Spring Planting Brings New Life to Mackinac Island
A Look at History
BY FRANK STRAUS

As spring comes to Mackinac Island, garden owners are making lists of flowers to buy, sorting their seed packets, mentally checking to see where the hoe and trowels are, and thinking about weeding the perennial beds.

During the 1800s, spring held a different significance for Mackinac Islanders. Less than 150 years ago, large land parcels on Mackinac Island were agricultural. Most of them were used for generations as cropland and pasturing grounds. Significant plots were cultivated by the soldiers at Fort Mackinac, who grew food to supplement their daily rations. Perhaps more than half of the households on the Island owned a free-range cow that produced family milk.

Spring brought new life to both the farm fields and the pasturelands of Mackinac Island. With new grass on Mackinac Island's pastures and fields, tracts of land that now form large parts of the Grand Hotel Jewel golf course, Surrey Hills, Harrison-ville, Hedgecliff, and Stonecliffe, dairy cows could give birth to calves and begin their flow of milk. As the soil temperature increased in the plowed fields that now form large parts of Hubbard's Annex, Wawashkamo, and the solid waste transfer station, the Davenport, Dousman, and Early families could sow crops of oats, Indian corn, barley, and spring wheat.

Mackinac Island's relatively small space quickly proved to be inadequate for growing the crops required to feed itself, particularly with the annual arrival of thousands of guests each summer to take part in the summer fur-trade rendezvous. William McGulpin, an early Mackinac Islander, is recorded as the pre-War of 1812 recipient of a land grant on the mainland, 640 acres of relatively flat, well-drained soil on the south side of the Straits of Mackinac. The grant covered that fast-growing part of today's Mackinaw City that lies west of Interstate 75. McGulpin Point, a small headland west of Fort Michili-mackinac, guarded by a small 1869 lighthouse, is one reminder of the McGulpin family at the Straits of Mackinac.

This vintage photo shows cows grazing on the Island.

Census and land records show that William McGulpin and his family were professional bakers and farmers. They grew and ground much of the grain they baked, and signed contracts with the powerful American Fur Company. Mr. McGulpin may have baked loaves of fine wheat bread for company boss Robert Stuart in his large white home down Market Street, may have baked cornbread for the fur company clerks and canoemen, and may have carefully prepared small quantities of biscuits and hardtack to be taken by these workers into the wilderness as emergency rations, although the company was notoriously stingy with the food they issued to their workers.

Another echo of the past is the McGulpin cabin, built about 1780. The cabin may have been one of the dwellings carried across the ice by the British during the forced evacuation of Fort Michilimackinac in 1780-81. William McGulpin purchased the house in 1819 with the resources he earned from his successful farming and baking work. The McGulpin cabin, which now stands at the corner of Fort and Market streets across from Marquette Park, is one of the oldest standing houses on Mackinac Island.

Other baskets full of local grain may have been used for a different purpose. Old records hint that at least two small distilleries were operated on Mackinac Island in the early 1800s. Few records confirm the existence or location of these intriguing structures, for whiskey was subjected to a heavy federal tax and was not supposed to be available in "Indian country" at all. The copper pot-stills chugging away in these tiny factories transformed fermented mash - mostly made from Indian corn, with possibly some rye, if any was grown in the Straits at this time - into distilled liquor for local consumption and sale to the fur traders and the Natives.

After steamboat Walk-in-the-Water arrived in Haldimand Bay in 1821, heavily laden with passengers and freight, the local growing of grain and distillation of whiskey began to die down.

These commodities could be obtained more inexpensively in shipments from the lower Great Lakes.

Farming continued, with an increased emphasis on fruits, vegetables, and root crops. What is now the "home leg" of Wawashkamo's ninth hole was planted in apple trees. A few of the trees survived into the 1900s as golf hazards, and Lorna Puttkammer Straus remembers seeing them in the 1940s.

Dr. William Beaumont, Fort Mackinac surgeon in 1820-25, fought to improve the nutrition of the soldiers under his care. Unhappy with the standard Army rations of the day, which relied heavily upon the staples of bread, salt meat, and corn whiskey, Dr. Beaumont successfully urged his commanding officers to order the men to clear and plant vegetable gardens around Mackinac Island.

One of the Fort's most successful gardens was at the foot of the fort's bluff itself, the rectangle of land now occupied by Marquette Park. Here, cabbages, onions, beets, and turnips were grown, and Dr. Beaumont succeeded in setting aside a small section to grow poppies, from which he tried to extract juice to make a small quantity of gum opium. Anesthetic chemicals had not yet been invented, and surgeons like Dr. Beaumont were dependent upon opium and other drugs to deaden pain and allow operations to be carried out.

During this time, however, livestock, especially cattle, were the new focus of farming life on Mackinac Island. One cattle barn, the gable-roof frame structure off Davenport Street on the far western edge of Hubbard's Annex, survives as a living memory of this period. While some cattle were allowed to roam free, wearing Swiss-style cowbells as signals to their owners, increasingly intensive use of the interior of Mackinac Island by the Army's target sharpshooters tended to discourage this practice.

With a permanent, year-around population of 500 to 1,000 people, Mackinac Island demanded a significant quantity of fresh cow's milk. Much of the overall Stonecliffe complex, including most of what is now the Woods golf course, was pressed into service in the late 1800s as semi-confined pastureland for the animals. Island old-timers still call a slight rise near the entrance to Stonecliffe "Listening Hill" because the animals' owners would listen for the distinctive sounds of their cowbells from there. The rutted, short wooded road on the eastern edge of Hubbard's Annex is officially called the "Cow Path." It was used, well past the turn of the last century as a passageway for some of the Island's remaining dairy animals being led from the West Bluff to and from pastureland in Stonecliffe, Hedgecliff, or Harrisonville. Helen Blodgett Erwin, Island cottager, is credited with being one of the last "sum-

mer people" to keep a cow on Mackinac Island.

With the development of "high-pressure" steamboats making fast trips to and from the lower Great Lakes, however, fresh, refrigerated milk became available at Doud Mercantile and other Island grocery stores. The invention of canned and, later, World War II-style powdered milk, made an ersatz beverage available even during the chilled winter months. The growth of the tourism industry made it necessary to devote all of the Island's dwindling supply of pasture space to horse grazing, as has remained the case to the present day. Today, only tiny orchards and small patches of vegetables in private gardens recall Mackinac Island's rich agricultural heritage.