Beaver Island Historical Society site. Crawled copy of https://www.beaverislandhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Gutsy-Women-of-Beaver-Island-3-scaled.jpg.
Visual descriptionwritten by a machine · unchecked
A tall vertical page uses a dark green and sepia background with large white headings and several paragraphs of printed text. The upper section includes an oval black-and-white portrait of a woman beside a lighthouse and buildings. The lower section includes two outdoor photographs of another woman, one showing her standing among trees and one showing her seated on a porch or steps.
A model wrote this. It was shown the image and the catalogue record together, and asked to keep them apart — what it saw is here, what the record told it is under "taken from the record" below. It is still wrong often enough to matter, about who is pictured, where, when, and what is happening. Read it as a way to find the image, never as evidence about it. If you can correct it, please do: write to michael.bommarito@gmail.com, or see how corrections work. Someone who recognises a face or a shoreline knows more than the model did.
Beaver Island Historical Society
1,280 × 2,560 px · JPEG · 406 KB
Subjects and keywords
Text in the image
Transcribed from the object itself.
Elizabeth Whitney Williams Lighthouse Keeper Williams was born on the 24th of June 1844 on Mackinac Island. In 1848, her family moved to Beaver Island. But, due to pressures to convert to Mormonism by King James Strang, her family moved to the mainland until Strang's assassination in 1856. When the Mormons left, she and her family moved back to Beaver Island. She married Clement Van Riper who, in 1869, was appointed lighthouse keeper of the Beaver Island Harbor Light. However, his frequent illness meant that Williams had to learn to monitor the lighthouse. In 1872, her husband was lost at sea attempting to rescue survivors from a sinking ship. A few weeks after his death, she was officially made lighthouse keeper — a rarity at a time when women were seldom appointed lighthouse keepers. In 1875, Williams was hired to monitor the Little Traverse Light in Harbor Springs which she did for 29 years. Williams excelled at her job and received an award for best kept lighthouse in the Great Lakes. By 1897 she was one of four female light keepers in the Great Lakes. In 1905 she published her autobiography, A Child Of The Sea. She was one of America's longest serving lighthouse keepers, serving for 41 years and retiring in 1915. On the 23rd of January 1938, Elizabeth Whitney Williams died at the age of 93. Photo Credit: Williams, Elizabeth Whitney, A Child of the Sea: and Life Among the Mormons. Antje Price The Protar Lady Antje Price was born in Germany May 31, 1922. Her family moved to the United States where she graduated from Michigan State Normal School, now known as Eastern Michigan University, with a degree in occupational therapy. She worked for many years as an occupational therapist. However, Price was a woman of many talents and put them to use when she started spending her summers on Beaver Island. Antje Price first came to Beaver Island in the late 1960s. She saw one of Fedor Protar's journals which he wrote in German. Price could read German and reading his journal sent her on a journey to research the man who came to the Island in 1898 to live a 'simple life'. During several decades of summer visits to the Island, Antje Price shared the details of Protar's life giving talks at his historic home and writing articles, earning her the title 'the Protar Lady'. In 2006, she published her biography of him, Protar: A Different Life. On the 23rd of April 2019, Price died in Pennsylvania at the age of 96. Photo Credit: Beaver Island Historical Society
Taken from the record
Not observed in the image — supplied by the archive's own catalogue, and repeated here so the two stay distinguishable.
The archive record identifies this as a crawled copy from the Beaver Island Historical Society website, with the filename Gutsy-Women-of-Beaver-Island-3-scaled.jpg. The catalogue classifies the object as a photograph, although the image itself is a designed page combining text and reproduced photographs.
Rights and credit
© the site's owner; archived for research citation under fair use
Credit this to Beaver Island Historical Society when you use it.
Why this archive publishes it. Beaver Island Historical Society site. Community heritage material with no stated terms; published with credit and a link back.
Material goes off the web without anyone deciding that it should: a host lapses, a gallery is retired, a link stops resolving. Holding a copy — with its provenance, its checksum and its holder's terms recorded beside it — is much of why this archive exists. If you are looking for something whose original has since gone, write to michael.bommarito@gmail.com and a full-size copy of what is held here will be sent to you.
Recorded verbatim from the provenance sidecar taken at retrieval — this archive does not restate a holder's terms in its own words, does not add a restriction the holder did not state, and does not abridge one.
Provenance
- Held by
- Beaver Island Historical Society
- Collection
- Beaver Island Historical Society website
- Original
- https://www.beaverislandhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Gutsy-Women-of-Beaver-Island-3-scaled.jpg
- Copy taken
- 2026-07-31
- Title from
- the note recorded at retrieval
The file
| Rendition | Format | Extent | Size | SHA-256 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Master | JPEG | 1,280 × 2,560 px | 406 KB | fdc1308db55a… |
Checksums are the values recorded when each copy was taken.
Download
- Web-sized image1200 × 2400 · 200 KB · WebP
- The full-resolution original, from Beaver Island Historical Society1,280 × 2,560 · 406 KB · JPEG
The archive holds its own copy of that file and will supply it on request; it is not re-served here, because the holder serves it better and a second copy is a second thing to go stale.
Cite this
“Beaver Island Historical Society site”. Beaver Island Historical Society. Beaver Island Archive, https://beaverislandarchive.org/media/photograph/gutsy-women-of-beaver-island-3-scaled/. copy retrieved 2026-07-31.
Built only from what the archive recorded: the names on the record, the title as recorded, the date if one was recorded, this page, and the date the copy was taken. Nothing is filled in to satisfy a citation style.