What’s Left of Garden Island’s Abandoned Catholic Church

Garden Island — We don’t really have ruins in the United States. Ruins tend to imply something ancient and long gone and nearly forgotten. There are Greek ruins, Roman ruins, Hebrew ruins, and Persian ruins, but there are no American ruins, yet.

Certainly, the American Indians were here many generations before our early settlement in the 16th century, but due to the particular form of early pre-contact life in North America, there aren’t grand physical ruins left over from that early time for us to study today. Central America, yes. North America, less so. There are some things out West and the burial mounds a bit to the South, but in the great North there are no decaying stone ruins slowly dying like a fading shadow in the evening light.

Ruins can only exist if the structure decays but is not knocked down or replaced. With us, always expanding west, when something collapses or is no longer needed, we bulldoze it and build something more useful in its place. There can be no ruins if nothing is left alone.

Certainly other cultures did the same, and the ruins we see from earlier epochs are simply the ones that happened to escape civilization’s march forward.

There are some rare pockets where contraction and shrinkage have occurred. Ghost towns are a good example. They are eerie and lonesome, though often they don’t have a terribly ruin-like essence about them. They tend to feel more like early versions of our civilization rather than something else separate. But on Garden Island in Lake Michigan there is something that feels close to a ruin even though it might not be ancient.

Deep in the woods, through poison ivy, over old overgrown paths, in a place I could probably find my way back to by memory and sense of place but am not going to detail because it’s best to keep some things hidden, is the ruin of a church. There’s a dark brown wooden sign nailed to a tree with some words painted for the sparing visitor who finds their way there.

Immaculate Conception of Mary Catholic Church

Ojibwa, Ottawa

There are no pews, no organs, no prayer books or bibles. There are no walls, no windows, no doors, or anything left other than a stone foundation marking the only straight lines of civilization in any direction. Deep in the woods of currently uninhabited and abandoned Garden Island is a remnant of a world lost to the past.

Indeed, a ruin.

Though today Beaver Island is the only island in the archipelago with any meaningful population, it wasn’t always this way. Garden Island was once the center of life for the Anishinaabe people in the area. In fact, one of the largest known American Indian cemeteries exists on the island not terribly far from the ruins of the church. I’ve seen the cemetery myself and it too feels like something lost to time, though out of respect for the place and those laid to rest, I have no photos to share.

It’s difficult to find much reliable information about the ruins of the Catholic Church on Garden Island, but according to the oral history I’ve heard and sparse collections I’ve encountered, the church was in tact and in use in the middle of 19th century. Bishop Baraga is said to have visited the island in 1859 and found, alongside the church, a native Catholic community, including a school and a post office.

Though the church was a Catholic one, and a bridge from the old era to the new, it was a kind of church emblematic of a time and place that no longer exists. Whether you want to call it native, American Indian, Ojibwa, Ottawa, or Anishinaabek, that’s what it was. These were, in many cases, first-generation Christians. At the time there was a chief residing on the island by the name of Chief Peaine. Garden Island—known by the native inhabitants at the time as Tagoning—was still populated. The world was still big and wild in a way ours just isn’t.

The last residents of Garden Island left in the 1940s. It’s been nearly one hundred years since any kind of regular human habitation has occurred on the island that used to be the center of life for the Anishinaabek people who lived out in in the middle of northern Lake Michigan. The world of the church in the woods is gone.

The abandonment of Garden Island makes the foundation of the old church a ruin. That there isn’t any dock on Garden Island, that there aren’t gravel roads leading to the site, that there aren’t official signs, that there’s poison ivy everywhere, and violent bugs in the summer.

The church has been empty for so long that trees have grown up, in, and around the site so that there is no path leading to wherever the door used to be. The woods have taken back what was theirs to begin with. There’s a point when overgrowth becomes so heavy and all that’s left is mossy foundation. “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again,” as the wise king wrote.

Time moves on, the world changes, all that’s soft and organic rots away and disappears, ways change, people die and people leave, and all that remains as a memory of the world that was is the stone that won’t go.

Heavy ruins in the woods.