The country’s first town to marry fudge and tourism—the one that kicked off North America’s love affair with the sugary, chocolaty treat—is scarcely different. On Mackinac Island, which is four square miles and sits between the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan, just under the Mackinac Bridge, one can buy ice cream at Joann’s and go to Little Luxuries to pick up a few Petoskey stones: rocks dotted with fossilized coral available exclusively near the Great Lakes. There are no gas stations because, since 1898, cars have been banned on the island. The whole place runs on horses, bicycles, and, during a large portion of the year, snowmobiles. Main Street, which is less than a mile long, has no fewer than 13 fudge shops. The island imports ten tons of a sugar every day.
The story of how fudge came to Mackinac Island and, eventually, the world starts with the story of the island itself: a hub of the fur trade and the site of an important British fort in the 18th century. In the early days of contact with the French and British, the indigenous Odawa people in L’Arbre Croche sold as much as two hundred thousand pounds of maple sugar each year. Much of that sugar was shipped down the Great Lakes, but well into the 19th century, some was sold on the island in birch bark containers called mokuks—the original sweets of Mackinac.
The island is cool, even in the summer, and boasts limestone cliffs and pine forests. By the 1860s, the dramatic topography and the weather of Mackinac Island transformed it from a trade center into a tourist destination. In the years following the Civil War, vacationers began traveling to Mackinac to escape the growing cities and the pollen (at the time, the only remedy for people with hay fever was to spend allergy season away from the offending plants).
When tourists stepped off the ferries onto Mackinac Island in the 1860s and ’70s, they found an abundance of candy shops, which were increasingly common in oases across America catering to those looking to escape the heat of a crowded city. At first, the confectionaries on Mackinac were similar to all the others, offering a wide variety of candies and treats such as chocolate-covered nuts, caramels, and the maple candies made by local indigenous people. But by the turn of the century, Henry Murdick, a boatbuilder from Vermont, began to sell fudge, capitalizing on a new way that Americans were thinking about sweets.