Lord of the Flies Article Grand Traverse Insider, Mayfield Pond Park ~ Mayfield, Michigan

The Adams is a traditional dry fly primarily used for trout. It is considered a general imitation of an adult mayfly, flying caddis or midge. It was designed by Leonard Halladay from Mayfield, Michigan in 1922, at the request of his friend Charles Adams. The Adams has been considered one of the most popular, versatile, effective and bestselling dry flies since its creation.

Origin

In 1922, Leonard Halladay, a Michigan fly tyer conceived the Adams as a general mayfly imitation. It was first fished by an Ohio attorney and friend of Halladay, Charles F. Adams on the Boardman River near Traverse City, Michigan. Charles Adams reported his success with the fly to Halladay, who named the fly after his friend.[3] The small community of Mayfield, Michigan, bids itself as the "Birthplace of the Adams Fly"

 

Variations

The Adams has been tied with a variety of materials and variations. The most common variation is the Parachute Adams where the hackle is tied parachute style around a wing base of white calf hair. The variation gives the fly greater buoyancy and visibility in rough water. Other variations include spentwings, downwings, females tied with a yellow body tag resembling an egg sac, hairwings, and with different tailing material such as elk, deer or moose.

 

The Mayfield Electric Company:1921-1947

Armed with an engineering degree from the University of Minnesota, Harry Sargent was determined to put it to good use when his family needed electricity in rural Grand Traverse

County in 1921.

So he teamed with his father-in-law, James L. Gibbs, a lumber baron who oversaw the building of the Brown Bridge Dam, and came up with a plan to use hydro power to create electricity for more than 1,200 homes and farms, plus area grist mills and sawmills. Grist mills were used to grind grain into flour. Harry Sargent, James Gibbs and brother L.K. Gibbs then put their plan into action.

They and some friends from Mayfield, Kingsley and Arbutus Lake would erect poles and lines to supply electricity to these areas. “My father knew about the power of turbines at a dam to produce electricity, so he went ahead and made it happen,” says Sargent’s daughter Edna, now 88. “My grandparents were in the lumber business, so my dad had grown up around that. He knew how to make power poles and learned about power lines in college. He saw the need for electricity, so he and his friends and family basically created their own electric company.” After the Brown Bridge Dam was built in 1921, James Gibbs got the ball rolling by converting an old grist mill into a hydroelectric plant.

Harry Sargent and his friend Len Halladay, a renowned fishing expert, then began the task of building the lines and poles for what became the May field Electric Co. Less than a year after completing their work, the company faced its first crisis – The Sleet Storm of 1922 – which left nearly all seven miles of its

poles either down or badly damaged. “I remember my father

saying, when talking about that storm, it was ‘all hands-on deck,’” Edna recalls. Despite being born in 1925, Edna says she never knew what it was like to be without electricity. “I know that’s just the opposite of most people my age, but most people my age didn’t have a father who started their own electric company.”

Edna remembers that an old John Deere motor/generator doing the bulk of the work in generating electricity for the surrounding Kingsley area.

“My dad designed a belt that would work faster or slower, depending on the need for electricity,” she adds. “He would go down to the generator several times a day to make sure

it was working properly. In the morning, he would go down and crank up the generator to run faster and produce more electricity. “At night, he would go down and pull a lever back on the generator to decrease the power.”

Edna and her family, which included her parents, brother James and sister Janet, used electricity in a variety of ways at their Mayfield area home—from lighting to powering the

appliances. Harry Sargent kept food on the table with his electric company.

“If there were power outages, my dad, with help from family and friends, did it all to get the lights back on,” she says. “And when it came time to collect money for the bills, he would go into Kingsley once a month on a Saturday night. That was a big deal. That’s where everyone gathered to watch movies on

the side of a big building. He would go set up and people would pay him there.”

Edna and her siblings attended the one room Mayfield School, for grades K-8, and then were schooled in Traverse City.

When Edna was 14, in 1939, Consumers Power made an offer to her dad to buy out about 1,000 customers that made up the

Village of Kingsley, and he accepted. This left him to keep the electricity flowing for about 200 homes in Mayfield & Arbutus Lake, she says.

 

 

In 1947, nine years after Cherryland Rural Electric was established, Rural Electrification Administration representatives came knocking at the Sargents’ door.

“By that time, my father was ready to sell,” Edna says. “He had operated the Mayfield Electric Company for 27 years with the help of Len Holiday, who ran the operation if my father was out of town.”

Sadly, on June 26, 1947 – four days before Cherryland took over the Mayfield Electric Co. – Harry Sargent was electrocuted while working an outage. “Needless to say, it was a very hard time for our family,” Edna says.

“I still have a hard time talking about it. But I can say that Cherryland’s general manager Harry Hall and line foreman Bob Lambert were very, very nice to our family during that time.”

Even though it has been 66 years since the Mayfield Electric Co. went out of business, the thrill of being part of it still makes Edna Sargent smile.

“I think this was one of, if not the last, private electric companies in Michigan,” she recalls. “I remember that it was a lot of work for my father, but he loved it. He made it his

life’s work.

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