Whiskey Island

IslandGNIS 1616291

Coordinates

45.8117° N, 85.6098° WGoogle Maps: Whiskey IslandDownload KML

Concepts

environmentforestsvegetationtreeswildlifebirdssoilsgeologywetlandsconservationshippingshipwrecksmaritime

Within

Beaver Island archipelago

Media

Plats of the outer Beaver Islands, 1930s · Soils, wetlands, and terrain of the Beaver Island archipelago · Whiskey Island access and infrastructure · Whiskey Island coasts, harbors, and navigation context · Whiskey Island geology and landforms · Whiskey Island soils, wetlands, and terrain + 2 more

Summary

Whiskey Island is a small island in the northern part of the Beaver Island archipelago, roughly a mile long and a quarter mile wide by one 1970 visitor’s estimate, identified today by OSM relation 6063930 and the GNIS feature identifier recorded above. An 1849 federal survey found fishing shanties and roughly twenty Indigenous and French fishing families on its shore. The schooner-barge Chandler Wells wrecked on its shoal in a November 1884 storm, and the island appears repeatedly afterward as a navigational hazard and, from the 1960s, as a snowmobile and hiking destination. Privately owned through most of the twentieth century, it passed to St. James Township for back taxes in 2010 and to the State of Michigan through a 2012 exchange.

1849 survey

An 1849 GLO survey explicitly headed “Survey of Whiskey Island” records several fishing shanties and a fish house around its shore. Its general description calls the island low – about three to eight feet above Lake Michigan – and mostly stone in small ridges, with a thin vegetative soil and short cedar, fir, aspen, and white birch growth. It notes several small-boat landings on the south side of the east end, and reports that part of the growth had been burned, blown down, and cut.

The surveyor’s most consequential note for the island’s social history is that about twenty families of Indigenous people and French people were fishing there. That is a specific 1849 field-note observation in the surveyor’s terms; it does not identify tribal affiliations, individual households, residency duration, land rights, or a continuous community after that date.¹

The wreck of the Chandler Wells, 1884

A July 2008 Beacon feature by Mike Weede, drawing on an unstated earlier account, gives the wreck a fuller narrative than the 1961 retrospective alone supports. The Chandler Wells was built at the Quayle and Martin shipyard in Cleveland in 1866 (official number 9274) and rigged first as a barkentine; after fifteen years under sail she was converted to a barge towed by the steam propeller Keystone, a 180-foot lumber hooker. On 20 November 1884 the Keystone was towing the Wells, both loaded with lumber, from Manistique toward Tonawanda, New York, when a sudden storm – temperatures fell more than 45 degrees in twelve hours – drove them into the shallows off Whiskey Island. The Keystone ran aground on the island’s west side about 2:00 p.m. and cast the Wells loose; the Wells grounded on the Whiskey Island shoal roughly three-quarters of a mile on, with eight crewmen aboard and her mainmast gone. A Cheboygan tug reached the wreck the next afternoon and landed a steam pump, but renewed wind that night crushed the deckhouse under ice; the two crewmen left to tend the pump raised a distress flag that went unseen until the following day, when Indian Point islanders spotted it and the Life Saving Service rescued the survivors, “more frozen than alive.” Islanders subsequently salvaged washed-up lumber from the wreck.² The event is recorded separately at the wreck of the Chandler Wells; this 2008 feature was not among that entry’s sources at time of writing and substantially extends it.

The wreck remained a source in the water afterward. A 1976 recollection published in a 2009 Beacon issue describes retired Navy diver Jim Sawtell salvaging the Wells’s centerboard and centerboard well from an abandoned barge left on the Whiskey Island shoal, using volunteers and water-filled drums for buoyancy.³ An undated verse item reprinted in a 2005 Beacon issue – concerning a Captain Campbell’s icebound mail run – has a character named Sherman “landed on Whiskey Island” and picked up by a Charlevoix tug, though the item’s own date and factual status are not established here.⁴

