Growing Pains on the Old Mission Peninsula – Where Are We Headed?

This year will mark ten years since I started Old Mission Gazette in 2015 (here’s my very first post on May 31, 2015 – a short little post about the “home barn” on our family’s farm). I’ve been thinking a lot about not only the growth that’s happened on the Old Mission Peninsula in the past ten years, but also how the Peninsula has changed since I was a kid.

I’ve told this story many times here on the Gazette, but here’s a great example. My parents, Walter and Mary Johnson, began their married life in 1946 in an old farmhouse that sat across the road from our barn on Center Road, about a mile north of Mapleton. In 1959, a year before I was born, they decided to move their growing family (I was the last of four kids) to a new home in the village of Old Mission.

Their new ten acres of land on Mission Road (once Mission Street, then Old Mission Road, now Mission Road) before you get to the Old Mission General Store (known then as Lardie’s Grocery) included 437 feet of frontage on East Bay. They paid $8,000 for that parcel in 1959. None of their farmer friends understood why on earth they would want to live on land that wasn’t great for growing cherries.

“That soil is way too sandy for a cherry orchard!” farmers claimed. And they were right. We had a sweet cherry orchard there, but the growing conditions weren’t great, and there was a section in the middle where trees just didn’t grow.

I don’t have to tell you how things have changed. Now everyone and their brother wants a piece of land and shore frontage like that.

As mentioned, I was born a year later in 1960, and every day I thank God that my parents bought that land where I had the best childhood any kid could ever ask for. We still had the farm up on Center Road, so all of us kids had horses in the barn, including my Morgan horse, Copper.

Horses, a bay for swimming, country life, a community where everyone knew everyone, ready-made jobs on the farm … it was the best.

So much has happened on the Old Mission Peninsula in that 65 years, but let’s focus on the last ten years since I’ve been publishing the Gazette.

• The winery industry has continued to grow, and we’re waiting for a judge’s decision on the winery lawsuit.
• The cherry industry is nowhere near what it was back when thousands of migrants picked the crops, but we still have cherry farmers on the OMP, most of whom also grow apples, and a few who *only grow apples.
• Our Old Mission Peninsula School was nearly closed, but saved when a group of concerned citizens worked to turn it into a charter school.
• Peninsula Community Library moved into a new building on the corner of Center Road and Island View Road, thanks to my mom and other library board members who had the foresight to purchase that land decades ago.
• OMP residents voted to renew the Purchase of Development Rights (PDR) program, started by my dad and other concerned citizens back in the 1990s. This program has helped to preserve farming on the OMP.
• We have a new fire station on the north end, with a new Fire Station #1 in the works.
• The historic Dougherty House is now a museum, thanks to a group of dedicated people who made it happen.
• Many longtime OMPers have passed on — my mom, my sister, my husband Tim Boursaw, my uncle Guy Johnson, Cal and Verla Jamieson, Rich VanderMey, Nick Kroupa, Helen DeVol, Vi Solomonson, Marty Reay, Shirley Blackmore, Mark Johnson, Carlene and Jim Hilt, Bill Cole, Bud and Nancy Stych and many others — making me realize that I and my generation are now the elders on land where we were born and grew up and still live. That’s just weird to think about.

Needless to say, the Old Mission Peninsula is growing and changing with each passing year. My friend Dennis Arouca — who has a house over at Neahtawanta and who came up with the “Growing Pains” idea — put together a sheet with a few statistics about the Old Mission Peninsula, which you can view here.

One of the most staggering numbers for me is that 52 percent of residents have moved here since 2000. In my heart, I know that we are no longer the small farming community where I grew up, but that number really drills it home. Most of these newcomers are not farmers. They’ve moved here after living and working somewhere else. They’ve moved here to retire.

All of this begs a few questions: What does this growth mean for each of us and for our township? How do we handle it, and how much can our Peninsula absorb without losing its special character?

Dennis has written the first “Growing Pains” story, which you can read here. But in my quest to get more voices in the Gazette, I’d love for you to send me your thoughts about OMP growth, too — send to [email protected]. Maybe, like me, you grew up on a farm here, or maybe you’ve moved here in the past few years. Maybe, like Dennis, you have a story to share from a community where you used to live.

It’s my hope that collectively, all of our stories can educate and inspire us, and perhaps help to strengthen and make a path forward for our little community.

I’ve got some other story ideas you can write that don’t specifically have to do with OMP growth, so look for that coming up (i.e. OMP history, book reviews, farm and winery reports, “your” Old Mission stories, etc.). I’m also working with Peninsula Community Library to do some video interviews with OMP residents, so stay tuned for that.

And if you don’t want to write a whole story with your thoughts, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this story! What are your feelings about how the Peninsula is changing? Are we headed in the right direction?

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