Arch Rock a Destination for More Than 150 Years
A Look at History
Arch Rock
By Frank Straus

Of all of the rock formations on Mackinac Island, the most remarkable is Arch Rock on the Island’s eastern shoreline. Seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, it rewards those who come to it by carriage ride, on a bike, or on foot. Some come to see it from above, looking down through the frame of limestone at the ever-changing waters below. Others stare almost 150 feet up at it from below, looking up from Mackinac Island’s Lake Shore Road.

The Indians had, and still have, their own stories of Arch Rock. No doubt many of them came long distances to see it and the other sights of Mackinac Island. The stories of Arch Rock written in English began as long ago as 1820, when Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, better known on Mackinac as the builder of the Indian Dormitory, studied the “Giant’s Arch.” A self-taught naturalist attached to the Cass Expedition, Mr. Schoolcraft decided that the arch had been formed by “the falling down of enormous masses of the rock.”

This picture was taken when the Michigan National Guard camped on Mackinac Island July 12, 1888.

Today’s geologists agree with Mr. Schoolcraft. They point to a period of time several thousand years ago, called the Nipissing Era by Great Lakes scientists, when the water levels of Lakes Huron and Michigan were much higher than they are today. It is guessed that Nipissing high water and winter ice may have eroded or swept away many of the “toe stones” that once protected the base of the bluff below Arch Rock. With these anchors gone, one or more rockslides uncovered a mass of breccia limestone at the top of the bluff. Further erosion created the symmetrical archway that we see today.

In 1836, Harriet Martineau took a look at the “Natural Bridge of Mackinac.” Reaching for a sublime image suitable to her Romantic Age readers, she wrote: “We viewed it from above, so that the horizon line of the lake fell behind the bridge, and the blue expanse of waters filled the entire arch. Birch and ash grew around the bases of the pillars, and shrubbery tufted the sides and dangled from the bridge. The soft, rich hues in which the whole was dressed seemed borrowed from the autumn sky.”

Ms. Martineau’s appreciation of the mingled blue, green, and white of the lake, shrubbery, and rock could have inspired the photographers and artists for Detroit Publishing Company, who used the formation as the focus of one of Mackinac Island’s earliest colored postcards in 1899. By now called “Arch Rock,” the natural bridge was already the destination of four of the five paved roads that lead to it today: Huron Road, Arch Rock Road, Sugar Loaf Road, and Leslie Avenue. From the year of its founding in 1895, the Mackinac Island State Park Commission recognized Arch Rock as one of its treasures.

During the first decade of the 20th century, as a flock of postcards bearing Arch Rock’s increasingly famous image began to run off the presses of souvenir printers throughout the Midwest, the State Park took two additional steps to make the Rock more accessible. At the base of the formation, the park graded and graveled the first Lake Shore Boulevard so that bicycle tourists could enjoy the bridge from below. The State Park also built the first of several sets of steps up one of the “pillars” identified by Martineau, so that travelers already atop the plateau of Mackinac could climb up to a parapet and see the top of the Arch up close.

Young and reckless visitors used to climb across the arch. Gerald Ford, Eagle Scout, did so in 1929; the Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids has a photograph of the feat. A sign firmly cemented into the archway now warns the careless to “Keep Off.”

From its beginning, the tourist-buggy business on Mackinac Island recognized the status of Arch Rock as a must-see. After World War II, most of the independent operators organized into what is now Mackinac Island Carriage Tours. While the standardized tour has shifted over the decades, Arch Rock has always been a feature. Starting in 1980, Carriage Tours began bringing visitors to Arch Rock in a three-horse hitch, and the fifth road to the site, Rifle Range Road, was opened.

Other changes have also affected the Arch Rock experience. Throughout the first three quarters of the last century, visitors could buy souvenirs from a small shop just below Arch Rock to the south. The curio store was run for two generations by Gunn and Ella Chambers, mother and father of the Mackinac Island Town Crier’s longtime columnist Jeannette Doud. The State Park tore down the store in 1972. Later in that decade, the State Park opened bike paths to Arch Rock from the north and south. The northern bike path joined hands with Leslie Avenue for part of its length.

Small plaques and displays have been set up from time to time, starting with a bronze monument at an overlook just north of Arch Rock in 1915, naming the viewpoint the “Nicolet Watchtower” in honor of explorer Jean Nicolet, who first saw Mackinac Island in 1634. Other displays and signboards explain the geological process that formed the Arch, and list the roads and streets that converge here.

Some hikers want to climb the Arch Rock’s bluff. A trail from near the Rock down to the water’s edge has been in place since at least 1843, when Margaret Fuller climbed it both ways: “The arched rock surprised me, much as I had heard of it, from the perfection of the arch. It is perfect whether you look up through it from the lake, or down through it to the transparent waters. We both ascended and descended, no very easy matter, the steep and crumbling path, and rested at the summit, beneath the trees, and at the foot upon the cool mossy stones beside the lapsing waves.”

One of the key factors making a trip to Mackinac Island enjoyable is the thought that one is enjoying oneself in much the same way, and feeling the same feelings, as people who were here more than 150 years ago.