Jesse Wells Church Journal (GLMS 10)

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Jesse Wells Church Journal (GLMS 10)

Sugar Island, Michigan, in the middle of St. Mary’s River between the U.S. and Canada. 1850. The Church family has set up a trading store on the island and expanded to include a saw mill, a shingle mill, and shipbuilding operations. Jesse starts a journal to record details of the business, calculating lumber and supply requirements by hand, sketching vessels, estimating horsepower, and recording ownership and salvage histories for small sailing vessels generally under fifty feet in length. Maybe Jesse wanted to amuse himself with the minutiae of life… or maybe Jesse knew that, one day, his meticulous records would open a window into life in the mid 1800s.

Center for Archival Collections, GLMS 10
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