On Thursday, August 11, 1904, an enthusiastic crowd of year-round residents, summer cottagers, and distinguished clergy gathered to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone for the Union Congregational Church on Mackinac Island. Church trustees Samuel B. Poole and Joseph Leggett placed the stone while summer pastor Rev. Aeneas W. Bond and Rev. Allan D. Grigsby, pastor of the Congregational Church in nearby Cheboygan, led the dedication service. The event was a joyous culmination of five years of planning, fund raising, and prayer. It was also the first step in constructing one of Mackinac Island’s most distinctive and beautiful buildings, a building that soon became known by its popular moniker “Little Stone Church.”

The congregation’s efforts began in early 1897, when they organized and opened a Sunday school which attracted eleven students and raised a collection of eleven cents. The success of the Sunday school encouraged the small group to formally organize as a congregation on April 7, 1899. The following year, the membership voted to formally affiliate with the Congregational denomination and adopted the name Union Congregational Church.

Early on, the congregation held services in the City Hall council chambers on Market Street. In 1902, they received permission to use a small parcel of city-owned property on the east side of the Borough Lot on Cadotte Avenue. The lot was too small for building purposes and the congregation secured a lease from the Mackinac Island State Park Commission for an adjacent portion of land in the old “Fort Pasture,” today’s Grand Hotel Jewel Golf Course. The combined city/state park parcel provided sufficient space for the proposed church.

The congregation hired Asbury W. Buckley to design the church building. Buckley was well-known and respected on Mackinac Island as the designer of many of the large cottages on the West Bluff in the 1890s. Buckley rendered a plan that was “Gothic in design and artistic in finish,” and featured cobblestones collected from across the island. Koepke Brothers from Petoskey, Michigan constructed the building at a cost of $4,814 and completed their work by late August 1904. Three years later in his notes following the 1907 annual meeting, Samuel B. Poole christened their house of worship as “Little Stone Church.” Today, 119 years later, Little Stone Church remains an important part of the Mackinac Island’s rich history and faith community.

To learn more, read Blest Be the Tie That Binds, Mackinac Island’s Little Stone Church, by Phil Porter, available at the Island Bookstore on Mackinac Island.