Mackinac Island is packed with tourists on Memorial Weekend during peak tourist season, but the island’s Fort Mackinac also hosts an intimate observance honoring the men who gave their lives during the fort’s active years.
On the island, so much Michigan history is concentrated into one place that even the chaos of hundreds of tourists every day cannot overshadow it.
When you picnic in the park, you sit under the gaze of Father Marquette. From Windermere Park, you can see the long-retired Round Island Lighthouse.
Hiking or biking in any direction means encountering any of the 38-plus historical markers on the eight-mile island.
My personal favorite, though, is how a gentle walk through the woods takes you to a peaceful, light-dappled cemetery, where interred Catholics, Protestants and Native Americans lay next to one another spanning centuries.
But it’s at the Fort Mackinac Post Cemetery where the Fort Mackinac historical interpreters and historically conscious citizens gather to remember the island’s military history on Memorial Weekend.
It feels personal here, where island residents frequently remember and bring up names important to their local history from the early 19th and 20th century, as if it is local lore from 20 years ago.
It is unique that Fort Mackinac is so famous, but not for the scale of bloodshed seen on the island. It is renowned for a long tradition of military propriety, the security the fort offered to the Mackinac Straits, and its role in America’s tumultuous early decades.
The last time soldiers at Mackinac Island gave their lives for the United States occurred during the War of 1812, when the British and their allies surprised the American troops and captured Fort Mackinac.
Two years later, the Americans fought valiantly to retake the Fort, but to no avail. Twenty brave men lost their lives in the battle. Fort Mackinac was returned to the U.S. at the conclusion of the War of 1812 and would not be decommissioned until 1895.
According to Dominick Miller, chief of marketing for Mackinac State Historic Parks, Captain Edwin Sellers initiated the first Decoration Day programs at Fort Mackinac in 1883 when he suspended regular duty and paraded his soldiers to the Post Cemetery, where they decorated the graves.
The fact that this tradition has continued for nearly 150 years, in largely the same manner, speaks to the intimate nature in which history is experienced on the island.
Visitors, residents, and Fort Mackinac staff make the time to honor the memories of these soldiers, many of whom have little or no other information to their names—if even that.
There are many unidentified soldiers in Post Cemetery, due to relocation and the elements breaking down their original wooden headstones.
Despite what’s unknown, Fort Mackinac does a fantastic job of bringing a clear historical vision of the 1880s to life, particularly for children.
The display signs are easy to read, succinct, and chock-full of insightful and fun historical photographs, documents, and artifacts.
Everything from century-old buttons found to the 1840s cannons that are still fired, to the interpreters themselves, is engaging and personal.
Some of the interpreters even grow historically accurate mustaches, complete with the curled ends that were so popular for gentlemen of the 1880s.
As someone who has traveled to many forts and battlefields that were historical contemporaries of Mackinac, I think that Fort Mackinac most effectively communicates how casual and real the people within the fort and without were.
When I read about Rose Van Allen Webster (heiress and owner of The Island House in the late 1800s), I could picture her love story with Lieutenant John McAdam Webster as easily as if I had watched it in a movie.
There is little separation between military history and the history of everyday life on the island, largely due to the nature of the island community in the 1880s.
It adds color to the sepia-tone and black-and-white faces found in photos all over Fort Mackinac.
The reverent and small observance for Memorial Day is one of the traditions that keeps Mackinac honest, not hokey or touristy, in its anachronistic way of life.
The people on Mackinac Island remember that the people of the 1880s were just as alive, and that their service and sacrifice meant just as much then as it does today.
The sentiment is echoed truthfully and simply by Miller: “These men served, and they served here at Fort Mackinac. To me, it’s as simple as that. They deserve to be remembered.”
Anna Bassols is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.
