon, “copper was king.”

    The Ontonagon River is the largest river on the south shore of Lake Superior.  Soon the port of Ontonagon became the busiest port on Lake Superior which created the need the was need for a lighthouse.  In 1851, a wooden lighthouse was constructed on the west side of the river's mouth to guide ships to the port from which copper was being shipped from the mines upriver.

    In 1951 business was booming in Ontonagon and a hotel the Bigelow House was under construction.  It was a frame structure, five stories high, and eighty feet front by 110 feet. deep, with a basement, which was first occupied by the Miner newspaper office, post office, County Clerk's office, a Justice of the Peace office, a clothing store, a billiard room and bar. Fortune-hunting prospectors gathered at the five-story hotel to exchange information about possibilities for striking it rich here and elsewhere.

    The Lake Superior Miner was Ontonagon's first newspaper.  A later owner of the Gorman House would, for a brief time, would publish the Miner once again.

    In 1852, the abstract documents that Simon Mandlebaum and his wife Mary transferred the land to Joseph W. Clark of Boston in trust for Balch, Clark and Mandlebaum of Boston, Mass.

    In 1855, Simon Mandlebaum and his wife Mary sold half the property to Livi Hanna of New Lisbon, Ohio.

    Time passes.  25 years to be exact. 

    It's 1880.  Building of the Panama Canal begins, Thomas Edison patents the incandescent lamp, James A. Garfield becomes president, and John Philip Sousa becomes new director of U.S Marine Corps Band.

    In 1880, the land on which the Gorman House was to be built was sold to Byron W. White of Ontonagon County.  White was a supervisor of the County Board, county surveyor and a notary public.  He probably did not pay this taxes on the land.

    In 1881, the land was sold by a tax deed to the Ontonagon and Brule River Railroad Company.   The  O&B RR date back to 1857 when the State of Michigan authorized by an act to grant six sections of land to aid in the construction of the Ontonagon and State Line Railway.  A survey was made, but financial issues caused a suspension and the project was abandoned for years.  So long that most people seemed to have given up and forgot the grant.

    In the previous year, 1880, a new Ontonagon resident, a Timothy Nester, revised the rail project and the Ontonagon and Brule River Railroad Company was formed and a new survey done from Ontonagon to Rockland.  The following year the Michigan legislature passed a bill defining the conditions of a line from Ontonagon to the intersection of the Brule River with the state line between Michigan and Wisconsin.  The bill provided that the first 20 miles be completed in one year and the entire line by 1886. 

    In 1885,  Ontonagon which was settled in 1842 was incorporated as a village

    A year later, in 1886, the Ontonagon County Courthouse was built on the public square.  The Courthouse is a two-story Romanesque Revival structure, built of brick on a sandstone foundation.  Three sides have similar facades a central entrance in a gabled pavilion flanked by tall double-hung windows. The stone window lintels form part of a beltcourse that circles the building. A bay window is above the entrance, and the hipped roof has projecting dormers and a glass-roofed dome at the peak. The rear sports a rectangular addition.  The courthouse is currently on the National Register of Historic Places.  Two future owners of the Gorman House were also be owners of the courthouse.   More on this later.

    Between 1886 and 1923 Byron White and M. A Powers of Ontonagon are dealing real estate and buying a lot of land ...mostly from the State of Michigan.

    M.A. Powers was register of deeds and Ontonagon County clerk.  He was elected and served part of his term and then appointed H.M. Power in his place.  Apparently the Board of Supervisors were not happy with this arrangement and appointed Will J. Coulter to fill M.A. Powers' vacancy.  H.M. Powers declined to recognize Coulter and, as they say,  “held the fort” until the Circuit Court recognized Coulter as clerk. 

    In 1923, Sarah H. M. White, the widow of Bryon White,  now living in Spokane, Washington, sold the Gorman House land to Joseph M. Donnelly of Ontonagon.

    Joseph M. Donnelly was Probate Judge, 1920-24 and Prosecuting Attorney, 1924-1928, and 1930-1932.  In 1934 lumber was in great demand and Donnelly sold the land to the Northern Logging Company, a Wisconsin corporation.  Secretary to the corporation was Walter Gorman of Wausau, Wisconsin.

