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SOLVING THE MCGULPIN MYSTERY by CHASE EDWARDS
M
ackinac island visitors strolling by McGulpin House would notice a squat, whitewashed structure with the simplest of lines, like a Monopoly playing piece; nothing overtly intriguing, nothing grand like the island’s iconic cottages and hotels. But for more than two centuries, the homely little cottage that sits at Market and Fort streets has held its secrets tight to its ancient timbers. Until now. Certainly, historians could date it to the 18th century given its French Canadian–style construction typical to that era—squared horizontal pine logs and a steeply pitched roof covered in cedar bark that naturally sheds rain and snow. But when exactly was it built? Date the house (now known as the McGulpin House and managed by Mackinac State Historic Parks) precisely, and you’d have an intimate window into Mackinac Island in the 1700s. And what a dramatic and colorful century that was. Way back then, the Straits of Mackinac was a wild frontier where Native Americans, the French, British and finally Americans warred over possession of the lucrative Great Lakes fur trade.
Historians postulated that the home could have been built as far back as 1740. If that were the case, it would have been built across the Straits at Fort Michilimackinac most likely by the French. And how would it have gotten to the island? The British (they took control of the Straits in 1780) could have brought it across the ice along with most of Fort Michilimackinac as a defensive move at the end of the Revolutionary War. Or was the McGulpin House built later, after America won the Revolution and the island became part of the new country? In the end, it was the tree rings in those old timbers that gave up the date. Recently, Zachary Merrill of Great Lakes Dendrochronology determined the home’s construction as late summer or early fall of 1790. Merrill likes to say, “Trees don’t lie, but oral histories do.” In order to accurately date the McGulpin House, core timber samples of the house had to be compared to another building with a known date. “There has to be enough overlap between one chronology and another for it to statistically match,” Merrill explains. Samples from the McGulpin House matched up with another dendrochronologist’s research on Beaver Island at an old Mormon print shop.
photo courtesy of Mackinac State Historic Parks
The truth behind a tiny cottage on Mackinac Island has baffled historians for decades. The answer was in the tree rings.
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7/7/23 9:38 AM
