William W. "Willie" Boyle

Summary

William W. “Willie” Boyle ran the Silver Top Saloon at Saint James from about 1904 until Michigan prohibition closed it in 1918, then served as the Saint James postmaster from his January 1923 appointment until Frank J. Nackerman’s 1939 succession.

History

According to a postal chronology the Beaver Beacon reprinted in 1964, 1973, and 1994, the building that later became the Saint James post office was built in one week in 1904 by Johnny Green, a local businessman, on a Main Street lot. Boyle operated it as a saloon known as the Silver Top, named for the brand of beer served on the ground floor, while upstairs card players had drinks passed up through a hole cut in the floor. The 1994 retrospective dates the saloon’s closing to Michigan’s state prohibition law; the 2004 version puts that closing in 1918. After Prohibition the building served briefly as a tailor shop — Frank Nackerman recalled being fitted there for his first pair of long pants — before standing vacant. In 1923 it became the Saint James Post Office, and Boyle, who had lost his saloon to Prohibition about five years earlier, was appointed postmaster; the 1994 account calls the appointment “an act of great thoughtfulness.” Boyle served until 1939, when Nackerman — the same boy fitted for trousers in Boyle’s old building — succeeded him and held the post until 1973.

A separate March 1966 Beacon retrospective on the island’s pre-1930 ice mail carriers names “Willie Boyle (Brutz)” among the men who carried mail on foot or by horse and sleigh across the frozen strait to Cross Village. Whether this is the same Willie Boyle who ran the Silver Top and served as postmaster is not established here; the nickname “Brutz” does not appear in the saloon or postmaster accounts.

Evidence and limits

The record rests on Beaver Beacon local-history retrospectives written decades after the events they describe, not on postal service appointment records or a civil identity file. It is intentionally not merged with the separate William Boyle (1826–1899), a Beaver Island Boyle of an earlier generation whose 1972 family-letter mention as “Willy Boyle, son of the Boyle from Mackinac” may or may not be this same man — no source ties the two directly, and the earlier William Boyle’s documented lifespan ends in 1899, a quarter-century before this Willie Boyle is first attested running a saloon.

Added 1 August 2026 · revised 4 August 2026. Recent changes