Paleoethnobotanical inquiry of early euro-American and Ojibwa Gardens on Grand Island, Michigan

Northeastern Naturalist, 1998 by Silbernagel, Janet, Martin, Susan R, Landon, David B, Gale, Margaret R

GEOMORPHOLOGY AND SOIL

The Grand Island area experienced a series of continental glacial advances and retreats during the past 100,000 years. The most recent advance, the Marquette, was a sub-stage of the Wisconsin stage and left substantial marks on Grand Island sandstone formations, largely erasing evidence left by previous glaciers. Geomorphic features such as wavecut bluffs and scarps, terraces, beaches, etc. are largely attributed to post-glacial lake activity (Dorr and Eschman 1971, Saarnisto 1974).

Today much of Grand Island has only a thin layer of soil over sandstone bedrock (0.6 m to 1.5 m). In some places the bedrock is exposed. Sands, sandy loams, loamy sands, and few areas of sandy clay loams and muck soils occur on the island. In an early soil survey of the Munising area, Rice and Geib (1905) mapped three soil types on Grand Island: dune sand, Miami sand, and muck. Their notes also provided some clues to early cultivation: "... only a small proportion of the vast area of the Miami sand has been cleared and farmed, but enough has been done to demonstrate that the type is surprisingly fertile for so sandy a soil. The grains and grasses grow to a perfection usually expected only on soils of heavy texture ... Potatoes come to maturity very quickly and large yields are secured."

VEGETATION HISTORY

The ice retreat left barren terrain and newly deposited till subject to colonization by pioneer plants. The early Holocene vegetational history of Grand Island can best be surmised from pollen stratigraphies taken around the Lake Superior area (Davis 1978, 1983, Webb et al. 1983, Wright 1976). Pollen maps show the times of arrival for tree species in the eastern United States (Davis 1983, Webb et al. 1983), from which estimates of the date of arrival to the Munising area were made ranging from Larix laricina (Duroi) K. Koch (larch) and Pinus banksiana Lamb. (jack pine) as early as 10,000 BP to Fagus grandifolia Ehrh. (American beech) as late as 500 to 3,000 BP. Any vegetation that was established on Grand Island by 10,000 BP would have had to re-colonize the area following the Marquette Advance ca. 9500 BP.

General Land Office (GLO) survey notes provided information on pre-European settlement (1850s) species composition (General Land Office 1840, 1855). Analysis of the survey notes recorded F. grandifolia as the major forest species, comprising 41% of the trees listed by the surveyors. Acer saccharum Marsh. (sugar maple) was less abundant (14%) on Grand Island, even though on nearby mainland sites it was more prevalent (29%) (Silbernagel and Padley, unpub. data; USDA 1994).

Current ecological types at William's Landing and Murray Bay are typified by sandy outwash with coarse sand and gravel in the substrata, supporting Pinus spp. (pine), Acer rubrum L. (red maple), Betula papyrifera Marsh. (paper birch), and Quercus borealis Michx. (northern red oak) in the overstory, and Pteridium aquilinum (bracken fern), Gaultheria procumbens L. (wintergreen), Vaccinium spp. (blueberry), and Trientalis borealis Raf. (starflower) in the ground flora. The Farm Complex is a different ecological type: mesic upland with loamy and deep soils on high plateus, with A. saccharum and F. grandifolia forests, few A. rubrum or B. alleghaniensis Britt. (yellow birch), and a species-rich ground flora (Ball 1993, USDA 1994). However, most of the Farm Complex area (several hectares) is now in abandoned fields with weedy herbaceous vegetation.