Historic Sites in Northern Michigan
3 historic sites to discover with Bad Historian in Northern Michigan.
British Landing
You've made it to British Landing — the far side of the island, right about the halfway mark of the loop, and a good place to catch your breath. There's a nature center here, and restrooms, and usually something cold to drink.
Fort Mackinac
You climbed the hill, and it was worth it. You're at Fort Mackinac — long white limestone walls, black cannon pointing out over the harbor, the whole town and the blue straits laid out underneath you. It is a genuinely commanding position.
Middle Village — St. Ignatius Church and the Cemetery
This stop is the quiet one. Pull off at Middle Village, and I want you to slow everything down, because you've arrived at the heart of this whole coast. The Odawa have a name for this shoreline — Waganakising.
Northern Michigan Audio Experiences
Visit these historic sites and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Earl Young's Mushroom Houses
A short, unlicensed insurance salesman spent fifty years building around thirty storybook stone houses in Charlevoix — burying nine-ton boulders in the ground for decades, tearing roofs off for being too neat, and naming his cottages like pets. Walk Earl Young's "hobbit houses" from the drawbridge to the lighthouse, and try to spot the one lie at every stop.
Mackinac Island — The Island That Banned Cars
Eight miles around the Great Turtle — an island where cars have been illegal since eighteen ninety-eight and roughly five hundred horses do all the work. A fort that surrendered without firing a shot, a doctor who spent eight years studying a hole in a living man's stomach, a hotel built in ninety-three days by candlelight, and an 'ancient legend' that was written in nineteen seventy. Most of what the Bad Historian tells you is true. A little of it he made up — you find out which at the end.
The Complete Guide to Traverse City
A town that turned an insane asylum into a wine bar, baked a cherry pie that needed a construction crane, and let a river out of a hundred-and-twenty-six-year jail. Cherries, lumber, and the asylum with a wine bar — a comedic walking tour of Traverse City where most of it is true and some of it definitely is not.
The Tunnel of Trees — Twenty Miles of Crooked Road
Twenty miles of the most famous two-lane road in America — M-one-nineteen, the Tunnel of Trees, the only Michigan state highway with no center line. A car-free town of millionaires who still ride a horse-drawn bus, a driftwood castle roofed in cast-iron stove legs, a village named after a post-office typo, and the Odawa homeland of the crooked tree, still here today. Most of what the Bad Historian tells you is true. A little of it he made up — you find out which at the end.
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