The Early Years
Well before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans raised crops on Madeline Island and elsewhere in the region. Travelers reported that Hurons and Ottawas grew corn in the Chequamegon Bay region, while the Ojibwa grew pumpkins, squash, and corn. During the fur trade era, the American Fur Company maintained gardens and orchards on Madeline Island, to supply the bustling headquarters settlement at LaPointe. As European settlement grew, entrepreneurs and developers made attempts at establishing agriculture in the area. In the years following the Civil War, men such as Henry Rice, founder of Bayfield, and Ozara Stearns, Senator from Minnesota, bought tracts of land on the islands and had them cleared for agricultural use. Farms were established on Rocky, South Twin, and Ironwood Islands, but the schemes were short-lived. As early as 1895, the farm fields were disappearing under second-growth forest.
The Farms of Basswood Island
While developers such as Rice and Stearns failed in their efforts to promote agriculture on the Apostles, a Civil War veteran named Richard McCloud showed that it was possible to establish a viable island farm. McCloud acquired a homestead on Basswood Island in 1865, and by 1870, he had a successful farm that supplied produce to the crews working at a neighboring brownstone quarry. McCloud sold the farm in 1878, and a few years later, the land came into the hands of Elisha K. Brigham, who expanded the operation further. Elsewhere on the island, an entrepreneur named Charles Rudd cleared land for a farm which he proposed to make a showplace for agriculture in the islands. Rudd himself spent much of his time out of the area, and hired a tenant farmer to manage the operation. The farms of Basswood Island did not outlive their owners. Rudd's farm ceased operation when he died in 1897, and Elisha Brigham's death in 1923 signaled the end of farming on Basswood Island.
Roswell Pendergast and Michigan Island
Perhaps the single most influential figure in the area's agricultural development was a Michigan Island lighthouse keeper, Roswell Pendergast. Appointed keeper in 1869, Pendergast planted thousands of fruit trees on the island. Soon he was selling the apples, cherries, peaches, plums and pears that his trees produced, and supplying nursery stock to farmers around the region. As his enterprise expanded, Pendergast eventually found it desirable to move to the mainland, and in 1874, he resigned his position as lighthouse keeper and left the area. The trees that Roswell Pendergast planted are long gone, but his legacy lives on in every orchard of the Bayfield Peninsula. Pendergast was by no means the only one to attempt farming on Michigan Island. Prompted by a belief that the outermost islands of the archipelago were best suited to agriculture, several families and individuals filed homestead claims on Michigan Island. Some of these pioneers stayed only a year, others held on longer, but one by one the settlers returned to life on the mainland. By the end of the nineteenth century, no farms were left on Michigan Island.