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| The Grand’s famous 800’ porch, promoted by W. Stewart Woodfill as the world’s longest porch, overlooks master Gardener Jennie Shanku giving a garden tour. She discusses landscaping styles and cultivating on a massive scale spring bulbs, roses, perennials, zinnias and dahlias of formal carpet bedding, wildflowers on the embankment, and the porch’s famous geraniums. Seven gardeners plant over 300 flats of bedding plants. On a rock island, everything is composted: clippings, weeds, branches, sticks, wood chips, coffee grounds, and limed horse manure all stay on the property. |
Architectural historian Kathryn Eckert, seldom inclined to hyperbole, writes in Buildings of Michigan, "The Grand Hotel exceeds all superlatives ever written to describe its stately majesty and festive quality. . . . [Its] classical columned façade is one of the most enduring images of Mackinac Island." She goes on to describe how, in 1882, a wealthy lumberman from Kalamazoo, Senator Francis B. Stockbridge, "purchased the site of the hotel and formulated a scheme to finance its construction." He talked up the project to the two railroads and steamship line that served the island. The transportation consortium built and ran the hotel. (Northern Michigan railroads and ship lines became developers of most all Lake Michigan's resort colonies from Harbor Springs south to Grand Haven. They sought to develop tourism to replace business lost as the pine forests were giving out and lumbering faced a sudden decline.)
