History
The area which is now known as Hilton Beach had its origins in the 1850s when a wharf was first built. By the 1860s, fourteen families had settled in the area, including the Trainors, Rousseaus, Gordons, Bishops and Desjardins.
John Marks came to St. Joseph Island in the 1860s to settle at Sailors Encampment. He moved to the area that would become Hilton Beach in 1872. Marks first opened a store and a wood dock followed by a post office six years later under the name of Marksville. A school was established in 1877, and in 1881 St. John's Anglican Church was erected.
J. Archibald built a hotel in 1879, originally called The Ottawa House. It was moved to its current site in 1890. Other businesses included Bowker's General Store, Duncan's General Store, R. Chester's shoemaker shop, and the sawmill operated by Dean and Davis. J.C. Cooper was a wagon maker, and T. Steinburg was the blacksmith, who operated out of the white concrete building still standing today on Hilton Road.
A.G. Duncan, D. McPhail and John Marks were justices. The village was called Marksville until June 1, 1921, when it was changed to Hilton Beach. Two years later the village separated from Hilton Township and became St. Joseph Island's first village.
Many of the historical buildings in Hilton Beach are still being used today. The community hall, renovated in 1989, was originally built in 1896 and used as a schoolhouse until the 1960s. The old town hall, built in 1916, was used as a violin workshop for several years and is now for sale. The Hilton Beach General Store is over 100 years old and is still open for business.
The Hilton Beach jail is unusual in that it never actually housed an inmate. The small building, barely measuring 20' by 20', in fact housed the Hilton Beach Library for several years in the 1920s. The library is now housed in another historical building on Marks Street.
Read more about this topic: Hilton Beach
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)