Mulligan's Hollow

In centuries past, Anishinaabek used the surrounding area as a gathering ground for trading and meeting. The area was known as "Gabagouache," which describes the widening of the river and the slowing of the current as the flow reaches Lake Michigan. The hollow was easily accessible by canoe or by foot along a trail that paralleled the river. As early as 1755, Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade, a man of Odawa and French descent, established a trading post here, where he conducted trade through 1790. Fur trader Gurdon S. Hubbard recorded what he described as the "Feast of the Dead," a ten-day ceremony held here in 1819 by Anishinaabek to honor their ancestors. In the 1821 Treaty of Chicago representatives of several tribes ceded land south of the Grand River to the United States. The land north of the river was part of the 1836 Treaty of Washington. In 1851 Alfred and Louisa Bennett settled in the hollow. They were the first documented Black landowners in Grand Haven. The area was known as Bennett's Hollow until John Mulligan, an Irish immigrant and tugboat captain, purchased a part of the hollow in 1881. Mulligan continued to acquire land in the hollow until the city purchased "Mulligan's Hollow" in 1908. Called the "city forest," the hollow remained untouched until 1939, when a Civilian Conservation Corps camp was built. During World War II, the camp was converted to a Coast Guard training base. The site went largely unused after the war until volunteers established the ski bowl in the 1960s. They retained the camp's mess hall as a warming hut. The city of Grand Have dedicated the ski bowl and surrounding eighty acres as Mulligan's Hollow Park and Recreation Area on August 25, 1973.