St. Ignace Mission

St. Ignace Mission preserves the site of a seventeenth-century Jesuit mission founded in 1671, when Father Jacques Marquette moved from Mackinac Island to the mainland and built a small chapel near the Straits of Mackinac. He served Native communities there, especially the Petun, and after his death in 1675 his remains were returned and buried beneath the chapel in 1677. The mission later declined, was abandoned and burned in 1705, and eventually moved across the Straits in 1741. A later mission chapel from 1837 was relocated here in 1954, uniting both eras of local Catholic history. The site now houses the Museum of Ojibwa Culture and remains important to Indigenous, religious, and colonial history.

St. Ignace, Michigan · United States