Restoring North Manitou Island's Katie Shephard Cottage

Rustic hotel could begin taking guests as early as summer 2019

By Patrick Sullivan | Sept. 2, 2017

Depending on how you think about it, restoration of the Katie Shephard Hotel on North Manitou Island has taken years — or a flurry of weeks.

Since 2009, volunteers from Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear have spent 10 days each August painstakingly bringing the 1895 structure back to life.

“To put it in perspective, nine years at 10 days — it’s only 90 days. It’s only three months. And that’s really amazing,” said Susan Pocklington, PHSB director. “It’s truly on the backs of volunteers. I mean, yes, we put money into it for materials, but it’s all volunteer.”

Today, the nonprofit is on the cusp of a milestone: With restoration almost complete, PHSB plans to submit an application to the National Park Service for permission to run the Katie Shephard as a rustic hotel that would give visitors to North Manitou an alternative to camping and the chance to experience resort life like it was a century ago. If the plan is approved, Pocklington said the hotel could open as early as the summer of 2019.

COMPLICATED HISTORY
The worksite buzzed on a Monday morning in mid-August, but it was quieter than it had been in previous years, with most of the heavy-duty structural work complete and only some painting and finishing work remaining.

The Katie Shephard was constructed on the east side of the island as part of Cottage Row, originally a row of 10 cottages on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. A wealthy Chicago businessman platted out the lots in the late 19th century. The Katie Shephard, a small two-story structure just a short walk from the ferry dock and the island’s ranger station, housed guests for decades. Then it sat abandoned for decades more.

North Manitou became part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore’s boundaries in 1970, but it was more than a decade before the park service could officially take over the property from the island’s then-owner, the non-profit Angell Foundation; the federal government and foundation spent much of that decade squabbling over the island’s final price. Ultimately, the government paid $12.2 million for the island.

The history of the 1895 structure — and its maintenance — isn’t entirely clear.

What is known: “Miss Katie,” the daughter of the woman who built the house and the woman who ran it as a hotel for decades, left the island after falling ill in 1932. After that, the house was used as a summer cottage and then as a home base for hunters the Angell Foundation hosted on the island to raise money for charities.

No doubt its various owners and keepers performed general upkeep throughout its years of use, but by the time PHSB arrived in to undertake its restoration in 2009, the building had fallen into profound disrepair and had become home to bats, raccoons, and other creatures of the encroaching wilderness.

FIRE SUPRESSION QUESTION
Before guests can be welcomed back to the Katie Shephard, Pocklington said PHSB must answer one critical question: What kind of fire-suppression system, if any, can be installed in the structure?

The group has learned that they would likely be able to operate a hotel without a fire suppression system if it only offers guests the four rooms on the first floor, because those rooms all exit directly to the outside. But that plan would eliminate five guest rooms on the second floor.

“At this point, we’re going to submit two scenarios,” Pocklington said. “One is only people in the first floor, with no fire suppression, and then the second scenario is keep trying to find a solution for fire suppression upstairs.”

Depending on what PHSB comes up with, the group will have to raise additional money in order to install a system. It’s not everyday someone tries to restore a 19th century hotel to its rustic origins and still manage to live up to modern building codes.

“We’re still researching different alternatives, including the dry powder and things like that,” she said. “The Dougherty House on Old Mission has found something. We’ve been in contact because we’re both researching the same thing.”

The kitchen and dining area originally was constructed behind the house, keeping it safe from fire, heat, and any animals that might be attracted to the food. But that area has fallen down and cannot be rebuilt; according to National Park Service rules, once a building is in ruins, it can almost never be reconstructed.

So, if the hotel plan goes forward, neither cooking or fires will be allowed in the building; PHSB plans to set up an area with gas grills behind the Katie Shepard so that guests can cook. 

WHAT KEEPS THEM COMING BACK
David Watt, the project manager, has volunteered on North Manitou each of the project’s nine years.

He said what keeps people coming back each summer for hard labor is the satisfaction of seeing the old building come to life.

“The vision that these people have is so powerful that people are willing to keep working, in spite of the fact that progress is slow,” Watt said.

Preservation of Cottage Row is important in a place like northern Michigan, he said, because it is one of the earliest examples of resort life in the region.

“This whole Cottage Row is an example of the earliest cottagers,” Watt said. “The idea of being able to live here, approximately as they did on the order of a hundred years ago, is pretty cool. I mean, we’ve got the photos of these ladies sitting out on this porch right out there, those same types of chairs, a picture of these ladies, and it’s really cool to be able to do the same thing.”

Fred Siegmund also said that restoring the building is a passion. For Siegmund, it’s something he’s thought about since before he even heard of PHSB.

Siegmund recalls hiking on the island years ago and wishing that the Katie Shepard was restored.

“The first time I saw this building, it was falling down, and I wanted to fix it,” he said. “Then this came along. This is our ninth year. I’ve been out here every year. I saw the possibilities.”

Siegmund said his wife had noticed an article in the Leelanau Enterprise about the project in 2009 and told him he should sign up.

The remote workplace has built strong bonds among the volunteers, who say the camaraderie also keeps them coming back.

Some of the bonds are stronger than others: Stacie Longwell Sadowski met her husband of one year, Vince, three years ago while both were volunteering.
“He came on the crew, and we met, and we struck up a friendship after that,” she said. “We came back to the island camping. The next year we did an eight-day camping trip, and he proposed to me on the other side of the island, overlooking Lake Michigan. He brought wine and the ring and everything. It was a big surprise.”

