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Detroit, MI → Lansing, MI → Mackinaw City, MI 336.0 mi (540.7 km) |
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Comin’ in for a Lansing, everyone!
My yo-yo of a quest continues, from the north to the south and back to the north! Navigating Michigan has been a puzzler for me for a while, because the sights I’ve wanted to see in the Great Lakes State have been either at the very bottom or the very top. Most of those places have been in the Upper Peninsula of this two-part state, so what was I going to do? Well, I picked a late flight on Spirit Airlines into Detroit, and I figured I’d just spend a little extra time on the road!
Lucky for me, though navigating Detroit’s airport and hotel shuttle was super complex and time-consuming, my overnight hotel was very close, and it turned out that the car rental company was a short stroll down the street! That meant I was able to kick off my Friday morning with an easy ride into Lansing, Michigan’s capital since March 16, 1847. When it was so designated, it was a remote village, off in “a howling wilderness,” which for me meant it was the perfect place to kick off a northbound adventure!
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Lansing, of course, was home to my 49th capitol building. 49th! Can you believe it? By now, you should already be able to guess that this was not Michigan’s first capitol building. The first two were destroyed by—you guessed it—fire! Like many other capitols, this one’s design came from a nationwide contest in 1872, the winning architect being Elijah E. Myers! This was a savers’ capitol, built from the most affordable materials from whichever state or country made them available! Inspired by the national capitol building, it went up in the Renaissance Revival or Neoclassical style with a super unique, cast iron dome and was dedicated on January 1, 1879 after six years of construction!
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I strolled around the capitol a bit then moved down the street to see a much more recent landmark, the Rotary Steam Clock! This was a gift to the city by Rotary International in 1997, a clock powered by a steam engine, blending history and technology! See, the engine was repurposed from another clock built in 1927 by the Seth Thomas Clock Company, and it was connected to an electrical grid and a computer library of thousands of songs, which it plays for five minutes after noon and five minutes after five! I wasn’t there in time to hear it play, but what a marvel nonetheless!
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South Lansing was also the childhood home of Malcolm Little, who’d rise to prominence as Malcolm X. This site was only recognized with a landmark sign in 2022! It was here that the Little family built their home but were chased out, because while Michigan law allowed them to own land, as a Black family, they were not allowed to live in areas that had been set aside for white folks! Arsonists burnt down their home within a year, and Reverend Little, Malcolm’s dad, died of mysterious circumstances! State welfare services then took Malcolm and his siblings away from their mom! It was very easy to see how his experiences here caused him to diverge from the integration and nonviolence goals of the mainstream Civil Rights movement!
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While I hadn’t taken the time to tour Detroit’s famous automobile factories, Lansing was actually where Michigan’s first operating automobile company got started! Here, in 1887, Ransom Eli Olds drove an experimental steam vehicle for one block and spent ten years developing it into a gas-powered, 4-person vehicle that could hit a top speed of 18 miles per hour! On August 21, 1897, the Olds Motor Vehicle Company opened here in Lansing, and today, the site of that first company is commemorated by the R.E. Olds Museum!
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Mr. Olds had come here from Ohio in 1880 to work in his dad’s machine shop, and that’s what gave him the background in mechanics that enabled him to innovate! His inventions were (pardon the pun) driven by his desire to eliminate stinky, messy horses as the main means of transportation! While working here in Lansing, he married his wife, Metta, and here they made their permanent home. The Olds brand rose up here alongside Durant and Star, the brand built by General Motors founder, Billy Durant, making Lansing a major pilgrimage site for anyone interested in the rise of the automobile!
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Mr. Olds’ flagship vehicle was the Model R, the Curved Dash Olds. Introduced in 1901, this two-seater, gas-powered carriage was lightweight, easy to operate, and relatively affordable with a top speed of 20 miles per hour. Two years later, Mr. Olds recruited Roy D. Chapin to take one of these Curved Dashes on a cross-country roadtrip in order to promote it, and the success was astronomical! By 1904, 10,300 Curved Dashes had been built for sale, making this the world’s first mass-produced vehicle and the most popular car in the world!
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The R.E. Olds Museum is not only home to several Olds models, but also two one-of-a-kind Olds inventions: the last survivor of his first four 1897 prototypes and the only known remnant of his experiments in electric vehicles, circa 1899! The latter had sat in a barn here in Lansing all the way until 1959 before it was found and restored by private car collectors. The museum then purchased it in 2018; the 1897 prototype is on loan from the Smithsonian, which was gifted this vehicle by the Olds Motor Works in 1915!
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Innovations on display here were both big and small! This Baby REO, built in 1905, was the world’s first fully functional miniature car, featuring a 2-cylinder engine! Building it was twice the cost of a full-sized REO, but it spent 75 years on the promotion and marketing circuit for the Olds brand! It even got leased to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus as an attraction!
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But the Olds brand sure didn’t stop innovating in the early 1900s! I was amazed at the variety of vehicles on display here! The first Olds trucks started rolling out in 1910 with the founding of the REO Motor Truck Company, and the company kept innovating through mergers and acquisitions afer Mr. Olds resigned from the company on December 28, 1935. This truck, the 1974 Diamond REO Raider, was one of the last models produced here in Lansing before the company went bankrupt in 1975! Today, Volvo owns the REO brand name!
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All told, the R.E. Olds Museum housed 80 vehicles spanning those first prototypes to one of its final models, the 2004 Olds Alero Final 500! The company peaked in the 1980s, but even with innovative technology like climate control and the first satellite navigation system in the US, the brand lost out to foreign competitors like Acura and Lexus! The pioneering work of R.E. Olds, which led to the firsts speedometers, standard windshields, fully automatic transmission, and more, may not still be at the forefront of technology, but its story is still on fine display in its hometown of Lansing!
