Saint Ignace: Gateway to the Straits

The town you are driving through is one of the oldest continuously occupied European settlements in the Great Lakes, a place that began as a Jesuit mission and grew into the northern anchor of the route connecting Michigan's two great peninsulas.

In sixteen seventy-one, the French Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette established a mission here at the Straits of Mackinac, naming it for Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. Marquette had already built missions among the Anishinaabe peoples to the north, but the straits, where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron pinch together, were the strategic center of the western fur trade. Two years after founding his mission, Marquette joined the explorer Louis Jolliet for the journey that traced the Mississippi River for the first time, from Wisconsin all the way to the mouth of the Arkansas. The expedition departed from these shores.

Marquette died in sixteen seventy-five returning from a second journey south. In eighteen seventy-seven, workers excavating a site here discovered what were identified as his remains, and they were reinterred beneath the city at the site of his original mission chapel. That burial ground is now Marquette Mission Park, where a small museum stands beside the Straits.

For the next two centuries, Saint Ignace served as a critical fur trade hub. The French built Fort de Buade here in sixteen eighty-one to protect their trading interests. British traders replaced the French after the conquest of Canada in seventeen sixty, and American settlement followed after the War of eighteen twelve.

For most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Saint Ignace was the end of the road for Lower Peninsula travelers heading north. Ferry service across the Straits began in eighteen eighty-one, first for rail cars and eventually for automobiles. Travelers would queue for hours waiting for a crossing. All of that changed in nineteen fifty-seven, when the Mackinac Bridge opened just to the south, and Saint Ignace became the northern touchdown of one of the world's great suspension spans rather than a bottleneck at the edge of the known world.