Grand Island: A Tycoon's Private Kingdom on Lake Superior

Just half a mile off Munising in Lake Superior lies Grand Island — 13,500 acres of sandstone cliffs and deep woods that was, for ninety years, one rich man’s private playground.

In 1900, the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company and its president, William Gwinn Mather, bought the whole island (about $93,000) as a personal retreat and game preserve. Mather, a conservationist, protected the old-growth forest, stocked the island with game behind a fence — the story goes that armed agents watched the winter ice for wolves trying to cross — ran a maple-sugar operation, built a roughly 23-mile carriage road for guests’ buggy rides, and opened a resort hotel. It was a Gilded-Age island kingdom, minus the crown.

After Mather died in 1951, the company logged about 80% of the forest he’d worked to preserve, and the hotel closed. Then in 1990, the U.S. Forest Service bought the island and Congress made it the Grand Island National Recreation Area, part of the Hiawatha National Forest. Today it’s mostly quiet wilderness — hiking, biking, primitive camping — with only a handful of grandfathered private cottages and no cars for visitors.