More information about 50th Anniversary:

 

Dr. Eugene Petersen gave his word to his new boss, Mackinac Island State Park Commission chairman and Grand Hotel owner W. Stewart Woodfill, assuring him that the new revenue bond-financed Fort Mackinac museum would open on June 15, 1958. The deadline was only six months away.

“The mountain was there,” Petersen wrote in Inside Mackinac, “and I was determined to climb it. For the help I sorely needed, I turned to two men.”

These two men were Victor Hogg, an artist-curator at Michigan State College museum in East Lansing; and Dirk Gringhuis, a commercial artist who had helped Petersen with a special exhibit at Petersen’s Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing. Both men, working as contract employees, were enthusiastic about the job ahead.

In the several weeks that followed, Hogg worked out an exhibit plan, and a local lumber yard contracted to build display cases to his design. His art covered topics ranging from the War of 1812 to the advance and retreat of the glaciers which created Arch Rock and other geological formations on Mackinac Island. 

“What success we eventually achieved was due in no small part to his ability and dedication,” Petersen wrote in Inside Mackinac. “My wife liked to call him our resident genius.”

In the past, Hogg had designed and constructed displays with a natural history slant, but according to Petersen, Hogg easily transferred his exceptional creative and technical skills to human history. Described as short, stocky and handsome, Hogg welcomed freelance jobs to support his large family, and this was one of those jobs…one that would eventually lead to an incredible involvement in and dedication to Mackinac State Historic Parks.

Dirk Gringhuis, an energetic young man with a mustache and neatly trimmed goatee, had been making a living drawing commercial displays for a shoe company and for the State Medical Society, but his heart was in history.

“Dirk possessed a rare combination of imagination, a sound historical background, and the ability to meet deadlines,” Petersen wrote.

Gringhuis set aside space in his studio to paint at least four large murals, and then he got down to work. His murals covered many topics, including prehistoric Indians, which introduced visitors to early man, and Fort Mackinac on a dark and gloomy day in 1840, based on contemporary accounts and sketches. Gringhuis’ impressive 40-square-foot mural showing local men and women watching the fort’s soldiers in an 1885 dress parade documented the interdependence between Island residents and the military.

Winter was over in record time, but Gringhuis and Hogg had met their deadline. Petersen gathered the winter’s work and set out for Mackinac Island. He only had a couple of weeks to set up the new museum, and didn’t waste any time. After installing the twenty-two empty cases in the 1859 soldiers' barracks mess hall according to Hogg’s plan, Petersen found the actual exhibit installation somewhat easier. But, according to Petersen, “I was on the phone with Vic almost every night.”

Petersen welcomed Hogg’s and Gringhuis’s visit to the island for two weekends. During these days, they all worked long into the night to complete the fort museum on time.

And they did. It was a spectacular feat, creating a new museum in only six months. In this short time, Mackinac State Historic Parks had not only gained beautiful and informational murals and exhibits, but two talented artists who would help shape the parks into what it is today, a museum which, since 1973, has been accredited four times by the American Association of Museums.

Their contributions continued past the Fort Mackinac museum. In 1959 Hogg built the Missionary Bark Chapel on Mackinac Island, and in 1966 he planned and worked on the Indian Museum that was installed on the second floor of the Indian Dormitory. His fingerprint touched Colonial Michilimackinac and in later years Old Mill Creek, now Historic Mill Creek Discovery Park.

Gringhuis went on to paint over fifteen murals for Fort Mackinac, Colonial Michilimackinac, and the Indian Dormitory, and was a key player in planning the interior interpretation of the Indian Dormitory. In addition, he was the author and illustrator of twenty-eight books for young people, many of which are Mackinac State Historic Parks publications.

They were talented artists, men who were inspired by history and committed to creativity. But they were more than that. Hogg and Gringhuis, by way of brush strokes on a blank canvas and progressive ideas, were two of a key group of early figures to apply “living” history to the sites of Mackinac State Historic Parks. They turned an exhibit case into a story that came to life in the minds of visitors. They insured that these visitors would return, and that their children would return. They gave character and color to the past. And in doing so, Hogg and Gringhuis inspired a legacy of protecting, preserving and presenting the parks to future generations of people who care and who, more than anything, are inspired themselves.