PIONEER YOOPER: Lucena Harris

SMITH-Dort/Winsor-Secord/HARRIS [REVISED 4/8/19]

PIONEER YOOPER: Lucena Harris, 2^nd Cousin 6x

YOOPER

Lucena Harris

Yes, “Yooper” is now an official term listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary to define residents of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Once used as a pejorative put-down (by jealous ‘city-folk,’ of course) to describe the people who lived in the scattered, rural farming hamlets and old mining towns dotting the peninsula, it is now proudly embraced by the people who call the U.P. their home.  ‘Yooper’ is displayed on our vanity plates and proclaimed in solidarity as an exclusive membership in the vast region of Michigan north of the Mackinac Bridge, typically done with humorous self-deprecation. We're da Yoopers uh da U.P., eh?  But, before being a Yooper meant something special, it just meant living far, far away from everything. At least that’s what I thought when my father’s government job required our family to relocate to the U.P. in the early 1960’s; I thought WE were the first -and only- family Yoopers …but I was wrong. 

Recently, while expanding the Harris line in our family tree, I made a surprising discovery: one of our Harris cousins had been here first! She was a Yooper almost 150 years before the word was coined!

Although I had been tracing the numerous migrations of my ancestral Harris family from colonial New England to pre-Revolutionary New York and post-territorial Midwest relocations, I knew that many of our expanded Harris line ended up in Michigan. Lower Michigan (you know, the “mitten”). But in August of 1843, my second-cousin Lucena, her husband and first child moved North to the very U.P. town in which I now live!

According to a biographical sketch published by the National Park Service, in 1843, Lucena’s husband Daniel was appointed as government blacksmith and mechanic to a small town at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula. Three years and two babies later, the family moved to Michigan’s northernmost settlement of Copper Harbor where a federal mineral land office had recently kicked off the mining boom. The article states:

View from Brockway Mountain, Keweenaw Co., MI

‘Daniel wore many hats over the course of his lifetime, as blacksmith, hotelier, mine agent, land agent, postmaster, merchant, politician, and inventor. Lucena provided support for all of these endeavors while raising a family. The couple was memorialized in the 1930s for their role as Copper Harbor pioneers when Brockway Mountain Drive, which traverses the ridge of West Bluff, was named in their honor. The promontory overlooking Copper Harbor on West Bluff had been known locally for many years as “Brockway’s Nose,” given its supposed resemblance to this prominent feature of his countenance. Daniel and Lucena retired in Lake Linden and died in 1899. They were buried together in Calumet’s Lakeview Cemetery, where their migrant story ends.’ (1)

In her large diary collection, now archived at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, LUCENA HARRIS BROCKWAY left behind descriptive accounts of life as a pioneer Yooper woman. From these and other sources, we learn how some of the ‘oft-unsung’ women of our ancestry made important contributions to their communities and regional history. And, in the pages of her diaries, we are able to see it all through Lucena’s eyes and begin to understand in part how Lucena and others epitomized what it meant to be a pioneer Yooper. MTU archivist Emily Riippa explains:

‘What we see from Lucena’s writing are women who confronted

the challenges of ordinary days,

 the heartbreaking difficulty of tragedies,

and the world at large with courage, humor, strength, and flair.’

Riippa continues:

‘Lucena, born in New York in 1816, moved to southwest Michigan in her youth and there married Daniel Brockway in 1836. She became the mother of four daughters [Charlotte, Delia, Sarah, Anna] and two sons [Albert and Daniel], one of whom died in infancy and whose birthday was remembered with mournful devotion in her diaries. With her husband, Lucena made the aforementioned transition to the various locales of the Upper Peninsula and there dedicated herself to carving out a new life from the rugged locale. Though her husband’s growing financial assets meant that Lucena was insulated from some of life’s difficulties, living in a frontier community nevertheless required her to confront thorny dilemmas with tenacious resolution… In August 1880, for example, Lucena awoke to an empty house and headed to her kitchen in hopes of having “a quiet day, the first in a long time.” When she glanced out the window, however, she found that her dreams of relaxation had quite literally gone up in smoke. The wooden fence near the Brockway home had spontaneously combusted and was now engulfed in flames. “So I fought fire for sometime [sic],” Lucena wrote, recalling the event later in the day, “then ate my breakfast and the fire had broken out again.” Eventually, her persistence in firefighting paid off, and the blaze came under control. Little time remained for resting by this point, however. There were chickens to be fed and beans to be picked for dinner. Life went on.” (2)

Life went on. It went on through the long and hostile Lake Superior winters that were measured by the feet, not the inches, of snow that limited movement and isolated the residents of the Keweenaw’s copper mining communities. That isolation was one of the most imposing “thorny dilemmas” to be faced by pioneer Yooper women like my cousin Lucena.   

