Mackinac Island

By Isla Quinn

Hooves, not engines. That is the sound the sources keep returning to on Mackinac Island, Michigan, where motor vehicles have been banned since 1898.

The ban

The island tourism bureau says village leaders enacted the ban on July 6, 1898, after carriage operators petitioned the council to prohibit “dangerous horseless carriages” that were frightening their horses. The regional history site Northern Michigan History gives the same date and the same reason, and says residents who worked in the carriage trade feared that smoking, sputtering automobiles would spook horses.

The history site adds two later steps. In 1900, it says, a summer cottager brought a steam-powered Locomobile to the island, which scared several horses, caused injuries and wrecked carriages in the state park. In 1901, it says, the Mackinac Island State Park Commission banned automobiles in the park. We name no cottager.

What is still allowed

The island bureau lists the exceptions: emergency vehicles, which it says are on the island at all times, and utility company trucks. It says golf carts are allowed at the golf courses, year-round residents use snowmobiles in winter, and deliveries come by horse-drawn dray. It says there are no mail or parcel trucks. The history site adds that a few vehicles were allowed when a film was shot on the island in 1979, and that on July 6, 1998, a 1901 steam-powered car was driven from City Hall to a park to mark the ban’s 100th anniversary, the first car driven on the island since 1979. The two sources agree on 1979 and describe the event differently, and we do not try to merge them.

The road

Both sources describe M-185, the shoreline road. The island bureau says it is 8.2 miles long and the only state highway in the United States where motor vehicles are not allowed. The history site says it was built between 1900 and 1910, paved in 1960 and is 12 feet wide. We have no second source for the paving date or the width.

Horses

The island bureau says horses first arrived around 1780, when the British used them to haul parts of Fort Michilimackinac over the ice, and that the first carriage license was issued in 1869. It calls the island’s carriage operator the world’s oldest and largest horse and buggy livery. That last claim is the bureau’s own, and we have not found it in an independent source.

Fort and park

Wikipedia says the British built Fort Mackinac in 1780 on the island’s bluffs and that the United States closed it as a fort in 1895. It says federal land on the island became Mackinac National Park in 1875, three years after Yellowstone, and was transferred to Michigan in 1895 to become a state park. It says the whole island was designated a National Historic Landmark in October 1960.

The island in numbers

Wikipedia gives two areas for the island: 4.35 square miles of land in the infobox, and a total of 3.8 square miles in another section. It gives a 2020 population of 583 year-round residents. We cannot say which area figure is the better one, and the two may count different things.

Winter

Wikipedia says people can reach the island in winter by snowmobile over an ice bridge. The island bureau says most visitors arrive by ferry from Mackinaw City or St. Ignace, that private boats can use the marina and that the island has an airport.

What kind of sources these are

The island bureau is a tourism site, and its claims are promotional. The history site is a regional history page written for general readers. Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited reference work. None is an official record of the ordinance, and we have not seen the ordinance.

What it means for a visit

Our reading is that the quiet is a result of one decision made 125 years ago and kept ever since, and the sources show how it was kept: through exceptions, each of them narrow. Check ferry times, what is open and the season before you plan, since the sources do not say.

Where sources differ, we show each: the area of the island and the account of the 1979 and 1998 vehicles. We list them in the check file.

Roam first. Shop later.

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