FARM HISTORY
This land we now call home was first inhabited by the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ and Anishinabewaki peoples. We honor their enduring relationship with this place and acknowledge that our farming continues within that deeper story.
The land at the corner of today’s Larson Road and Onnela Street (Asumaa Road) in Stanton Township was shaped by logging and corporate ownership. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Copper Range Company controlled much of the upland behind Atlantic Mine, cutting timber and then leasing or selling tracts for farming as mining activity slowed. Local loggers like Michael Messner worked the surrounding woods, and Henry Lampinen, a Finnish immigrant, established a post office and store at the Coles Creek crossing while also farming and running a small mill. This area, known as Onnela/Obenhoff, became home to many Finnish farming families who cleared land for potatoes, dairy, and mixed crops.
It was in this context that Andrew Larson arrived. He emigrated from Finland at age 14, and after arriving, worked for Lampinen (on what is now the Gagnon Farm). Andrew later married Lampinen’s daughter Lillian and settled on a farm “a few forties away” from the Lampinen place. As roads were built, the track to their home became known as Larson Road. Andrew gradually developed the farm with horses, dairy cows, and potato fields. A new barn was built in 1930, and before the county began plowing in 1937, the roads in winter were packed by a team of horses pulling a massive roller.
Electricity reached the property in 1942. The farm produced potatoes and dairy. Cream from the barn was hauled by horse-drawn wagon to the Bridgeman Russell Company in Hancock, and in the winter this trip sometimes followed a frozen “winter road” over the ice at the Michigan Smelts.
In 1950, Andrew sold the farm to his son Raymond. Raymond phased out the dairy herd and expanded the potato acreage, operating the property as a potato farm through the 1950s and early 1960s. At that time, potato farming in Stanton Township relied heavily on manual labor, and the new mechanical pickers struggled in the rocky soils of the Onnela area.
When schools stopped excusing students to help with harvest and machines proved unreliable, the economics no longer worked. In 1963 Raymond sold the farm, and soon after he opened a gas station and later a public sauna in Atlantic Mine.
In most, if not all, of the intervening decades after the Larsons, the land was owned by the Tormala family. While it was no longer used for large-scale farming, the property remained occupied and cared for. Over time, fields gave way to forest regrowth, though apple trees planted during this period still stand, now buried in the woods.
The Larson dairy barn remains but has collapsed in on itself, and the original Larson home is still occupied and loved. Another outbuilding, thought to have been a granary and later repurposed as a storage shed, dog kennel, and goat barn, has recently been renovated into a farmstand.
Today the land is operated as Troemner Farm, a small-scale regenerative farmstead. While the potato fields that once defined the property are gone, the farm remains a site of cultivation and community use. The apple trees, barn ruins, and repurposed farmstand building tie its current chapter to the long history of agriculture on Larson Road, stretching from the early Finnish settlers and the Larson family’s potato fields to present-day diversified farming.
Ready to delight your tastebuds? Shop our fresh produce, eggs, sourdough bread, jam, syrup, apple cider vinegar, fresh milled-flour and other delicious goodies.