About

Jerry Koski was born in Iron River, Michigan in 1941. He moved to Ontonagon, Michigan to work as a surveyor for the US Forest Service in 1973. Koski ran a small business that built log homes and saunas from 1975 to 2022. This collection consists of an oral history interview with Jerry Koski and a set of photographs documenting his business, Koski Log Homes. In the oral history interview, Koski discusses how his log home business got started and the history of woodworking in his family. Another major topic is his career as a surveyor for the US Forest Service. Koski describes his work retracing the original 1840s and 1850s surveys of the western Upper Peninsula, early surveying methods, discovering which surveyors were accurate and which were crooked, and how surveying technology changed over the course of his career. This collection was donated to UPLINK by Jerry Koski at the community digitization event held in Ontonagon in July 2022. The event was sponsored by the Ontonagon County Historical Society and funded by the Michigan Humanities Council. 

See the full finding aid here.