Why the Grand Hotel Became a National Historic Landmark on June 29, 1989

The Grand Hotel sits on a bluff above the Straits of Mackinac, on an island a few miles east of the Mackinac Bridge and roughly three hundred miles north of Detroit. The hotel opened in 1887, after resort builder Charles Caskey's crew of three hundred men raised it in just over three months. On June 29, 1989, the National Park Service entered it on the roster of National Historic Landmarks, the highest federal designation a building in the United States can hold. The hotel had been a National Register of Historic Places property since 1972; the 1989 designation moved it from "historically significant" to "nationally important."

The resort builder who raised it

The National Historic Landmark nomination is plain about authorship: the hotel was designed and built by a resort builder, Charles Caskey (1851–1933), and his brother-in-law, Alphonse Howe. Caskey had settled in Harbor Springs, had built a number of the cottages in Hubbard's Annex on the island, and had a reputation for building solidly and well. Pressed on the schedule, his answer, as the nomination records it, was direct: he had to finish the job by a specified time for specified dollars.

He did. Caskey opened his own timber mill in St. Ignace and hauled the wood across the ice in the winter of 1886–87. Thirty teams and wagons moved materials up from the boat landing, and dozens of carpenters worked through the spring and summer of 1887. A job the nomination says would have taken the average builder two summers was finished in just over three months, using three hundred workers and a million and a half feet of lumber.

The commission came from a syndicate. In 1886 the Michigan Central Railroad, the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad, and the Detroit and Cleveland Navigation Company joined hands, as the nomination puts it, to form the Mackinac Island Hotel Company. The three companies shared a problem: they could move people to the Straits in volume but had nowhere to put them once they arrived. A resort hotel on the bluff above the harbor solved the problem and gave each carrier a destination to advertise.

The longest porch in the world

The porch is the building. The hotel is white wood, four stories, with a long colonnade of pillars across the south elevation and a central pediment and cupola above the entrance. The hotel advertises it as the longest porch in the world, and visitors have been assembling on it since the 1880s. Wicker chairs line the deck in a single row. The view is south across the Straits to St. Ignace and the Mackinac Bridge.

The National Historic Landmark nomination, available through the National Park Service archive, makes the case on both the architecture and the hotel's social history — presidents from Grover Cleveland, who arrived shortly after the 1887 opening, to Jimmy Carter have visited.

The Detroit connection in 2026

The Mackinac drive is five hours from downtown Detroit. For wedding and portrait coverage on Mackinac Island, see our portrait photography page, or book a session in advance — the island is busy May through October.