A hiking and snowmobile destination

A February 1970 first-person account describes five islanders – Archie LaFreniere, Russ Green, Bill Wagner, Sheldon Parker, and the writer – snowmobiling about four miles from Indian Point to Whiskey Island over rough pack ice more than ten inches thick. They found the island, “perhaps a mile long and a quarter mile wide,” thick with rabbit tracks and browsed cedars, built a fire, and continued on to Squaw Island (now Ojibwa Island) and Garden Island.⁵ A 2010 “Forty Years Ago” retrospective confirms the same trip with a fifth companion, Phil Gregg, in place of the unnamed narrator, and adds that the 1970 party found no rabbit sign on Squaw Island that day.⁶ A 1963 report separately places the island as a landmark: the barge Mackinaw Islander, under tow from Port Inland toward Charlevoix with a load of crushed stone, began settling as it passed Whiskey Island and had to run for St. James harbor, where it settled on the bottom before being pumped out and re-floated.⁷

Ownership and the 2010-2012 exchange

By 2009 Whiskey Island was privately owned; a Peaine Township trustee report that October noted that phragmites (invasive reed) spraying could not extend to a patch on the island because “the owner of Whiskey Island did not respond to attempts to secure his permission.”⁸ In June 2010 the St. James Township board discussed acquiring the island for $13,087 in unpaid back taxes – the current owner had purchased it twenty years earlier for $175,000 from the bankrupt MacCormack Corporation – with the stated intent of trading it to the DNR for the Sheriff’s Substation property and its 100 feet of harbor frontage.⁹ The township recorded title the following month.¹⁰ The proposed trade drew organized opposition: by late 2010 a petition against trading away the island had gathered about 200 signatures, and township board members were divided on its merits, one saying the island “provides nothing not offered by other nearby islands” and others calling it “a wonderful resource” being undervalued.¹¹ The 2017 MDNR management plan reports that the State of Michigan ultimately acquired Whiskey Island in 2012 through an exchange with St. James Township and Charlevoix County (see Whiskey Island state-land exchange, 2012 plan account); the Beacon coverage held here does not include the exchange’s final terms or an account of how the Substation dispute was resolved.

Ecological profile

The Whiskey Island ecology, wildlife context, and cormorant study evidence connects the 1849 low, stony, thin-soil setting to a modern but deliberately limited ecology record. The 2017 MDNR plan describes Whiskey as approximately 100 acres, entirely state-owned and undeveloped, with mixed conifer, balsam fir, and some aspen. It also records a natural-heritage survey gap, a colonial-waterbird site, and bald-eagle nesting territories. The cover description is not a complete forest or plant inventory.

The strongest direct wildlife evidence is the 2010 cormorant study. Early-season counts recorded 332 nests – 184 on the ground and 148 in trees – and late counts recorded 107 nests – 12 on the ground and 95 in trees. The study modeled 737 and 221 chicks respectively, with an estimated 238 chicks surviving to fledging. These are single-season field-study and modeled results, not a current colony trend or population estimate.

The study’s 61 regurgitate samples contained 236 whole fish. Round goby made up 67 percent of prey biomass and alewife 29 percent across the Hat and Whiskey colonies; white sucker and crayfish occurred only in Whiskey samples. This links Whiskey’s bird history to the nearshore food web, but the modeled chick consumption is not lake-wide prey biomass or a terrestrial habitat result.

The MDNR distribution table adds dated context for amphibians, reptiles, and Bald Eagle, while the current public-observation snapshot has no Whiskey records. Neither result establishes presence or absence for the whole island: the study lacks a public-safe colony coordinate, and the table combines dates and source types. The place record therefore keeps bird, forest, soil, and survey-gap evidence connected without inventing geometry.

The companion Beaver Island Archipelago wildlife and bird species evidence index, 2017–2024 currently preserves four linked wildlife/bird evidence records spanning six taxa for Whiskey Island. The count combines the dated MDNR distribution table with the direct cormorant study and archival context; it is not a current population estimate or complete fauna inventory.

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Added 28 July 2026 · revised 5 August 2026. Recent changes