The Peter Dougherty Society has been busy restoring The Dougherty House all summer. We just went by there yesterday, and I see that the house appears to be back on its foundation. Read more about the restoration here and here and here.
They need a little additional money to finish it, but when they’re done, we’ll have a fantastic museum that honors the peaceful relationship between the settlers and Native Americans during the mid-1800s on the Old Mission Peninsula.
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Shortly after the 1838 Cherokee Trail of Tears death march, Chief Aghosa (Flying Hawk) of the Odawa tribe and Peter Dougherty, a Presbyterian minister, formed a remarkable bond of mutual respect and
collaboration. Together, they moved with the local tribe from Elk Rapids, Michigan to Old Mission
and eventually on to Omena, crossing two bays and three peninsulas in a shared quest for the safety and protection of Aghosa’s people.
Together in 1843, they built the Mission House on Old Mission Peninsula. The Peter Dougherty Society is honoring this remarkable feat of inter-cultural cooperation by restoring the Mission House (sometimes known as the Dougherty House).
“We’ve raised money and have restored the ice house, the summer kitchen and have just completed raising the main house and replacing the 172-year-old foundation,” notes John Scarbrough. “We need just a little more money to meet a matching grant to finish the project.”
He says they’ll use the money to finish the interior and exterior of the main house. When completed, it will open as a museum to help keep this moving story alive.
You can be a part of history, this little known achievement between the Odawa people and the settlers. When violence was happening elsewhere, these two men stepped up and achieved peace and worked in harmony. Because that’s how we do things in Old Mission.
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SUPPORT YOUR INDEPENDENT LOCAL NEWSPAPER: I started Old Mission Gazette in 2015 because I felt a calling to provide the Old Mission Peninsula community with local news. After decades of writing for newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Family Circle and Ladies' Home Journal, I really just wanted to write about my own community where I grew up on a cherry farm and raised my own family. So I started my own newspaper.
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