Alma and the Middle of the Mitt

There is a boulder in a small park on M-46 that marks the geographic center of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. Five minutes from it, a small liberal arts college has spent nearly a century deciding it is Scottish, and hosts one of the largest Highland gatherings in the Midwest every Memorial Day weekend. Alma is the least obvious base in this whole series and one of the most pleasant, and from it a forty-five-minute radius reaches farther into central Michigan than you would expect.

The Actual Middle of the Mitt

Drive five minutes east from Alma to St. Louis and you reach Clapp Memorial Park on M-46, where a state-recognized marker identifies the city as the Middle of the Mitten: the geographic center of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, as closely as it can be determined.

The designation has a longer history than the modern sign suggests. A bronze plaque set into a boulder there reads that Sidney S. Hastings placed the stone in 1876 to mark the geographical center of lower Michigan. The state designation came much later, after a campaign in the early 1950s by Clarence and Odessa Smazel, who owned the St. Louis Leader-Press.

It is a five-minute stop and it is completely free and it is right on the highway. Do it first, because it reframes everything else: you are not near the middle of the state, you are at it.

Scotland, USA

Alma College was founded in 1886 and is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, which is where the Scottish thread starts, since the Presbyterian Church originated in Scotland. In 1931 the college held a contest to name its teams; Herb Estes, class of 1934, won five dollars for proposing the Scots. The identity took from there and never let go.

The campus is worth a walk on its own account. It is compact, green, and built to be crossed on foot, and it holds the whole town's cultural calendar.

The Highland Festival grew out of the same soil. David MacKenzie, class of 1955, played the pipes as a student and took an interest in the games; he and Guile Graham, the college's director of development, brought the idea to the Chamber of Commerce on November 10, 1967. The Chamber voted unanimously three days later, and the first Alma Highland Festival and Games was held on the college campus on May 25, 1968.

The Highland Festival

It runs Memorial Day weekend every year and it is not a small-town approximation of Highland games. It hosts the Great Lakes Scottish Heavyweight Athletic Competition, the Great Lakes Highland Dance Championship, and the U.S. Open Pipe Band Championship Supreme, and it draws thousands of people to a city of under ten thousand.

If you can only come to Alma once, come then. Book lodging early, because the town's room supply is finite and Mount Pleasant twenty-five minutes north absorbs the overflow.

If your dates cannot be moved, the Scottish thread is still visible year-round in the college's traditions, the tartans in shop windows, and the fact that the pipe band exists at all in central Michigan farm country.

The Heartland Trail

The Fred Meijer Heartland Trail is a paved 42-mile rail trail connecting Alma to Greenville, begun in 1994 and completed in 2015. It runs through Elwell, Riverdale, Vestaburg, Cedar Lake, Edmore, McBride, and Stanton on the way, which is to say through farmland, woodlots, lakes, and creek crossings rather than anything resembling a city.

It is open year-round to non-motorized use and it is flat, which makes it the rare central Michigan trail that works equally for a serious cyclist and for a family with a six-year-old.

At Greenville it connects to the Fred Meijer Flat River Valley Trail, so the network keeps going west if you want it to. From the Alma end you can ride out ten miles and back and have had a genuinely good morning.

Downtown Alma and the Pine River

Alma's downtown is a compact brick main street with the college at one end, and it holds the restaurants and the coffee. The Pine River runs through town and gives it a riverwalk and a set of small parks, which is where people actually spend evenings in summer.

Ithaca, the Gratiot County seat, is about fifteen minutes south and has the courthouse and a smaller version of the same main street. It is worth twenty minutes if you like county-seat architecture.

This is farm country, and that is not a euphemism for empty. The sugar beet and dry bean country of mid-Michigan runs through here, and the drive between towns is genuinely pretty in a way that does not photograph well and has to be experienced at fifty-five miles an hour.

Mount Pleasant, Twenty-Five Minutes North

Alma's forty-five-minute radius includes all of Mount Pleasant, which effectively doubles the trip. The Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways opened in 2004 and is operated by the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe; it is the most substantial Native-run museum in the Lower Peninsula and it is the reason to make this drive.

Mount Pleasant also has the Chippewa River, a large county park system with covered and swing bridges and two eighteen-hole disc golf courses, and Central Michigan University.

This is a legitimate day out from Alma, not a token cross-reference. If you have two full days here, give one of them to Mount Pleasant.

Midland, Forty Minutes East

At the far edge of the radius, Midland is about forty minutes east and adds a completely different register: Dow Gardens, the confluence of the Chippewa and Tittabawassee rivers, and the three-legged pedestrian bridge over that confluence that the town calls the Tridge.

The Chippewa Nature Center just outside Midland covers over 1,500 acres of forest, river, and wetland with 19 miles of trails. The trails are open dawn to dark, 365 days a year, and visitor center admission is free.

This is a stretch of the forty-five-minute rule and I will say so plainly: Midland is at the outer edge, and if you go you should plan on it being the day rather than an afternoon.

How to Structure It

Two nights, or three if you are coming for the Highland Festival. Alma's lodging is limited and mostly practical rather than charming; Mount Pleasant has more rooms if you need them.

A workable shape: arrive, drive to the Middle of the Mitten marker, then walk the college campus and downtown in the evening. Ride the Heartland Trail in the morning. Give a full second day to Mount Pleasant and the Ziibiwing Center, or to Midland if the nature center appeals more.

US-127 runs right past Alma, which makes this an unusually easy stop to fold into a north-south drive between Lansing and Grayling. It is a good deliberate destination and an even better excuse to get off the highway for a day on the way to somewhere else.