Mackinaw City, Michigan

Mackinaw City, Michigan is a greatly improved tourist area and jumping off point to Mackinac Island (www.mackinacisland.org & www.mackinac.com). We stayed at the Lakeside Comfort Inn on the beach with a beautiful view of Lake Huron and Mackinac Island in the distance. Ferries like Shepler’s, Arnold’s and the Star Line carry more than a million tourists to the island every summer.

Mackinaw City is at the “tip of the mitt” and as such was the northern terminus of the Dixie Highway until they built the Mackinac Bridge in 1957. Known as “Big Mac” and “Mighty Mac,” the bridge (part of Interstate 75) connects the village of Mackinaw City on the south with the city of St. Ignace on the north.

It’s a suspension bridge – the longest suspension bridge between anchorages in the Western hemisphere – spanning the Straits of Mackinac. The length of the bridge’s main span is 3,800 feet, which makes it the third-longest suspension span in the United States and twelfth longest worldwide.

Freighters (look closely, there’s a huge freighter in the distance) have historically found it to be a notoriously bad weather-prone stretch of water that connects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

The Mackinac Bridge actually runs right over the top of the visitor’s center at what is now known as Colonial Michilimackinac, an 18th century French, and later British, fort.

Fort Michilimackinac served, in large part, as a supply depot for traders in the western Great Lakes.

It was years later that railroads actually solidified the development of Mackinaw City. Nine passenger trains came through here everyday in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And there were even more freight trains because of all the natural resources in the Northern Michigan area.