Thanks to a onetime influx of infrastructure money, Mackinac State Historic Parks is in the middle of a construction boom. Excavation for foundations and utilities, such as water, sewer, electricity and communications, can lead to the disturbance of archaeological resources. For this reason, archaeological potential is considered during project planning, and testing and monitoring are carried out when appropriate.
One of the most exciting projects for the archaeology program was the construction of an addition on the back of the Petersen Center in Mackinaw City, because it includes additional artifact storage space, among many other features. It is not known how far south the fort’s stables and gardens extended in colonial times, but it is possible they reached this far south. In the early twentieth century, this block was the original site of Pierce’s Dairy Farm, which moved out to West Central Avenue in 1929. After that, this parcel was developed as a cabin court and later the Mich-La Motel, with an owner’s house, now the core of the MSHP office, motel units, cabins and a pool. Two of the cabins, torn down in 2010, stood where the new addition was built. The construction and demolition of the cabins had disturbed most of the area. The most interesting cultural remains found were a large cache of metal objects, including part of a mop bucket, a push lawnmower head, several electric burners, a pickaxe head, a watering can, an axe head, and other miscellaneous scrap and wire. This was uncovered when the asphalt driveway was removed and appears to represent the cleanout of a garage or shed.
The other major construction on the mainland is the renovation of the Colonial Michilimackinac Visitors’ Center. Excavation included footings for new patios and utility upgrades. This area was part of the “suburbs” for eighteenth-century Michilimackinac and a popular campground from the 1920s until the 1970s. All cultural deposits appear to have been removed and replaced by fill during the construction of the Mackinac Bridge and the Visitors’ Center.
Two new buildings are being constructed in the Mackinac Island Service Yard. The new field office is just north of the oldest barn in the yard, which may date back to the military garrison era. The only cultural material encountered during excavation for the footing was a phone/data line. The utility trenches yielded more artifacts, including three unusual objects from the sewer trench, which were eventually identified as lightning suppressors. These act as surge protectors for an entire structure. These examples may be left from a wagon shed which was in this area from the early twentieth century until it was moved to the north end of the service yard in 1968, where it was converted into a lumber shed. The trench for the new waterline intersected an earlier waterline trench, which had been backfilled with a variety of metal implements, including a grader blade. These may be refuse from the wagon shed.
The other new structure in the service yard is a new waste handling building on the north end of the yard. This is on the edge of the woods where military dumps have been located, but this area only contained twentieth-century rubbish scattered across the surface. Remnants of stumps were located in the trench for the waterline, indicating the edge of the woods before the existing garbage warehouse was built.
In order to connect the two new buildings to the existing sewer along Huron Road, two manholes were installed. The one adjacent to the service road did not impact anything cultural. Excavation for the other manhole, in the old drill ground, near the concrete barn, uncovered a thin scatter of refuse from throughout the nineteenth century, including ceramic sherds, glass bottle fragments, clay pipe stems, nails, barrel bands, butchered animal bones and oyster shells. These may have been deposited in an effort to level out the rolling terrain.
The Scout Barracks sits on the other end of the old drill ground and historic base ball field. Built in 1934-35, the barracks post-dates the fort-era structures. Renovations include small additions on the north and east sides for updated bathrooms. Monitoring the excavation for the new footings and upgraded utilities revealed only older, and in some cases abandoned, utility lines. Apparently the area was wooded before construction and the scouts have kept it tidy ever since.
The Soldiers’ Barracks inside Fort Mackinac is being renovated for new exhibits and upgraded restrooms. This required excavation for a footing for a new deck outside the restrooms. Based on historical records and excavations carried out by the University of South Florida in 1995-96, the north end of this area is known to have been the site of three successive blacksmith shops from c.1796 to 1876. Careful excavation in this area revealed the remains of the stone foundation of the second shop (below), as well as many tool fragments and other blacksmith-related artifacts. The new restroom foundation was re-designed to preserve the remnant of the blacksmith foundation in place.
One of the major construction projects at Fort Mackinac during the winter of 2025-26 will be moving the public entrance of the fort from the Avenue of Flags to the North Sallyport. This is one of the historic entrances to the fort. In the second half of the nineteenth century, there were many support buildings located north and east of the fort walls and a network of paths connected them to the sallyport. As part of the design process to make the new entrance accessible to all, geological testing was carried out in the fall of 2024, requiring the machine-excavation of three testpits. These were monitored for cultural material. The first test, near the sallyport gate and ramp, yielded distinct layers containing kitchen refuse (butchered bone and ash) (left). The second test, near the northeast corner of the fort, contained a variety of fort-era ceramics, including the spout from a teapot, bottle glass, tumbler glass, clay smoking pipe fragments, nails, a brick, and animal bone (below right). The third test, close to Huron Road, hit natural limestone at a much shallower depth and contained fewer artifacts than the other two tests. More controlled testing will be carried out before construction begins in October.
None of this excavation uncovered stunning archaeological information, and that is the point, MSHP tries to avoid damaging our archaeological resources during construction projects. Nevertheless, the artifacts uncovered do shed some light on activities of daily life, especially garbage disposal, that are rarely recorded in documents.
