Fort Mackinac

Fort Mackinac stands on Mackinac Island, Michigan, on limestone bluffs about 150 feet above the Straits of Mackinac, the channel between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The British built it during the American Revolutionary War to control the straits and, with them, the fur trade of the Great Lakes. Before 1763 the French had held the area from Fort Michilimackinac on the mainland shore; the British who took it over found the wooden fort hard to defend, and in 1780 and 1781 their lieutenant governor, Patrick Sinclair, put up a new limestone one on the island.

Despite the terms of the 1783 peace treaty, the British did not hand the fort to the United States until the Jay Treaty was ratified in 1796. Closed in 1895, the old outpost was turned into a museum on the grounds of Mackinac Island State Park.

In July 1812, soon after the United States declared war on Britain, a force of British soldiers, Canadians and several hundred Native Americans came by canoe and landed on the north end of the island. The small American garrison, taken by surprise and badly outnumbered, surrendered without a fight, and the British paroled the men. The British then built Fort George, a stockade and blockhouse on the island's highest point. In July 1814, 700 American soldiers landed to retake the island. Fort George stood too high for the ships' guns, and the troops who advanced through the woods were hit by British fire in a clearing; 13 Americans were killed and 51 wounded, and they withdrew. The Americans reoccupied the fort in July 1815, after the Treaty of Ghent, and renamed Fort George as Fort Holmes.

In later decades the fort served as a troop reserve and fur-trade post. In 1822 its surgeon, Dr. William Beaumont, treated a fur trader who was badly hurt in an accidental shooting. The man survived, and Beaumont's later observations of his digestion made him known as the Father of Gastric Physiology. From 1875 to 1895 the fort sat inside Mackinac National Park, the second national park in the country after Yellowstone.