Somewhere we have a summary of the titles issued for our property since the first homestead, and so I can't give a complete history in that respect.
I do remember that the Kero family bought the property sometime in the 1920s or 1930s. Kero is a shorter version of the original Finnish name. They tried their hand at fox farming. We don't know if they succeeded, but we still haven't succeeded in pulling up all of the tangle of grass, chicken wire, and wood frames.
Eventually they moved to Michigan, presumably to work in the auto industry. Their daughter Nora Holm inherited the property and later sold it to us.
Once there was a co-operative grocery in the big clearing on the north side of Little Creek Road. Supposedly people would walk to it on the path that runs to the SSE from our cabin. We don't know if that was before or after the Keros occupancy. Now that clearing is the Rack Shack, a small cabin and garage owned by a group of hunters. They are a friendly bunch, but neither of us takes the time to walk across the road and visit.
After the Keros moved the property was rented several times. I met one woman who said her first child was born in the house on the property in the same year I was born. A couple who we later met rented it in the seventies. Somebody else rented it after them. At the time our friends rented it, there was no well and they had to haul water in. I would guess that they got their water from the Rack Shack well; it is excellent water.
The satellite picture was taken in the morning; the shadows are the west of many objects. So, some details get lost, like exactly where is our drive to the road. One feature that does show is the path to west of the northernmost large field. Along much of that segment, Ernie Nelmark planted red pines decades ago. Ernie lived in a cabin to the west of where the Rack Shack is. Those red pines are now dozens of feet tall and a foot or more in diameter.
Kevin Hellman used that same path as a logging road twenty or so years ago. He widened and leveled it for his equipment and continued it into the Forest Service land. To level the road, Kevin dug "borrow holes" on each side. Most of these still remain; many covered by overgrowth. Kevin cut mostly aspen both on Nora Holm's property and Forest Service land. When we bought the property, the regenerated aspen was only 10-12 feet tall and less than an inch in diameter.
See http://magree.blogspot.com/2009/09/people-come-and-go-woods-endures.html and http://magree.blogspot.com/2009/09/people-come-and-go-woods-endures_23.html for the previous chapters.
