March 10, 2011 • Issue 789 • $1.00 Serving St. Joseph Island since 1995 “Your Island Newspaper” Visit us online at www.islandclippings.com Tel: 705 246-1635 email:
[email protected] Fax: 705 246-7060 The Lewises of Encampment By Michael Cansfield “Dear Friends: The old typewriter greets you from its new desk on Everens Point.” SO BEGINS A REMARKABLE COLLECTION of 28 letters penned during the summer of 1921 by Professor Edwin Herbert Lewis as he, his wife, and daughter spent three months on their newly-acquired property at the southern end of Sailor’s Encampment, on the western shore of St. Joseph Island. Professor Lewis was a Rhode Island native who spent his academic career in Chicago—first as a student and lecturer at the University of Chicago, then as Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty at Lewis Institute (the name similarity is a coincidence), a highly-respected polytechnic school that Michigan Governor Chase Osborn, whose summer camp was later became the Illinois Institute of Technology. on Sugar Island. Sometime before 1899, the Lewis family began summering on In 1920, the Lewises bought twelve acres of shore property on the Encampment section of Neebish Island, interacting with St. Joseph Island in the Neebish Concession, Lot 16 from notable full-time and summer residents from both sides of William Burnside, who was farming the remainder of the 88 the St. Mary’s River such as Florence Orrell, Anna Maria acre parcel. During the summer of 1921, Professor Lewis, his (Miss Molly) Johnston, Howard Johnston, and former wife Elizabeth, and 22 year-old daughter Janet camped on the property which included a small, one-room building back from the shore.