The Hermit of Higgins Lake Survived Being Frozen Alive

Since my family bought a house on Flynn Island in Higgins Lake, I have become increasingly interested in the stories attached to the place.

You do not just inherit the view, the dock, or the walk through the trees. You inherit the rumors, the half-remembered names, the old stories people repeat because they have been repeated for so long they feel like part of the land itself.

One story in particular always seemed to resurface: The story of Ezra Pritchard, the island’s most famous resident.

Depending on who you ask, Ezra was a Civil War deserter, a bounty jumper who hid a fortune somewhere on the island, or simply a broken man seeking solitude after unimaginable loss.

More than a century after his death, his story is still woven into the identity of Flynn Island.

In August 1902, a young man from Bay City rowed across Higgins Lake toward that small island. The old man living there had been sick. Neighbors had brought him food and medicine, but there was a growing fear that something had gone wrong.

When Lloyd Harmon arrived at the island, he found the old man dead.

Before Higgins Lake knew him as a hermit, Ezra Pritchard had been a blacksmith, husband, father, Civil War veteran, homesteader, and pioneer. He had raised children, buried loved ones, survived war, and endured enough personal tragedy to alter the course of his life.

Ezra Porter Pritchard was born in 1828. The America of his youth looked very different from the country most people know today. Michigan had not yet become a state. Roads were primitive. Much of Northern Michigan was sparsely settled wilderness. Small frontier communities depended upon practical tradesmen for survival.

Ezra learned blacksmithing, one of the most important skilled trades of the 19th century. Blacksmiths repaired wagons, forged hardware, sharpened tools, shod horses, and performed countless tasks necessary for frontier life. Communities relied upon them.

In 1855, he married Susan Jane Fox, and together they built a family.

The Pritchards raised children, including Edwin, William, Houghton, and Emma. Long before Higgins Lake knew him as a hermit, Ezra was a husband and father.

Then came the Civil War.

Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, Ezra entered military service. Records connect him to the 148th New York Infantry. It was during this period that one of the most persistent myths surrounding his life began.

The unit fought battles in 16 separate locations, and its final action came on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, where it helped facilitate the surrender of Robert E. Lee.

After only eight months and six days in uniform, the National Archives state Ezra deserted. Just prior to this date, Captain Edwin Ludlow had requested that Private Ezra Pritchard of the 148th be detailed to the iron works in Norfolk, Virginia, because he was a skilled blacksmith. Later, Ezra’s status was changed again. Oddly enough, Ezra was mustered out of the 148th on June 22, 1865.

Poor record keeping during the Civil War frequently resulted in soldiers being incorrectly reported as deserters, and this could have easily happened to Ezra. It is also worth noting that President Andrew Johnson granted the Christmas Amnesty Proclamation in 1868, which would have absolved Ezra of his desertion and/or bounty jumping if it was true.

The legend of Ezra the Deserter may have survived because it is the kind of story people remember. A mysterious old man on an island. A Civil War record with the word “deserted” attached to it. Rumors of hidden money. It is not hard to see how the details hardened into folklore.

But the paper trail complicates the simpler version.

That was part of what sent me to the Roscommon Historical Society. I spoke with Laura Richardson, who helps run the place, and told her what I was looking for. I explained my specific interest in Flynn Island, Ezra Pritchard, and the older stories surrounding Higgins Lake.

She started pulling things out for me.

Records. Books. Photographs. Local histories. The sort of material you do not fully understand until you sit with it for a while.

So I sat there and read.

The more I looked, the more Ezra became less of a legend and more of a person. The myth was still there, but underneath it was a man whose life had been shaped by work, war, family, loss, and survival.

Following the war and the loss of his two brothers, Ezra eventually settled in Michigan and established himself in Missaukee County on 160 acres via the Homestead Act of 1862.

Like many settlers of the era, he worked to carve a life out of difficult conditions. Clearing land, building a home, raising crops, and surviving Northern Michigan winters required constant labor.

For years, the Pritchards appeared to be building a fairly ordinary life. Then tragedy struck.

On July 4, 1873, Susan Pritchard, while pregnant with twins, died following an accidental shooting.

According to surviving accounts, the firearm discharged while Ezra was handling or cleaning his shotgun. The blast struck Susan in the leg, between her ankle and knee. The pain was so immense she prematurely delivered her twins, both stillborn.

A few days later, Susan’s leg had to be amputated. After four hours of operation, Susan died.

In a matter of three days, Ezra lost his wife and two unborn children.

The loss would have been devastating under any circumstances. On the frontier, where family often meant survival, it was catastrophic. In 1879, Ezra sold his homestead.

The 1880 Census confirms Ezra’s children all lived elsewhere with other families after the sale of the homestead.

Five years later, Ezra’s oldest son, Edwin, was murdered.

During a visit to a neighboring farm, Edwin bumped into one of his former employees, with whom he had an ongoing dispute over money. After exchanging words, the former employee stepped into the house, reappeared with a loaded shotgun, and fired a blast into Edwin’s face at point-blank range, killing him instantly.

The death of a child is among the most devastating experiences a parent can endure. To lose a son violently only deepened the wounds already carried by the family.

Soon afterward, Edwin’s infant daughter died as well.

When viewed through that sequence of events, the image of an aging man living on an isolated island begins to make more sense.

Today, the island is known as Flynn Island or Treasure Island, depending on who you ask. But while speaking with Tyler Sharp, a descendant of the Sharp family, I heard another name: Trapper’s Island.

