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, eighty miles north of the Mackinac Bridge and four hundred miles from the Mason & Rice drafting room in downtown Detroit where the building was drawn in the winter of 1886. The hotel opened on July 10, 1887, after a construction crew finished the frame in ninety-three days. 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 State Historic Building since 1957 and a National Register of Historic Places property since 1972; the 1989 designation moved it from "historically significant" to "nationally important."

The Detroit firm that drew it

Mason & Rice was a Detroit partnership. George D. Mason and Zachariah Rice opened the office in 1878 and worked from rooms downtown, drafting houses, churches, and commercial blocks for clients across the city and across the Detroit River into Windsor. The firm's surviving Detroit work reads like a tour of the Gilded Age: the Joseph H. Berry House on East Jefferson (1882), the William Livingstone House in Brush Park (1893), the Hiram Walker and Sons Offices across the river in Walkerville (1892), and the building that now houses the Ecumenical Theological Seminary on East Grand Boulevard (1889). A young draftsman named Albert Kahn worked at Mason & Rice in those years and learned the trade at Mason's elbow before going out on his own. Detroit gave Mackinac Island its hotel.

The commission came from a syndicate. In 1886 the Michigan Central Railroad, the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad, and the Detroit and Cleveland Steamship Navigation Company formed the Mackinac Island Hotel Company and bought the bluff land. 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 four-hundred-room resort on a bluff above the ferry dock solved the problem and gave each carrier a destination to advertise.

The 660-foot porch

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 colonnade runs six hundred and sixty feet from end to end, which the hotel advertises as the longest porch in the world. The claim has gone unchallenged for a century and a third. Wicker chairs line the deck in a single row. The view is south across the Straits to St. Ignace and the Mackinac Bridge.

The 1989 National Historic Landmark designation cited the hotel's role as the most intact survivor of the Gilded Age summer-resort tradition in the Great Lakes. The case file, available through the National Park Service archive, runs to several hundred pages.

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.