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May 2009
Tale of Anne Cottage

Tale of Anne Cottage

A historic home on a historic Mackinac Island property gets a storybook makeover.

Jun 1, 2009 Elizabeth Edwards

Todd Zawistowski

The low-slung weathered wood cottage set at the harbor’s edge on windswept Mackinac Island looked like it was right out of a 19th-century novel. And it was. Sometime in the middle of that century, writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (a contemporary of Henry James and the great niece of James Fenimore Cooper) who summered on Mackinac, set her first novel, Anne in the little house. The structure burned to the ground in 1873, nine years before the publication of Woolson’s story about a simple island girl and the wealthy summer resorters she can’t avoid.

As irony would have it, in 1899 wealthy summer resorters Alvin and Sallie Hert (who’d made their money selling creosote for railway ties) constructed a mansion on the property. Eventually, the home grew to 32 rooms and 8,800 square feet—figures that don’t count the caretaker’s cottage, three-stall stable and carriage house. The Herts called their new home Anne Cottage, after Woolson’s then-famous novel.

The home passed through several more owners (among them New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner) until 1997, when Frankenmuth Realtor, self-made millionaire and Mackinac aficionado Scott Rausch, roller blading past it one day, could no longer resist the For Sale sign he’d noticed for several summers. “I got halfway around the island and turned around,” Scott says. “I took off my skates and started negotiating.”

The mansion, empty for years, was deteriorating. Scott and his wife, Debra, were under no illusions about the job that lay ahead. On Mackinac Island, where motorized vehicles are prohibited and most remodeling must follow historic preservation guidelines, the typical hazards of restoring a 19th-century mansion are magnified a hundredfold. But the Rausches persevered, transporting everything from construction materials to antiques over the Straits by plane, snowmobile and ferry. However the cargo made it to the island, the end trip was always in a horse-drawn dray that clippety-clopped its way down Main Street to the wrought iron-gated mansion with its quintessential Mackinac view of the ferry docks, boat-filled harbor and deep-blue Lake Huron.

Working with a construction crew from the island, the Upper Peninsula and Frankenmuth, Scott spent two winters on the restoration, stripping and sanding most of the woodwork himself. The remodeling is finished now, though Scott still works in the estate’s lush gardens. He often invites gawkers in for a tour of the home, posing as the caretaker—a modern twist on the old rags to riches theme that Woolson might well have appreciated.