Mackinac Island
— — the island the cars never reached.
Not only on a wall.
“An island in the straits where Lake Huron meets Lake Michigan. No cars since 1898, only horses, bicycles, and feet on the limestone bluffs. The Grand Hotel keeps its long white porch above the harbour, and the fudge shops on Main Street have been working the same copper kettles for over a century.
Mackinac Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mackinac Island sits in the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet between Michigan's Upper and Lower Peninsulas. The island covers about 3.8 square miles, with the limestone arch of Arch Rock above the eastern shore and Fort Mackinac on the bluff above the harbour. The year-round population is roughly 600, and the whole island sits inside Mackinac Island State Park, which protects more than 80 percent of the land and includes most of the interior trails and bluffs.
Access is by passenger ferry from Mackinaw City or St. Ignace, with crossings running roughly mid-May through October. Motor vehicles have been banned since 1898, so the island moves at the pace of horses, bicycles, and walking. Most visitors land at the main dock and head up Main Street past the fudge shops and the Pink Pony. Carriage tours circle past the Grand Hotel, whose 660-foot porch has been a fixture above the harbour since 1887.
After the last ferry leaves in the evening, the island settles into a quiet most American towns no longer have. No engines, no headlights on the bluffs, only hooves on the pavement and the lake against the breakwater. The Mackinac Island State Park trails empty out, and from the cliff above British Landing the only sound is the wind through the cedar and the foghorn at Round Island Light, half a mile out in the straits.