Mission House

About this property

The Mission House, on Mackinac Island, is a historic structure owned by the state of Michigan. Built in 1825, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is operated as part of the Mackinac Island State Park. The Mission House is a wood-frame structure covered in clapboard siding and constructed in a U shape. The center section is three stories, and the flanking wings are two stories. The front facade has a single-story porch covering the entrance in the center. In 1823, missionaries William Montague Ferry and his wife Amanda founded a mission on the southeast corner of Mackinac Island at the location since known as Mission Point. In 1825, this mission house was built at the site by a building crew led by Martin Heydenburk, a fellow missionary who was a teacher and carpenter. It is the centerpiece of a major effort by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to disseminate Christianity among the Native Americans of the upper Great Lakes. It is also a standing remnant of the fur trade era of Great Lakes history. The Mission House was designed as an American Indian boarding school for students of Native American, meti, and Euro-American ancestry. The students were boarded at the school, taught manual crafts and rudimentary liberal arts, and trained to adopt the standards and living patterns characteristic of New England and the American East Coast. In 1827, 112 students were enrolled in the school. The Mission House was constructed as a two-story building. It was built in a spare, utilitarian style suitable for its purpose. There has been little exterior decoration on the building since its original construction in 1825. The dormitory structure was built with local sawn timbers from nearby Dousman's Mill, and a close study of these timbers enabled archeologists to reconstruct what kind of steel saw had been used to cut the logs and even how fast the saw blade had moved. The Mission House was the largest structure of a complex that also included a church, the Mission Church (built 1829–30), and nearby fields for training students in agriculture. The Ferry family lived in this house for 12 years, from 1825 until 1837. Here their son, Thomas W. Ferry, a future U.S. Senator, was born in 1827. The Mackinac Mission never succeeded in financially supporting itself and, in the late 1830s, its functions were undermined by the decline of the upper Great Lakes fur trade. In 1837, Michigan Territory was admitted to the Union as a state, and the Ferry family moved to what was to become Grand Haven. The Mackinac mission complex was abandoned.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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