2 - The Gormans 1936-1949

Walter Gorman and his son Tom in front of the Gorman House

3 -  The Hawleys 1949-1978

4 - The Potts 1978-1981

    The 182 jobs lost when Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. shuttered its corrugated paper-making plant in Ontonagon, Mich., barely rate a blip on the dismal unemployment screen in that state, which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past decade.

    Lost jobs are also a common sight in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., which has watched jobs disappear by the tens of thousands as major corporations have collapsed in recent years.

    But a flurry of letters from residents has won Ontonagon a special hearing Thursday before Judge Brendan Shannon, who is presiding over Smurfit-Stone’s Chapter 11 case in Delaware.  Shannon hasn’t said why he wants to hear about the plant closure, which is the kind of routine business move that generally doesn’t require court authorization. In an order signed Friday, he said Smurfit-Stone is to “advise the court of the status of their assets and operations” at Ontonagon.

    The Chicago company is headed toward the exit from Chapter 11 within months. It cited the need to protect its long-term growth and profitability when it announced in December it would close the Ontonagon plant, as well as one in Montana.

    In letters to the court, residents of the sparsely populated Michigan Upper Peninsula raised the specter of extreme environmental harm if the plant that has supplied jobs to the area for three generations is left untended. Tanks filled with acid and caustics will split in the extreme cold, then thaw in the spring, tainting the soil and Lake Superior, they fear.
   
    “Please keep the HEAT on,” said a letter from Cindy LeGault, written just before Christmas, shortly after Smurfit-Stone said the plant would never reopen.
   
    So far, fears of an abandoned plant have not materialized, area residents report. In fact, after the letters started flying to the court, a new gate, with guards, appeared at the entrance to the mill.

    Paper industry research analysts at Credit Suisse have predicted plant closures and capacity cuts from Smurfit-Stone and others will help push prices up for packaging materials, which have suffered in the recession. Smurfit-Stone spokesman Mike Mullin referred to company statements that blamed weak demand for the product and the high cost of the facility to explain the need to shut it down.

    Ontonagon residents claim the plant is profitable but is being sacrificed to keep a lid on competition. They have asked Smurfit-Stone to find a buyer or keep the plant in shape so they can find one themselves.
The skills, natural resources and the customers are available, and the Ontonagon facility is the only paper plant in Michigan to meet or exceed standards for air and water quality, according to Bruce Johanson, a reporter for the Ontonagon Herald and president of the local historical society.

    “Maybe they can’t make money, but that’s no reason to destroy the town,” Johanson said.
Ontonagon residents are drumming up potential sources of financing to start the plant up again.
“We don’t want stimulus money. We don’t want handouts. We have potential investors,” said Debbie Dix, one of those who wrote to Shannon. “All we want is for these people to have the right to make a decent living.”

    Ontonagon has survived previous plant closings and at least one bankruptcy in the 90 years a paper mill has been in operation at the site, Johanson said. The plant always comes back into operation, and the town is prepared to hang on as long as there’s a plant standing, he said. It’s also looking at legislation that would bar Smurfit-Stone from razing the plant, if that’s what Smurfit-Stone has in mind.

    “Just walking away from this place is not going to be cheap for them,” Johanson said.
Environmental scientists say the permanent loss of the plant means an end to all of the area’s prospects because it will cost Ontonagon its harbor, which is now dredged regularly for Smurfit-Stone’s business.
“It is doubtful that the federal government will continue to pay the roughly $400,000 annual dredging price tag, since large freighters will no longer need the harbor,” wrote Kent Murray, professor of geology and environmental science at the University of Michigan, in an email. “This means that the harbor at the mouth of the Ontonagon River, one of the largest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, will begin to silt up.”

    There’s no immediate cause for concern that Ontonagon will be submerged, Murray wrote. But the harbor will become shallower each year and less safe for boaters, cutting “into one of the last chances this hard-hit town may have – recreation.”

    “It would be a shame to rip down that facility,” said Ron Kinnunen, a manager with Sea Grant, a network of university-based science programs that work with coastal communities. Big boats that run into trouble on the Great Lakes are finding fewer and fewer harbors deep enough to provide safety, he said. The loss of a plant at Ontonagon means one less safe harbor.

    “That community is going to be devastated, and it will be devastating to coastal recreation and refuge,” Kinnunen said.

5 - The Fischls 1981-1986

6 - The Langs 1986-1988

7- The Lees The Sanders The Lees 1988-Present

   

Margaret Lee and her Jag