What Mackinac Island is known for

Mackinac Island is a Lake Huron Victorian resort of fewer than 600 year-round residents that has run on horses, bicycles and fudge since it outlawed the automobile in 1898. The ban still holds, and that single refusal became the island’s defining draw. Mackinac now draws on the order of 1.1 million visitors a year.

A choice every resort town faced

When the automobile arrived at the turn of the 20th century, every resort town in America had to choose: pave the way for the car or not. Mackinac Island had spent decades building an identity around carriage promenades and grand verandas, and the first cars frightened the horses on its narrow lanes.

The island could modernize like everywhere else and slowly become indistinguishable from any other town, or it could make a stand that might look backward and absurd to the rest of the motorizing country.

Banning the car

In 1898 the village banned motorized vehicles, and within a few years extended the ban to the entire island. It doubled down on the frozen-in-time experience instead of treating it as a quirk to be outgrown, keeping travel to horse-drawn carriage, bicycle or foot.

What the ban earns

More than a century later the ban still holds. Mackinac now draws on the order of 1.1 million visitors a year to a population of fewer than 600, with shops turning out more than 10,000 pounds of fudge on a busy day.

Why it worked

The commitment was extreme and irreversible. A safety ordinance from the horse-and-buggy era became a promise no competitor could copy, since copying it would take another 125 years of holding the line.

The island was the country’s second national park in 1875, still guarded by Fort Mackinac, and is now a National Historic Landmark crowned by the Grand Hotel and its 660-foot porch, billed as the longest in the world. Mackinac made that absence not a limitation to outgrow but the sharpest of its many reasons to cross the water.