Daniel & Lucena Brockway

In his book, Strangers and Sojourners: A History of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, A. W. Thurner notes from her diary entries that by the age of 50, Lucena suffered from what her doctor termed “general prostration of the nervous system” in addition to intermittent physical issues that led to her being wheelchair-bound in her later years. Her diary reveals that following her illness in the spring of 1866, she was upset that her husband would spend days away at Portage Lake: “Started at 5 o’clock a.m. Went unbeknown to me, the cruelest thing he could do when I was so sick.” Thurner suggests that, because of their unpredictable onsets, Lucena’s episodes may have “been accompanied by unconscious psychosomatic protest.” For example, years later when Daniel left by stage for Houghton and L’Anse, Lucena recorded, “Five minutes after, I was taken sick…pretty sick all day symptoms of Paralysis again.”(3)

But, life went on. Lucena’s days were impressively busy with not only the raising of her children and keeping her own household in remote, challenging early mining environments, but she also appears to have played a big role in managing the “family-style” hotels she and Daniel had established when they arrived in Copper Harbor and later in Eagle River. Lucena employed girls and women for domestic duties, entertained hotel guests, and kept record of their arrivals and departures. On the 27^th of August, 1873, she noted how she had ten visitors and served 22 extra meals!

In Beyond the Boundaries: Life and Landscape at the Lake Superior Copper Mines, Larry D. Lankton notes:

‘Her house was deluged with women and men who came for tea and often stayed for dinner. A good businesswoman, Lucena Brockway sold milk, eggs, butter, and berries in season. In July 1878, she picked strawberries each day from the seventh through the sixteenth, thirty-two quarts in four days alone at the Cliff [mine], gave away some, then sent son-in-law Scott to Calumet with forty quarts for the market there. She and the family picked some 531 quarts by July 19.” (4)

Lankton describes Lucena’s husband Daniel as a businessman who juggled many interests including the post of the Northwest mine agent while hotel-keeping at Copper Harbor, later starting a mercantile business there, too. There was a temporary move to farming downstate in rural Kalamazoo County, but their return to the Keweenaw in 1872 to run a general store and meat market at the Cliff mine would keep Daniel and Lucena in the Copper Country for the rest of their days …with the exception of one brief whim by Daniel.

“Reading was vitally important to Lucena Brockway, a woman who struggled with poor health, loneliness, and depression.”(4) So it certainly couldn’t have helped Lucena’s peace of mind when in 1879, according to Lankton, Daniel put a thousand miles between them, spending seven months prospecting for gold in the Black Hills before returning home to stay. Thankfully, books and newspapers, letter writing and journaling provided Lucena comfort and connections with the larger world and people she missed. Lankton notes:

“Lucena Brockway craved companionship. She absolutely needed to be connected to a world bigger and more interesting than her quarters in Copper Harbor or at the Cliff mine. For this woman, sometimes a shut-in, reading was a passion, if not an obsession, and mail was her salvation. The spring of 1867 had been unpleasant; it had snowed several times during the first week of May. Then came the blessed mail: ‘In the evening we got a through mail, the first in two weeks. Got a letter from D.D.B.[Daniel] Two from [daughters] Charlotte, one from Sarah & Scott, one from Ada Harris [her brother Daniel’s wife], one from Mrs. Broughton [Sarah Sumner, her husband’s half-sister]… and a dozen papers. And I read more than I was able being so long without any news from the lower world.”(4) In her diary for 1874, Lankton finds that she mentions sending out 146 letters to thirty-nine different people along with receiving 138 letters.

And, so, life went on. Lucena’s life story is seasoned with the lasting pioneer spirit of the people who have, for generations, felt like they belonged to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, even when they moved away. So today, despite its remote location, largely rural demographics, and long winters that do not deter the “sisu” spirit of its inhabitants, it increasingly calls home those who once left for warmer climes, higher paying jobs, and more urbane lifestyles. But, in a small cemetery near Eagle River, once home to Lucena and Daniel, are the graves of their first child, Charlotte and her husband Oliver Farwell. Although their large family ended their days in places like New Mexico and Hawaii, most found their way back home …a final resting place near the abandoned copper mines of Michigan’s pioneer past.    

Sources include:

   (1) from “A Migrant Story-Daniel Dunbar Brockway,” NPS) found at: https://www.nps.gov/kewe/learn/historyculture/a-migrant-story-daniel-dunbar-brockway.htm

   (2) from blog post: “The Remarkable Brockway Women.” Emily Riippa. MTU Archives, Manuscript Collections. 4.5.2019. found at: https://blogs.mtu.edu/archives/2018/04/05/the-remarkable-brockway-women/

   (3) Strangers and Sojourners: A History of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula. Arthur W. Thurner, Wayne State University Press, 1994. Pages 108-111. (excerpt found here)

   (4) Beyond the Boundaries: Life and Landscape at the Lake Superior Copper Mines. Larry D. Lankton, Oxford University Press, 1997.