Last Monday, tens of thousands of people walked across the Mackinac Bridge as part of an annual Labor Day tradition. Beneath their feet was nearly 70-year-old metal that for the past few years has been slowly getting replaced and then sold off.

So, who ends up buying pieces of the Mackinac Bridge? And how far those pieces end up traveling around the globe?

A beloved landmark

You may have an early childhood memory of crossing the Mackinac Bridge for a trip Up North or maybe you’re a transplant to the state who was wowed seeing the Mighty Mac for yourself for the first time.

Kim Nowack is the director of the Mackinac Bridge Authority. She says when the MBA began replacing the decades-old grating that millions of people drive over every year, people would call asking if they could have it. ”Everybody seems to have some kind of story about the Mackinac Bridge. And so just getting a piece of it for themselves, whether it’s large or small, is on a lot of people’s list of things to do. ”  

For a while, the authority would send those folks to a scrap yard. But that changed around 2018.  

“We realized that there was a market for these pieces, and many people were interested in having them,” says Nowack. 

The MBA now sells different sizes of grating, from small pieces at its office to auctions of 40-foot-long cuts of metal.   

In local business

And if you search websites like Etsy, you’ll find many listings for jewelry, wall art and other metalwork all made from these pieces of the bridge. One of those small businesses is Atomic Rabbit Iron Work based out of Charlotte.    

James and Megan Race are in their home blacksmithing workshop where James is heating up a piece of the bridge in a red-hot forge, so it’s malleable enough for him to shape it into a bottle opener on his anvil. “Getting these pieces, every time you touch it and you work with it, it just reminds you of going to the UP and all those great memories.”

The Races have shipped their creations, the bottle openers as well as keychains and necklace pendants to all 50 states and even internationally.  

“With the people that we sell it to, the stories are so fun,” they say. Like a couple who used a piece as part of a cake topper for their wedding on Mackinac Island. Or a woman who buys one for her husband for every time he participates in a certain bike tour.  

DeWitt resident Jan Brnitnall also bought a small piece of the bridge from the Races. It looks like a little cross, cut from where two pieces of metal met for the bridge grating.  “It has on it different colors of paint, of the different coatings of paint that have been applied to it over the years,” Brnitnall points out.  

In the 18^th century, her ancestor came from France to the region to trade fur.  “My third great grandfather traversed the straits in a voyager canoe. And I wanted a piece of that to remember him.”

Going to the ends of the Earth

Just as people have come from across the globe to Michigan, it seems like the Mackinac Bridge has made its way worldwide, and even to the South Pole  

Indiana resident Brendan Fisher helped incorporate some medallions cut from a piece of the bridge into the ceremonial South Pole marker while working a heavy equipment job in Antarctica.

He describes the marker. “It’s surrounded by 13 flags of different company countries that signed the Antarctic Treaty. you can take a picture with the reflective ball of the marker, and you have the South Pole Station as your backdrop.”

In a video a colleague took, the winds whips around Brendan and the flags as he fits the ball onto the white and red striped pole. You can see his breath as his friend cheers him on.  

“Once you start making things out of history, you’re kind of making double the story,” says Fisher.

Fisher’s Bridge medallions were also added to the 2024 geographical South Pole marker, which gets replaced every year as the pole shifts.  

“Now it’s in a display case down there at the South Pole. When that display case gets too full, there they ship maybe 10 at a time, to the Smithsonian where it’ll live till eternity,” says Fisher.  

The Mackinac Bridge may only span 5 miles, but with the help of some of its biggest fans, its reach is worldwide.