Will Eesley with a string of fish — Black Lake, Michigan, c. 1929 (age 19)

Wilbur “Will” Eesley at nineteen, standing on the sandy shore of Black Lake, Michigan in c. 1929, holding up a string of two long fish — northern pike by their shape — from his afternoon’s catch. He wears a pale work shirt, dark wool jodhpurs-style trousers tucked into laced leather boots, and a dark belt; his head is bowed, looking at the fish rather than the camera. The lake is glass-calm; a distant tree-lined shore runs straight across the horizon. The original is hand-labeled in the family’s keeping “Will Black Lake 1929 Age 19.”

What the photograph documents

Will was the fourth of Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale Chenoweth’s eight children — born 25 December 1909, in 1929 still living at home in Bexley while the older brothers and sisters were marrying off and the family summer at the Black Lake cottage was the year’s anchor. He was the younger brother of Dale (then 23) who would drown in this same lake ten years later, Leonard (then 25, who appears in the 1928 dock photograph on this same beach), and Lyle (then 13) who would die at Cabanatuan in 1942.

It is the second-earliest dated Black Lake photograph in the archive, paired with the 1928 Leonard-and-dock frame — together they fix the Eesley family summer-cottage rhythm at the lake at the close of the 1920s, ten summers before the drowning that would change what the lake meant to the family.

The string of pike is a small Black Lake biographical detail: a teenaged Will catching dinner on the same sandy shore his daughters and Charlie would later climb across for the family’s mid-20th-century summers. The fishing-and-the-lake bond runs across two generations.

Sources: Eesley family archive, hand-labeled photograph; family memory of Black Lake summers transmitted via Roberta Burnes Walker, June 2026.