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May 21, 2024

Fudgetown, USA

By: Heather Radke Illustration: Yuanyuan Zhou

How a Michigan vacation town transformed the sweet into a nationwide tourist attraction

In Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, the local fudge shop is called Cottage of Sweets. In Stratford, Ontario, it’s Nudge Nudge Fudge. Sarasota, Florida; Juneau, Alaska; and Provincetown, Massachusetts, all have a Fudge Factory. In Mystic, Connecticut, there is Mystic Fudge, and in Cape May, New Jersey, you will find the Original Fudge Kitchen. Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario has Maple Leaf Fudge.

These towns are, like all places, unique—full of particular politics and personalities—but they also have much in common. They are the kinds of places that contain multiple stores that stock regionally specific seashells and a rotating display of nameplate keychains featuring a local food or animal: a lobster, say, or an orange. In any of these places, you can almost certainly buy a waffle cone scooped high with butter pecan ice cream, and you can surely eat a hamburger with special sauce and drink a local beer as you look out over a pleasing vista, most likely a body of water with a harbor full of boats. And, of course, weirdly, in each of these places, you can eat fudge.

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.

In Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, the local fudge shop is called Cottage of Sweets. In Stratford, Ontario, it’s Nudge Nudge Fudge. Sarasota, Florida; Juneau, Alaska; and Provincetown, Massachusetts, all have a Fudge Factory.

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.

Fudge is a relatively recent invention for such a simple substance. A smooth candy that is made by boiling sugar, milk, and butter and beating them until thick and creamy, it first showed up at candy shops and (somewhat bizarrely) women’s colleges in the 1880s. At Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley, students clandestinely made fudge in their dorm rooms using chafing dishes and spirit lamps. It’s an activity that may sound like a wholesome hobby now, but at the time, it was a rebellion against the strict rules of women’s colleges. Students broke curfew to make and eat fudge together, and they were also flouting nutritional advice...