Tourism comes to Mackinac Island
The upper Great Lakes fur trade continued after the War of 1812—this time, with John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company leading the industry. However, by the 1830s, the fur trade had started to wane, and a lucrative new industry had begun to emerge: tourism. Mackinac Island was located along a major shipping route through the Great Lakes, and steamships traveling between Detroit and Chicago often stopped there to refuel. Some of those ships had travel writers on board, says Brisson, and they began sharing their experiences on Mackinac Island with the masses.
As far as Brisson knows, there was no concerted effort to bring tourism to the island. But, he adds, Mackinac happened to have everything wealthy Victorians were looking for in a summer vacation destination: clean air, cool breezes, romantic paths through the woods, bluffs overlooking glistening waters. “After the Civil War, tourism really takes off,” says Brisson. “Mackinac comes into its own as a major summer resort of the Upper Midwest. It’s on the map as a place of wonderful natural beauty and historic charm.”
As tourists started pouring in, however, some onlookers began to worry about overdevelopment. One of those concerned individuals was Michigan Senator Thomas W. Ferry, who’d been born on the island in 1827. After Yellowstone was established as the first national park in 1872, Ferry began to push for Mackinac Island to become the second. He proposed turning roughly half of the island—land the federal government already owned because of Fort Mackinac—into a national park. “He feared that all this land on Mackinac Island is going to fall into private hands, it’s going to be locked up and not available to the public, and everything charming and beautiful about Mackinac is going to disappear,” says Brisson.
Ferry faced some opposition to his proposal. Texas Senator Morgan C. Hamilton disagreed with the entire premise of national parks, wondering why the government would set aside land for conservation and recreation while at the same time encouraging Americans to occupy the nation’s vast Western territory, according to Keith R. Widder’s book Mackinac National Park, 1875-1895. He didn’t want to see any federal funds used for national parks, either. That was an easy critique for Ferry to address: The federal government would not need to buy any additional land, and the U.S. Army troops stationed at Fort Mackinac could manage the new national park. President Grant signed the bill into law on March 3, 1875, officially establishing America’s second national park.