Built in 1825, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is operated as part of the Mackinac Island State Park.

In 1825, this mission house was built at the site by a building crew led by Martin Heydenburk, a fellow missionary who was a teacher and carpenter.

The students were boarded at the school, taught manual crafts and rudimentary liberal arts, and trained to adopt the standards and living patterns characteristic of New England and the American East Coast.

The Mackinac Mission never succeeded in financially supporting itself and, in the late 1830s, its functions were undermined by the decline of the upper Great Lakes fur trade.

For many decades in the early and mid-19th century, Mackinac Island was a key junction point for the short-run lake steamboats of the day.

Many immigrants to Lake Michigan changed boats at Mackinac Island, and needed places to stay during their stopovers.

After the Civil War, pleasure travel increased in northern Michigan, and the Mission House readapted itself as a somewhat spartan excursion resort.

Frank Buchman, MRA made Mackinac Island their world headquarters and built a large conference center to the east of the old dormitory.

Humbard's attempts to operate a resort and revive the college were short lived, owing to other financial difficulties in his organization, and ceased in 1973.

It opened with the sentence: “I was stranded at the old Mission House in Mackinaw, waiting for a Lake Superior steamer which did not choose to come.” However, in his lifetime Hale visited neither Mackinac nor Michigan.