Clara at her desk in “Pencroft”, her cottage in Omena. Courtesy OHS Archives.
The heat was suffocating the summer of 1896 in Traverse City.
It was a long-delayed vacation in which the young couple had hoped to get away from the heat, but it appeared it had followed them. By lucky coincidence, they happened to meet an old friend in their Traverse City hotel, who recommended they take a steamer north to Omena to escape the heat.
Clara Pierson and her husband, John, took the suggestion, and after their stay at the Omena Inn, they were so taken with Omena that they met with a developer, who, as it happened, was selling lots in Omena.
Clara, having money of her own, took out the right of refusal on a lot she picked out. Two years later, she had sold enough books to buy the lot and build a cottage which she designed herself. It was completed in the summer of 1898.
How did she do that?
Clara Pierson circa 1930. Courtesy OHS archives.
Women in those days did not have careers. They did not write books. If they wrote it was for their own amusement, diaries and the like.
At the beginning of the 20th century, women’s role was largely limited to the home or domestic work. If married, most women stayed at home to look after the children while their husband worked and brought in a weekly wage. For most, the expectation was that they would get married and have children.
Clara stayed home as expected, she had a child who died shortly after birth. And they later adopted two little boys, John, and Harold. But she did not stop there.
She wrote children’s books that were well known in her time and even today are being reprinted and sold on Amazon. She became the leading nature story author of the day.
Omena Inspiration
Inspired by her summers in Omena, Clara wrote eighteen books and numerous articles. Her books are chatty and fast-paced, showing summer as a time in which one does not waste a moment of sunlight or else one might miss the mushroom at its moment of best eating, or the flowers in the woods.
The setting, the people, the woods, and every living creature around Omena found their way into the pages of her children’s fiction. Clara authored a story called Pencroft, about the 3 Miller children who lived in a house called Pencroft in a village called Trelago Village, which was a thinly veiled Omena.
She named her cottage “Pencroft” after the house, her children’s book, leaving no doubt about her cottage’s place in her imagination. Through the adventures in her books, Clara was able to entertain children, but also to teach them about the nature around them.
The Pierson Cottage
An illustration from Clara’s children’s book, “Among the Farmyard People”, 1899. Courtesy OHS archives.
The Pierson cottage, third from the end of the row of Victorian cottages built in the heyday of the resort era, was with a cluster of other cottages also owned by women. These women, widowed or single older women of independent means, or, like Clara, married women determined to spend their own money as they saw fit, were sympathetic company, most being well-educated and progressive-minded. Like Clara.
Who was this unusual woman so out of touch with her time?
Clara Eleanor Dillingham was born in 1868, the only child of Jennie, a math teacher and pianist, and Captain Lucious Dillingham, a retired Civil War Captain and buggy manufacturer. An unhealthy child, she was home schooled and was sent outside to the woods, gardens, and yard. Her father in particular exposed her to the beauty of nature, the woods, and its inhabitants.
After high school, she trained as a kindergarten teacher, and then taught at Alma college, becoming superintendent of the kindergarten teacher training program for a while. Then John Pierson came into her life, a hardware store owner who she married in 1894 when she was 26, considered old at the time to be getting married. Clara had a mind of her own.
After her marriage to John Pierson, they moved to Stanton, Michigan, an agricultural and railroad town. John started a hardware business. Being a chatty fellow, knowledgeable about many things, John did well. The Piersons were thought by the other Omena cottagers to have money “because they had a car up here in the days of the ’20s when not everybody had cars up here all summer.” John’s business was going well.
How did Clara get to be a woman of independent means?
Clara Pierson, date unknown. Courtesy OHS archives.
Clara began writing children’s books more or less by chance. Inspired by a nature lesson she took for fun, she wrote a magazine story, which promptly got rejected by the publisher. Along with the rejection, however, came an encouraging letter. A New England minister also encouraged her to write children’s books after reading some of these early writings. She did, and the next books she wrote, the Among the People series (1897), were accepted immediately. She never received another rejection letter again. This series is now back in print because of its popularity, and available on Amazon.
So, this sickly child, trained as a teacher, married to a hardware store owner, discovered Omena almost by accident, and it became the centerpiece of her timelessly loved children’s books.
Clara and her mother returned to Omena in June of 1898, camping out in the unfinished cottage. They started taking their meals at the hotel, but a summer storm came up that forced them to fend for themselves until it passed. The Sunday morning after the storm, all was calm. Clara wrote,” Grand Traverse Bay was a gently dimpling sheet of blue and gold.” You have to love her toughness and ability to use words!
Courtesy Omena Historical Society archives, “Omena, A Place in Time” by Amanda Holmes, National Park Service history talk written by Ranger Jason Verhaeghe October 2014 and History Learning.