Leonard Bringing in the Dock — Black Lake, Michigan, 1928

The earliest dated photograph of the Eesley family Black Lake summer vacations, c. 1928. The original is hand-labeled “Leonard bringing in the dock 1928” — referring to Leonard David Eesley, Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale’s eldest son (b. 1904), then about 24 years old. This is the dock being installed (or removed) on the small sandy beach of Black Lake, Michigan, the lake near Onaway where Charles Leonard had built a summer cottage with his older sons in the 1920s.

What the photograph shows

A wide flat sandy lakeshore. Leonard stands at the end of a partly-installed wooden dock, shirtless in shorts and a peaked cap, knee-deep in the still water, holding a tool or fishing for a fitting. The wooden dock extends roughly twenty feet out into the lake, supported by simple log cribbing visible just below the surface. To the right, a small wooden lake boat with brass fittings and a steering wheel sits beached at the shoreline — clinker-built, polished wood deck, the family’s lake boat of the late 1920s. The sky is high and overcast; the lake is calm and silver, fading into far distance with hills on the opposite shore.

The dock construction was a seasonal Eesley ritual: Charles Leonard’s 1965 autobiography (per Charlie his grandson) recalled that “Grandpa, and some of his older sons, including Dad, built a summer cottage on Black Lake, Michigan, near Onaway. Here they spent many summers and I still am hearing about some of the adventures and misadventures they encountered.” The dock had to be put in each spring after the ice went out, and taken out each fall before winter. This frame shows Leonard at one or the other end of the season, doing the family-cottage labor of his early-twenties years.

The lake and the family

Black Lake sits in Presque Isle County, northern Michigan, about 250 miles north of Bexley, Ohio — a long drive for the family in 1928. The cottage Charles Leonard built there was the summer center of Eesley family life through the 1930s and into the 1940s. Tragically, the lake was also where his son Dale Dudley Eesley drowned on 14 July 1939, age 33, eleven years after this dock-construction photograph. The same lake that gave the family its summer-vacation memories took one of its sons.

This photograph sits in the family’s record as the earliest visual document of the Black Lake summer-cottage life — Leonard at 24, sun-tanned, working the dock at the beginning of the family’s long association with this place.

Source: Eesley family archive, hand-labeled “Leonard bringing in the dock 1928”; transmitted by Chuck Eesley 2026.