Look at History
Mackinac Island School Is Built on Land With Lots of History
BY FRANK STRAUS

Many residents and visitors to Mackinac Island are thinking about going back to school. The Mackinac Island Public School, our Island's only public school building, is preparing for the 2007-08 school year that will begin just after Labor Day. The school itself, and the land that it is built on, both have interesting histories.

When the British soldiers built a stockade around the new village of Mackinac Island in 1780-81, they left three flat areas outside the stockade wall.

Much of one area, the pastureland directly behind Market Street, eventually became the David Mitchell farm and then the "Grand Nine" of Grand Hotel's golf course.

The second area, the waterfront land east of Fort Mackinac, became the "East End" and Mission Point. The third and smallest flatland, on the far west end of the village beyond Mahoney Street, fell under the ownership of the municipal government of Mackinac Island, and the land was therefore called the "Borough Lot."

Following the decline of the fur trade in the 1830s, the protective stockade around the village was torn down or forgotten, and the village began to physically expand.

Looking across the village and the Straits from the bluff above the Island House, in the center of the photograph, is the Thomas W. Ferry School, and the Borough Lot is in the background, with the shanties. (Photograph courtesy of Tom Pfeiffelmann)

The new fishing industry demanded a large workforce of unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers and craftsmen. Men and women clustered in the bustling little town to buy and sell fish, make wooden barrels, weave and repair fishing nets, and measure out the salt and other supplies needed by the trade.

For several decades, the catch of fish in the waters immediately surrounding the Straits of Mackinac was so heavy that the disposal of fish guts was a major problem. In 1848, the borough aldermen enacted an ordinance to prohibit the "cleaning and dressing" of fish in Haldimand Bay. The local law effectively banned this vital stage of fish processing from the harbor and forced its workers to congregate in a suitable shoreline area.

The "Borough Lot" became the site of a large number of small workshops and temporary homes, called 'Fishtown' or the 'shanty town.'

Because most of the fishermen used Mackinaw boats, they did not need a harbor to come ashore. The Mackinaw boat has a flat bottom, probably because it is an evolutionary development from the Chippewa (Ojibwa) canoe.

The Mackinaw boat is given the stability necessary to sail against the wind by a retractable centerboard, which served the place of the fixed keel that most sailboats have. The men aboard the boat would pull up the centerboard, jump out of the boat into the cold Huron water, pull the boat onto the pebbled shoreline and unload its fishy cargo.

The cleaned and gutted fish, ready for salting, would be put into fishboxes and rolled in carts to the waiting warehouses at the docks. There, other men would further clean, trim, and filet the fish, and stuff the fish filets into "wet barrels" filled with salt and water. If suitably salted and packed in a goodquality, tight barrel, the fish would last for a reasonable period of time even without refrigeration.

Many of the fish industry workers and their families were very poor, even by the standards of the 1800s. Some of them could not read or write, as Mackinac Island did not set up a public school until after the Civil War.

When the Island did this, they were able to use the abandoned Indian Dormitory building (1838) as their schoolhouse.

Congress, after hearing a request from the Islanders, transferred the unused structure to the new school district.

The whole matter was handled by one of Michigan's senators, a man born on Mackinac Island, and that is why the school was called the "Thomas W. Ferry School." It was named in honor of this kindly senator, who is even better remembered on Mackinac as the founder of the short-lived Mackinac National Park.

As the Ferry School began to teach pupils, Fishtown's life came to an end. When the powerful railroad corporations that controlled the Grand Hotel Company came to Mackinac Island in 1886 to plan for the new summer hostelry, they found a beautiful location for their hotel on a plateau above the Borough Lot. Unfortunately, Fishtown was in the way. Its inhabitants moved to other locations on Mackinac Island, especially a new development in the interior of the Island called "Harrisonville."

The formerly bustling parcel of land became quiet open space. It was still owned by the village and, later, the city of Mackinac Island.

In the early 1900s, the Borough Lot open space became an informal park for the young people of Mackinac Island. It served some of the same purposes as Great Turtle Park now does.

A linen postcard from about 1934 shows a baseball diamond on the site, and the 1941 WPA guide listed a "municipal baseball diamond" on the site.

By 1952, Bob Benjamin's first guidebook was calling this land parcel the "recreation grounds." The little park had a baseball diamond, tennis courts, shuffleboard courts, a badminton green, swings, and a slide.

One of the slides survived into the 1960s, and I slid down it myself. It seemed immense to a small boy, and was in fact much taller and more exciting than the relatively tiny slides that are required by liability law nowadays.

In the late 1950s, Mackinac Island was pressured by the state to close its wooden schoolhouse and move educational operations to a new building that could be built so as to be fire-resistant. The Borough Lot was judged to be by far the best and most practical location for the new school building, which was built in 1960.

The school has been enlarged several times to take up more of the Borough Lot, notably for the construction of a new basketball court and sports hall in the summer of 2000.

The baseball diamonds have moved to the Scout Barracks and Great Turtle Park, but the playground remains as an ornament of the western half of the Borough Lot. Children can play there within sight and sound of Lake Huron and the Straits of Mackinac.