A Look at History
The Island's Four Corners
BY FRANK STRAUS

Now that Mackinac Island has been mapped for 9-1-1 emergency response purposes, almost everything has a name. The Island's geological features were all given titles, like "Sugar Loaf," long ago. Most of the Island's streets and roads bear names they've had since the 1800s; tradition-minded Islanders used a few names twice, such as "Hoban" and "Huron," and everything had to be straightened out. Today's Island maps reflect a formalized sense of space, in which almost everything on Mackinac Island is where it is officially supposed to be.

There are a few places on Mackinac Island that still have oral names, names that do not exist officially, names which are used in the course of ordinary conversation, which are often used more by Island yeararound residents and seasonal cottagers than by day visitors. One of these places is "Four Corners," in almost the exact center of Mackinac Island.

The reason for the name Four Corners is simple enough: The place is a crossing with four roads that meet and create four corners. However, there are many crossroads on Mackinac Island, and only two of them, this one and the crossroads below Surrey Hill and the taxi barn, have ever been called Four Corners. Why these two crossroads?

The Four Corners on Mackinac Island is just up the road from Grand Hotel, just before Carriage Tours' horse barn.

The crossroads named Four Corners are, or were, the places where all four roads change their names as they pass through. The north-south road is Garrison Road south of this spot, and British Landing north of it; the east-west road is Annex Road to the west and Crooked Tree Road to the east.

The taxi-barn crossroads used to have the same feature: Every road changed its name as it passed through. After the road that passes through Harrisonville was renamed as the northern half of Cadotte Avenue, this ceased to be true, and many Islanders now call this cross-way "the top of the Grand Hill" or "by the Taxi Barn."

Back to Four Corners. Congress created Mackinac National Park in 1875 as a way to stimulate the economy of northern Michigan and as a gathering place for Americans who could travel in summer. A mapmaker named H.A. Ulffers, of the Army Corps of Engineers, was assigned to draw a map of the Island. Ulffers and his superior, a Major George Weitzel, sketched in dotted lines the outlines of the roads which the Army proposed to build as National Park pleasure drives around the Island.

A view of the Four Corners near the Island's airport.

The Army knew the layout of Washington, D.C., where the city is dotted with circles and squares, from which streets radiate outward like the rays of sunlight; and Weitzel and Ulffers drew a proposed carriage roundabout in the center of the Island, close to the current site of Four Corners.

This map was sketched in 1875, and officially submitted in 1877, as a guide to the work the federal government would do to make Mackinac Island an attractive destination for travelers.

Most of the carefully spaced roads planned on the 1875-77 map were never built. The Island's undulating terrain did not encourage geometric roadbuilding.

On the Island's eastern blufftop, soldiers from Fort Mackinac cut Leslie Avenue in 1889, but the avenue as completed contains many bends and squiggles not planned for on the Army's map. Islanders preferred to use roads through the Island's interior that were already old in 1875.

Garrison Road heard the tramp of many soldiers' feet during the earliest years of Fort Mackinac, completed in 1781. The fort and its men burned many cords of firewood, and most of the Island's largest trees were cut down within a few years.

Garrison Road was a fatigue road used to give the men access to the interior of the Island and create a route for them to haul firewood and other supplies to the Fort.

British Landing Road was also already in place before

the War of 1812. A cleared slope on the northern quarter of the Island proved to be suitable farmland.

The powerful fur trader, Michael Dousman, squatted on nearly a square mile of this land and later acquired an official title to it. From Four Corners, this road leads downhill, across what is now the airport safety strip and into the remains of the Dousman farm, now the Battlefield of 1814.

Both British Landing Road and Garrison Road are shown on a map of the Island drawn in 1817.

Annex Road was built in the early 1880s. When Gurdon Hubbard subdivided his land in 1882, he named it "Hubbard's Annex to the National Park," but most people just called it the "Annex." Soon Annex cottagers were using the road to get to the new Wawashkamo golf links begun in 1898.

Crooked Tree Road was in place by 1915, when it appears on a map by Morgan Wright under the name "Crooked Tree Drive."

It was originally cut, as its first name suggests, as a pleasure drive for carriages; but instead of knifing through the woods, it winds through them to create an inefficient but charming pathway from Sugar Loaf to the center of the island. It is said that when this road was first cut, it passed through an "attractive growth of gnarled trees."

This quote comes from Edwin O. Wood's "Historic Mackinac," published in 1918, which states clearly that both Annex Road and Crooked Tree Road go to what the book calls "Four Corners."

And so there is documentary evidence that this familiar name for the crossroads at the center of the Island has been in use for almost 100 years.