Mackinac Island

Mackinac Island sits in the strait between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, and for two centuries it was one of the most strategically valuable pieces of ground in North America because whoever held it controlled the fur trade moving through the upper lakes.

The British built Fort Mackinac on the bluff in 1780, moving it from the mainland for defensibility. In July 1812 a British force landed on the far side of the island overnight, hauled two cannon to the high ground behind the fort, and demanded surrender at dawn. The American garrison had not yet been told the war had started. They gave it up without a shot.

After the war John Jacob Astor made the island the headquarters of the American Fur Company, and for a couple of decades it was one of the busiest commercial points in the interior. That trade collapsed by the 1840s and the island had to find something else. What it found was tourists.

Steamships from Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago and Cleveland began putting in during the summer, and by the 1870s the island was a full resort. In 1875 Congress made it the second national park in the country, three years after Yellowstone. It was handed to Michigan in 1895 and became that state’s first state park, and about eighty percent of the island is still parkland.

The Grand Hotel opened in July 1887 and was put up in a hurry — the frame went from ground to finished in a matter of months — with a front porch that runs six hundred and sixty feet, long enough that it is regularly claimed as the longest in the world. It is the anchor of most photographs taken from the water.

The ban on automobiles is the thing everyone remembers, and it happened in 1898. A car frightened horses badly enough near the village that the village board prohibited motor vehicles, and the state followed for the park. The ban never came off. So the photographic record here is unusual: transportation on Mackinac looks in 1950 almost exactly as it did in 1900, with drays, saddle horses and carriages, and photographs are correspondingly hard to date by the traffic.

The natural formations carry the same names they always have. Arch Rock, a limestone span nearly a hundred and fifty feet above the shore, and Sugar Loaf, a stack standing inland where an older shoreline used to be, are in more photographs than anything except the fort and the hotel.

One piece of medical history belongs to the island. In 1822 a fur trader named Alexis St. Martin was shot in the side at the company store and survived with a permanent opening into his stomach that never fully closed. The army surgeon at the fort, William Beaumont, spent years observing digestion directly through it, sometimes tying food to a string and drawing it back out. The work established most of what was then known about how the stomach functions, and the ethics of the arrangement have been argued about ever since. The store where it happened still stands and is in the photographs.

The Holiday That Had to Be Invented Twice