A Look at History
Golfers Have Enjoyed 'The Jewel' for More Than a Century
BY FRANK STRAUS

Above: After the British departure in 1796, the lower meadow became the property of the U.S. Army at Fort Mackinac. Gradually the meadow, now the lower half of the Grand Nine, evolved into a public pasturing-ground for the people of Mackinac Island. The brassy tinkle of cowbells rang from the meadow as the cows ate their grass. (Photographs courtesy of Tom Pfeiffelmann)

Grand Hotel calls its 18-hole golf course "The Jewel." Visitors to Mackinac find that its two nine-hole components are twin emeralds of our Island.

Very little on Mackinac Island is similar to what one finds on the mainland, and The Jewel is unusual, too. Its strange history is typical for this island, where a surprising number of local resources have been adaptively reused and carry traces of their former purposes.

The Jewel's lower nine holes, the "Grand Nine," are close to the village and fort of Mackinac Island. In 1779, Lieutenant Governor Patrick Sinclair asked his commander in Quebec for permission to move his British post at the Straits of Mackinac. The proposal was to move the fort from Mackinaw City, on the mainland, to Mackinac Island; Lt. Gov. Sinclair or a member of his staff drew a crude map of the future harbor area. Most of the steep-bluffed island was unfit for any sort of pasture agriculture, but one swathe of land behind the bay sloped gently upwards toward the interior plateau. Where men and women now play golf behind Market Street, Sinclair wrote a note:

At left: An early view of part of the meadow that later became Grand Hotel's golf course. (Photographs courtesy of Tom Pfeiffelmann)

"Low Ground yielding Cedar, Swamp Laurel, Willow, and other aquatic [trees], but the soil fit for rich Meadow. Here is a fine Spring of Water."

The meadow was a key component of the logistics of the move. As the British troops and their civilian allies moved to Fort Mackinac and cleared out the village area in 1780-81, the trees in this sloping area quickly disappeared. The meadow was subdivided into two halves; the British Army kept the lower half, but granted the upper half to George Mitchell, a key civilian ally, and his wife, Elizabeth Mitchell.

These vintage postcards depict early golf games on Mackinac Island. (Photographs courtesy of Tom Pfeiffelmann)

Mr. Mitchell, a trained surgeon's mate, was Mackinac Island's first provider of European-style health services. He also served as the fort's hospital mate and deputy commissary, and like other Islanders with means, participated in the lucrative fur trade. While these and other duties kept him busy, Elizabeth ran the farm and pasturage. The small but thriving town of Mackinac Island possessed enough milch cows and draft animals to create a demand for all of the hay and grazing-land rights that the Mitchells could provide.

After the British departure in 1796, the lower meadow became the property of the U.S. Army at Fort Mackinac. Gradually the meadow evolved into a public pasturing-ground for the people of Mackinac Island, but this land parcel, now the lower half of the Grand Nine, was never a common. It was part of the Fort's military reservation until the end of the Army's service here, when it became, like the rest of the military reservation, part of the State Park. The brassy tinkle of cowbells rang from the meadow as the cows ate their grass.

After Mrs. Mitchell's death in 1827, the upper meadow, which was attached to a spike of privately-owned land extending almost straight north into the heart of Mackinac Island, fell into other hands. In the 1880s, the northern end of this land grant was redeveloped as the village of Harrisonville; soon afterward, someone platted the southern half - the upper meadow - as the new subdivision of Wawatam Brook. The subdivision was designed to contain 15 spacious homesites grouped around the teardrop-shaped private park of Wawatam Spring.

The latter part of the 1800s was a time of growth and land subdividing on Mackinac Island. Several of the proposed developments, such as "Benham's Annex" (at the heart of the current Stonecliffe), would go dormant and reemerge after the passage of a full century. Wawatam Brook, by contrast, would never be built; an alternative use for this land parcel appeared. In the 1890s, the traditional game of Scottish golf was significantly perfected when an Ohio rubber company patented a new, dimpled golf ball. The resilient sphere flew much farther than the Scottish "featherie" made of feathers stuffed into a leather casing, and one of America's great sports had begun its life. Guests at the adjacent Grand Hotel began to bring up wooden shafted clubs and started asking hotel management where they could play.

Grand Hotel guests were playing "rough golf" on the pasture by 1901, dodging "cow pies" as they walked. The hotel purchased the failed subdivision in 1904, but 15 homesites were not enough acreage for a course. A deal was struck between the hotel and the State Park. Wawatam Brook remained green, open space, and the State Park leased the lower meadow to the hotel to complete the course. The new Grand Hotel Golf Links were built during the winter of 1915- 16.

The nine-hole golf links were designed for meadow play rather than as "resort golf," in which the fairways are separated by trees. The links were so flat and open that a barnstorming young flying couple from Detroit used it as a landing strip in 1929. The popular links were the subject of at least two Mackinac Island 1920s postcards. During the Civilian Conservation Corps days of the 1930s, the relief workers did a lot of tree-cutting north of the links, in a wooded area then called "Wigwam Trail." This cleared area is now part of the Surrey Hill Carriage Tours depot. The land-clearing was meant to be a preliminary move toward expanding the links into 18-holes, but nothing was to come of this idea for more than 50 years.

During the time of Grand Hotel's administration by W. Stewart Woodfill, the "Grand Nine" remained in the form that the aging owner had seen it when he had first come to Mackinac Island in 1919. By the time Mr. Woodfill transferred the hotel to the Musser family in 1978, the links had become obsolescent. Just as in the 1900s, golfing guests of Grand Hotel were pushing the hotel to improve its facilities.

Hotel owner Dan Musser hired Jerry Matthews to redesign and re-landscape the Grand Nine in 1987 in celebration of the hotel's centennial year. The open links were replaced by fairways delineated by newly planted trees, and watercourses such as Wawatam Brook were pressed into service as hazards. The resulting round was a short one (2,405 yards from the blue tees), but the experience of playing golf on Mackinac Island, with views of Grand Hotel on one side and Fort Mackinac on the other, was enjoyed by many golfers and hotel guests.

Meanwhile on the west side of the Island, developer George Staffan had acquired control of the former Stonecliffe estate. Hoping to build his own golfrelated development, Mr. Staffan cut down most of what was then Sunset Forest, the old Private Claim Number 2. Financial pressures prevented the developer from completing this work, and the half-built nine-hole course was sold to Grand Hotel in the early 1990s. After significant redesign and redevelopment, Grand Hotel opened the "Woods nine" to the public in 1994. This was a longer circuit of 3,040 blue-teed yards, including the 552-yard Number 15 - the longest hole on Mackinac Island.

Dan Musser and Grand Hotel did not intend to operate the physically separate circuits as two different nine-hole golf courses. As a key piece of the overall Grand Hotel guest golfing experience, the two circuits were physically linked by a horse-drawn shuttle. The carriage rides to and from "The Woods" are now part of a typical visitors' golf day on Mackinac Island; golfers who plan ahead can time their round so as to finish the day with dinner at the Woods restaurant.

By 2007, golfers have played their game at Grand Hotel for more than a century, but the facilities available to them today have little resemblance to the more primitive realities of golf on the old cow pasture 100 years earlier.