Mackinac Island

The Anishinaabe likened the island's shape to a turtle and called it Mitchimakinak, the Great Turtle. Fishing camps show people here by around AD 900, and the island was sacred — the home of Gitche Manitou, the Great Spirit, a gathering place for offerings and a burial place of chiefs. The French explorer Jean Nicolet probably saw it in 1634; the Jesuit Claude Dablon founded a mission in 1670, and the Straits quickly became a centre of the French fur trade, with a French fort at present-day Mackinaw City from about 1715.

Britain took control after the French and Indian War, and in 1780 Major Patrick Sinclair moved the garrison to the island's limestone bluffs, building Fort Mackinac. The Straits passed to the United States in 1783, though British troops stayed until after 1794. In 1812 the British captured the fort in the first battle of the war, and in 1814 they beat off an American attack on the north side of the island; the Treaty of Ghent returned it in 1815. John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company then made the island its centre, shipping beaver pelts for 30 years, and as late as 1829 the Métis were dominant in the region's economy.

By the mid-19th century fishing for whitefish and lake trout had replaced the fur trade, and after the Civil War visitors arrived by train and lake steamer from the Great Lakes cities. In 1875 much of the federal land on the island became the country's second national park, after Yellowstone; boat and railway companies built hotels, and wealthy families built summer cottages on the bluffs. When the army left in 1895 the park passed to Michigan as its first state park. Cars were banned from 1898, and in 1960 the whole island was listed as a National Historic Landmark.

The island's identity rests on preservation. Leaseholders in the state park must keep up its Victorian architecture, and buildings span three centuries: at least two survive from the original French settlement, the island has the only example of northern French rustic architecture in the United States, and the Federal, Greek Revival and Victorian styles of the resort years — Gothic Revival, Italianate, Second Empire and Queen Anne — line the streets and bluffs. The Mission Church of 1829 is the oldest surviving church building in Michigan, and a former Indian Dormitory of the 1830s now houses an art museum.

Horses define daily life. With no cars, carriages, saddle horses and bicycles fill the streets, and one of the island's carriage companies is described as the largest horse and buggy livery in the world. The Lilac Festival, held each June since 1949, ends with a parade of horse-drawn vehicles recognised by the Library of Congress as a local legacy event.

The island also draws the state's political and business world for the Mackinac Policy Conference, and sailors finish two of the Great Lakes' best-known yacht races here each July, from Port Huron and from Chicago, a tradition that has continued through wars and depressions. Anishinaabe heritage remains part of the story told at the island's sites, and the island has its own weekly summer newspaper, the Town Crier.

Only 583 people lived on Mackinac Island year-round at the 2020 census, on an island about eight miles round and under four square miles in area. Between May and October the population swells with tens of thousands of visitors and the hundreds of seasonal workers hired by hotels, restaurants, bars and shops, many of them from Jamaica.

Tourism is the entire economy: fudge, bicycle and carriage hire, the forts and museums run by the state park, golf, galleries and the hotels. Commercial fishing, once the island's main industry, has ceased, though the old fish docks are still in use.

Winter is a different life. The shops and the fort close, the ferries stop once ice fills the Straits, and the small year-round community depends on the airport, with daily charter flights to the mainland, and on snowmobiles, which are allowed in winter and can cross an ice bridge to St. Ignace when the ice is thick enough. The island newspaper switches from weekly to monthly, and the island belongs to its few hundred residents until the boats return in spring.

Fudge is the island's signature. Mackinac candymakers have sold it to visitors since the 1880s, and although fudge was not invented here, the island became so closely linked with it that visitors are nicknamed "fudgies". The Murdick family is credited with the first real candy store, and during the sugar rationing of the Depression and the wars the family used fans to send the smell of its fudge out into the street to draw customers. Much of it is still made the traditional way, cooked and then worked by hand on a slab until it cools into a loaf.

The sweet tradition reaches back further: Native Americans collected maple sugar here long before the fudge shops. The lakes supplied the other staple. Whitefish and lake trout were fished commercially from the mid-19th century, and smoked whitefish from the Great Lakes is still a regional speciality.

Across the Straits in St. Ignace begins the Upper Peninsula, home of the pasty, a pastry filled with meat and vegetables brought by Cornish miners. The Traverse City area, nicknamed the Cherry Capital of the World, grows tart cherries. On the island itself, restaurants, pubs and bars along Main Street and the harbour serve the summer crowds.