BAT GUY COMES TO THE ISLAND
The volunteers bear the brunt of the work, but at times, specialists are required.

Pocklington vividly recalls the day several years ago when she opened up a ceiling while dressed in a hazmat suit. Bat guano showered down upon her from the trusses.

“The bat stuff was above the ceiling, so it all came down on my heed,” she said.

The “bat stuff” required professional assistance.

“It cost $4,000 for the bat guys to come out,” Pocklington said. “That was so much work to find a contractor that could come out and just do this job, seal [up all potential entry points], and they also did some deodorizing. They came out twice — they came out once, and then we checked it again, and there were a few openings. They kept trying to seal it.”

Getting a contractor to come work on an island that’s 12 miles from Leland and lacks modern accommodations or even a restaurant is just one of the challenges PHSB has faced over the years.

“When you’re doing historic preservations, there are always surprises,” Pocklington said. “You can only tear off a few samples. You tear off samples to go get milled to match it, but there’s no way we’d be able to totally assess what’s here. You’d have to tear the whole thing apart. There’s always reconvening: ‘How do we solve this problem? How do we solve that problem?’”

While the volunteers today marvel at how much they’ve gotten done in the span of nine 10-day marathon sessions, to say the hotel’s been restored in the span of three months is a bit misleading. Lots of work takes place on the Katie Shephard in the weeks and months leading up to that week in August when volunteers work in the field.

Work is carefully plotted out, an inventory of the supplies and tools needed is drafted, and volunteers are scheduled in waves to ensure that each of the 10 or so bunks available for workers is full each night.

“It has its challenges, but we’ve been able to maneuver through it pretty successfully with some pretty good preplanning,” Pocklington said. “I think the biggest challenge is just transportation of materials. That’s the largest thing, because we have the tool trailer, which is parked out here on the island. I think the biggest problem is just pre-planning so you don’t have to go back and get something that you’ve forgot.”

PRESERVE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
That same kind of attention to detail has gone into the meticulous work of making sure everything in the restoration is as close to original as possible, and as much of the original material as possible is saved.

“We want to save as much of the original as we can. So we started pulling these boards down, cleaning them up, pulling out the nails, and by the time we got done, we realized that in milling the new boards, they did not match the old ones,” volunteer Margo Detzler said. “I wish Katie could talk to us, you know?”

Detzler walks into a back room, a room in the northwest side of the building that overlooks the ruins of the kitchen and a falling down structure next door. She calls it the “Katie Room” because more of the original wood in that room has been preserved than anywhere else in the structure. That’s an important room because it serves as a historical record of what the house is supposed to look like.

“My pride and joy is saying that this is the true, original ‘Katie’ ceiling,” she said.

Detzler said the work that goes into making new materials blend in with the old is arduous and painstaking, but it’s also where a lot of the satisfaction of the work comes from.

“Now the walls in that parlor area pretty much look like these, so they’ve been washed down — first of all with a special cleaner, a disinfectant-type cleaner, then wherever the stains are the worst, we kind of are using a mineral-spirits, steel-wool kind of thing,” she said. “And then we try to blend, with several cans of stain outside, and we try to smooth that all in. And that is the result of what can happen when you take that kind of time.”

ORIGINAL FURNITURE RETURNS
As word of the ongoing restoration has gotten around, it’s opened some portals to the past: A descendant of a former owner heard about PHSB's efforts and offered the group a bureau that had once stood in house’s upstairs hallway.

Now back, the antique sits on the main floor, wrapped in plastic and protected by a large quilt, waiting to be returned to where it stood decades before.

“She was a descendant, and she had an original bureau, and she wanted it to be put back in the Katie Shepard,” Pocklington said. “So when it’s all done, we’ll be putting it back.”

They’ve also got an original bed.

Those are just some of the little details that go into bringing a historic structure back to life.

Take the work that goes into the building’s restored lattice windows, intricate grids of dozens of small panes of glass that are fitted into a cross-hatched wooden form: Each pane has been meticulously recreated by hand, even though most people probably wouldn’t notice if they group had simply stuck a cross-hatched overlay on a large piece of glass.

Up at the front of the house, to the left of the main entrance, is a potential guest room which Detzler has dubbed the game room, because that’s where they’ve stored some antique games that were found in the house, left behind in the debris.

“This would have been the prized guest room back in the day, because it had the view of the lake and, of course, the porch,” Detzler said.

If the hotel wins approval, the game room will likely house the rotating volunteer staffer who would check guests in and out and make sure everything runs smoothly. Pocklinger said her group has talked about staffing the hotel the way some lighthouses are staffed, where volunteers pay a nightly fee in order to stay at the property and act as keepers.

If the Katie Shephard can be opened as a rustic hotel, the project will have done more than preserve history — it will make North Manitou accessible to more people.

There is currently only one daily ferry stop at the island from Manitou Island Transit in Leland, so staying overnight is required unless you’ve got your own boat. While the Katie Shephard would not offer traditional hotel amenities like electricity and indoor plumbing, it will offer island visitors a roof over their heads, beds to sleep on, and a place out back to cook meals.

The Katie Shepard would be a small oasis on an island of wilderness.

“Unbelievable. Really, the difference,” said volunteer Sally Byle of how far the long-abandoned home has come in fewer than 10 years. “People walk in here and they say, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’ And it is. But it wasn’t.”