Piece by piece, one kitchen table meeting at a time, Covington began working with landowners who were interested in selling their property for protection and with local funders who wanted to protect it. As a member of the Illinois chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Covington was familiar with the tools of conservation, but the Les Cheneaux Islands were not yet a priority for TNC and the barely formed Little Traverse Conservancy was just getting its feet wet in the greater Petoskey area. George was encouraged to start his own organization, and in 1978, he established the Les Cheneaux Foundation, providing a non-profit entity to hold the lands.

Shortly after that, the conservation wake-up call was heard loud and clear throughout Michigan. In the late 1990s, TNC designated the northern Lake Huron shoreline within its Last Great Places campaign and also began acquiring properties on Marquette Island. “George Covington and the Les Cheneaux Foundation were instrumental in getting a lot of the Marquette Island lands into TNC ownership,” said MaryKay O’Donnell with the Little Traverse Conservancy’s land protection staff.

By the 1990s, it had also become clear that the Little Traverse Conservancy was here to stay and the organization now considered Les Cheneaux one of its high priority regions. All the conservation partners working in the region agreed that the long-term care and management of the Marquette Island properties should fall with the most local group that is here year round.

In 2000, the Les Cheneaux Foundation donated 60 acres of land to Little Traverse Conservancy, and in 2001, the Les Cheneaux Club donated 200 acres to the organization. Late last year, a total of 943 acres with 1.75 miles of Lake Huron frontage were officially transferred from The Nature Conservancy to Little Traverse Conservancy as a single nature preserve. “As partners in conservation, we need to do more of these collaborative projects,” said Helen Taylor, executive director of the Michigan Chapter of TNC. “We can’t do it all by ourselves.”

Tom Bailey, Little Traverse Conservancy’s executive director, agrees. “We also can’t do it without the vision and perseverance of people like George Covington,” Bailey said. “He and the families of Les Cheneaux – in particular, the Ayres, McMillan, and Williams families who have been working at this for nearly 30 years – deserve much of the credit for all of this land’s protection.”

The Leopold Connection
Aldo Leopold, a legendary giant in the conservation world, is most associated with his work in Wisconsin and the southwest. But as a young boy, Leopold and his family spent their summers on Marquette Island in Les Cheneaux. Beginning in the early 1890s, the family made annual treks from their Burlington, Iowa home to Marquette Island, first by steam ferry from Chicago to Mackinac Island, and later by rail. If one believes that our love of the land begins in childhood, it can be said that those summers spent roaming the islands, by foot or by canoe, were instrumental in helping to shape Leopold’s own land ethic. His brother, Frederick, wrote of their summers on Marquette describing Aldo’s explorations. “Aldo knew most of the island intimately. He produced several handmade maps artistically decorated and illustrated with typical trees, animals, and birds in appropriate places. All of the trails were shown including some newer trails which he himself created.” It was while in the islands that Aldo met the headmaster of the prep school that eventually took him to Yale, the only school in the country at that time that offered a forestry degree. From there, the rest is history.

A historic photo of Aldo Leopold in 1908 boating in the Les Cheneaux. (photo credit: Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives and
University of Wisconsin – Madison Archives)