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But Lansing was not my final destination on this particular day. In fact, I needed to get from mid-Mitten to the top before sunset. After all, I had another national park site to check off! To get to Father Marquette National Memorial, I needed to cross a long bridge separating Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, park at a nearby motel, and sneak past the “Closed for Season” signs because this memorial technically wasn’t scheduled to open for another couple of weeks!
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This is an unusual national memorial, located entirely inside Straits State Park, administered by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources but affiliated with the National Park Service. It’s only got one landing page on the NPS website, like the David Berger National Memorial, and unlike most other national memorials, it’s not listed on the National Register of Historic Places! It also hasn’t had a visitor center onsite since the Marquette Memorial Museum burned down in 2000! The local vibes were very strong, though, as I strolled into the empty parking lot, where a huge boulder marked the site of a time capsule buried on July 4, 1978 by the LaSalle High School Industrial Education Club! I might not be around when it’s unearthed in 2078, but I sure am curious what kinds of artifacts will be pulled out of it when the time comes!
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The memorial itself was a tiny stone and wood pavilion, a short walk from the parking lot. It survived the fire that took out the museum and has been standing here since 1975, but I had a doozy of a time trying to track down any information about who designed it or what it was meant to resemble!
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But the focus here was Father Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit missionary who arrived here via Quebec in the 1660s. At first, he worked to support the first French mission at Sault Ste. Marie, then branched off to found his own at St. Ignace in 1671. He worked there for just over a year before the French empire recruited him and his linguistic prowess to join Louis Jolliet on an epic mapping journey of France’s newly acquired territory.
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A relief map on the floor of the pavilion retraced this 3,000-mile journey, on which they not only mapped out Lakes Huron and Michigan but also the Mississippi River Valley as far south as Louisiana! They probably would have gone farther if they hadn’t been treading dangerously close to Spanish territory! While the French never expanded to fill their map, their observations did guide future settlers, including the founders of another national memorial, Arkansas Post! Sadly, Father Marquette did not make it back to St. Ignace on this voyage. He’d contracted dysentery on the journey and died on May 18, 1675 at the age of 37! He was buried near Ludington, Michigan, but two years later, members of the Ottawa and Huron dug up his bones and moved them to St. Ignace for reburial at the mission!
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To find it, I left the memorial and headed east into the lakeside own of St. Ignace! Being so far north, I had plenty of daylight left at 8:00 PM, as a dockside sundial reminded me! I probably wouldn’t get a chance to see the light emanating from the Wawatam Lighthouse, which was moved here from Monroe, Michigan in 2004 and renamed for the ferry, Chief Wawatam, which serviced this dock from 1911 into the 1980s!
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The Chief Wawatam was just one of the state ferries that cruised the waters between St. Ignace and Mackinaw City between 1923 and 1957. In the three decades before the Mackinac Bridge connected the Mitten to the Upper Peninsula, these plucky ferries transported 12 million vehicles and more than 30 million passengers, even braving the winter ice with ice-breakers like the Vacationland!
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I paused ahead of a towering landmark, St. Anthony’s Rock, a sea stack like the ones on Flowerpot Island, which was named in 1679, likely by Father Hennepin, aboard the storm-tossed Griffon as it safely reached the shores of St. Ignace within sight of this towering Mackinac breccia formation!
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Just past St. Anthony’s rock, I reached a reconstruction of the St. Ignace Mission! When the Jesuits left St. Ignace for Quebec in 1705, they burned the whole thing to the ground, including Father Marquette’s grave marker! For over a hundred years, no one thought to seek out the original mission site, even building a new mission in 1837 about a mile to the south! The link to the original site came from Father Edward Jacker, who dug here in 1877 and found human bones that he connected to Father Marquette, two hundred years after they’d been moved here! In 1954, the second mission building was moved here, and it has remained here ever since!
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Today, though, this isn’t a working mission. In fact, today, it serves quite the opposite function, as a Museum of Ojibwa Culture! Not only does it have exhibits on pre-French Ojibwa, Huron, and Odawa cultures, but it also has an authentically rebuilt Huron longhouse, which hosts ceremonies and events to keep those cultures alive! In fact, with the help of a Mellon Foundation grant, this cultural information is spreading to the memorial too, in the form of a learning center, interpretive materials, and a developed pow-wow ground! Sadly, by the time I arrived here, pushing 9:00 PM, everything was closed, but it felt like the end of a mini pilgrimage to get here!
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From the mission, I strolled along the shoreline in the sunset and marveled at the beautifully clear water of Lake Huron, wondering if I could look hard enough to spot Tobermory in the distance! I dined at the Mackinac Grille & Patio Bar on Poorman’s Whitefish, brushed with herbed butter and baked in foil with heaps of potatoes, broccoli, mushrooms, tomatoes, and onions! It was a scrumptious meal that put me over the moon, then over the bridge, where I realized that I’d left my camera under the table at the restaurant, which had just closed for the night! Frantically, I called the restaurant, and someone picked up! They had my camera bag! Boy, did I ever race back over that bridge, confusing the heck out of the toll takers, and boy was I happy to have my camera back in my paws! I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to wait until 11:00 AM the next day to pick it up!
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After all, tomorrow is going to be a long day on the road! I’m driving way up to the Keweenaw Peninsula (pronounced “Kyoo-wee-naw”) to visit my next national park site, at one time the copper producing capital of the world!
Can’t stop me, copper!
More 2024 Adventures |
Total Ground Covered: 336.0 mi (540.7 km) |
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