I was unable to find that name in the written records I reviewed. No map or published account I found used it. But oral history matters, especially when it comes from a family that has been tied to the Higgins Lake area for generations. The Sharp family has been here practically since the start, and in places like this, some history survives by being repeated around counters, docks, and old family conversations long before it ever appears in a book.

Speaking with Sharp was eye-opening. He was not just repeating a tourist story or trying to dress the island up with mystery. He was sharing the kind of inherited local knowledge that often lives beside the formal record.

According to Sharp, “Trappers used it. Local Indians and Chief Shoppenegon used it. Ezra Pritchard camped there in the spring, summer, and fall.”

Sharp also told me there had been a “trapper’s shelter” on the south end of the island, and that Ezra eventually took shelter there. That account is difficult to prove, but it makes sense.

The island occupied a strategic location on Higgins Lake. For generations, hunters, fishermen, trappers, and travelers moved through the region. A small island near the middle of the lake would have been an obvious stopping place, especially for people moving across or around the water before the lake became a cottage destination.

Whether Ezra first arrived there as a hunter, fisherman, trapper, or simply a man seeking solitude remains unknown. But the idea that he camped there seasonally fits with other research.

Local historian John B. Cook’s research reaches a similar conclusion about Ezra’s life on the island. Even though Ezra lived on Flynn Island on and off during the better part of the last two decades of his life, Cook suggests he likely spent the harshest part of Michigan’s winters on his son’s farm. It was more than 15 miles between the island and his son Houghton’s farm, a hike Cook estimated to take roughly five hours.

That detail changes how the story should be understood.

Ezra was not necessarily living on the island, cut off from everyone and everything. He appears to have moved between worlds: the island in the warmer months, family or farm life during the worst of winter, and the broader Higgins Lake community when necessity or human contact required it.

According to Cook, one report stated that Ezra had lost some of his fingers to frostbite. In November 1883, Ezra was found about a mile from Roscommon with his legs, hands, arms, and part of his body frozen. The local paper reportedly wrote, “He cannot live.”

He was 55 years old at the time, and he survived.

For years, local stories about Flynn Island have focused on Felix Flynn. Historical records, however, point to an earlier figure whose role has largely been forgotten.

In 1892, James Michael Flynn of Cadillac owned the island and constructed a one-room cabin there.

Northern Michigan was still developing. Cabins were abandoned, reused, borrowed, occupied, and repurposed with remarkable frequency. What seems strange today may have appeared perfectly ordinary in the 1890s.

Ezra had apparently been away from the island for a few years while Flynn built the one-room cabin and spent a season there. By the time Ezra returned, Flynn was no longer using it. To Ezra, the cabin may not have appeared as someone else’s active home, but as a useful and unexpected improvement on an island he already knew well.

He probably saw it as a delightful surprise.

This was not necessarily trespassing in the modern sense, or even an arrangement that anyone around the lake would have considered especially unusual. On a remote island in a still-developing part of Northern Michigan, a vacant cabin could easily become shelter for the next person who needed it.

Ezra may have preferred solitude, but he was not completely isolated. He spoke with visitors. He accepted assistance. He remained part of the lake’s social landscape even while living apart from it.

People talked about him. They worried about him. In many ways, Ezra had become part of Higgins Lake itself.

At some point during the mid-1890s, Ezra left the island for another extended period.

What happened next, however, appears consistently in both Lloyd Harmon’s recollections and later historical research.

Believing the cabin abandoned and already in poor condition, a group of local boys visited the island and set it on fire.

By the time Ezra returned, the cabin was gone. The one-room structure built by Flynn had been reduced to ashes.

The loss of the cabin may not seem dramatic when compared to the deaths of family members, but it represented another step in Ezra’s gradual retreat from ordinary life.

After the cabin burned, Ezra moved into rougher shelter. Tyler L. Sharp’s family recollection points to a trapper’s shelter on the south end of the island, while later descriptions suggest a dugout-like structure partially excavated into the ground and protected from the weather as best it could be.

It would’ve predated Flynn’s cabin. It may even have been the same shelter Ezra used before the cabin existed.

Either way, after losing the cabin, Ezra went back to something older, colder, and more primitive. It was shelter, but barely. Even by frontier standards, it was a hard way to live.

One weekend, I walked around Flynn Island with all of this in mind.

I stood near where the trapper’s shelter and Flynn’s cabin would have been. Surprisingly, Flynn’s cabin sat only a few hundred feet from my own family’s cabin. That detail stayed with me. The story was no longer somewhere else on the island, tucked safely into legend. It was close. Close enough to make the past feel less distant than it should.

There is a certain level of peace you feel out there, walking among woods that have been almost entirely left alone. The island is not large, but it feels separate.

In that setting, Ezra becomes easier to understand.

More than 120 years later, people still talk about him. They still point toward the south end of the island. They still repeat what they heard from someone older. They still wonder where the cabin stood, where the shelter was, and what it must have felt like for Ezra to spend his final seasons there.

For most people, Ezra Pritchard will always be the Hermit of Higgins Lake. But after walking the island, reading the records, and listening to the people who still carry its older stories, that title feels too small.

He was a husband. A father. A blacksmith. A veteran. A homesteader. A survivor. A man who lost nearly everything and found, on a quiet island in the middle of Higgins Lake, the only kind of peace he may have had left.