Woolsey Family Farm

Around 1858, Chauncey and Caroline Woolsey moved with their children from Buffalo, New York, to Northport. Chauncey’s father, Adolphus Woolsey, a War of 1812 veteran, arrived with his wife Harriet soon after. Chauncey purchased more than 150 acres of land for a farm, including this site. He enlisted in the 26th Michigan Infantry during the Civil War, dying in battle in 1864. Thereafter, Chauncey’s teenage son Byron took over clearing the family land. By the 1890s, Byron ran a successful dairy farm. His Jersey cows provided milk and cream for summer residents at Northport Point for more than two decades. Byron was a builder who constructed his own dairy barn, a chapel and several local cottages. He and his wife, Sarah, had eight children. Clinton, their youngest, was born in 1894. He trained as an engineer and army pilot and served in World War I.

[Back]: In 1926, Captain Clinton F. Woolsey became an engineer for the U. S. Army Air Service. He was one of ten pilots selected to serve in the Pan-American Good Will Flight to Central and South America that occurred from December 1926 to May 1927. Clinton died when his plane crashed in February 1927. His funeral and burial took place in Northport. His father, Byron Woolsey, donated eighty acres of his dairy farm for this memorial airport, including a fieldstone structure believed to have been his creamery. Leelanau Township gave 120 more acres. The Civil Works Administration assigned workers to the airport project in winter 1933-34. The farmland became the runway, and the creamery became the terminal. The Clinton F. Woolsey Memorial Airport was dedicated on July 14, 1935.