Cross in the Woods National Shrine

The heart of the story is the cross itself. The parish wanted the largest crucifix they could raise, and that meant a single timber tall and straight enough to carry it. They found their tree in a redwood forest in Oregon, had it custom-cut, and shipped it east on a railroad flatcar in the early 1950s. To hold it upright they poured a steel and concrete foundation fifteen feet high, then buried it under soil to make a long, low hill, so the cross would look as if it grew from the ground rather than from a slab.

On a summer day in 1954 cranes lifted the redwood into place on that hill. For five years it stood bare, a giant plain cross among the pines, while the figure that would hang on it was still being made an ocean away. Even now, knowing the whole story, it is the raw scale of that one redwood beam that stops people first, before they ever look up at the bronze.

The figure of Christ is the work of Marshall Fredericks, one of Michigan's most celebrated sculptors, whose fountains and statues stand in cities across the country. He worked on it for four years, from first sketches to finished form, and the casting was done at a foundry in Oslo, Norway. When it was ready it crossed the Atlantic as one of the largest bronze castings ever shipped, then traveled up to Indian River.

In August 1959 workers hung the seven-ton figure on the redwood cross with thirteen thirty-inch bolts, and it was dedicated days later. It has been cleaned and re-waxed carefully over the decades to hold off the northern weather. Seen from the base of the hill, the enormous calm figure against the sky is meant to stop you in your tracks, and for most visitors it does exactly that.

The cross is the centerpiece, but the grounds around it reward an unhurried walk. Paths wind through the pines past outdoor Stations of the Cross, a flight of Holy Stairs, and small shrines to various saints, including Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, for whom the shrine was very nearly named. A newer church seats about a thousand people with windows framing the cross outside, and the original log chapel now serves as gift shop and museum space.

One quirky corner is the Nun Doll Museum, a collection of hundreds of dolls dressed in the traditional habits of Catholic religious orders from around the world, begun by a local woman in the 1940s. She donated the collection on the condition that seeing it always stay free, and it still is. Between the giant cross, the quiet woods, and that oddly charming museum, the shrine manages to be both a serious place of pilgrimage and a genuinely interesting roadside stop.

The shrine sits on M-68 in Indian River, just off Interstate 75, which makes it one of the easiest worthwhile stops on the long drive north toward the Mackinac Bridge. The grounds are open every day, dawn to dusk, all year, and there is no admission charge, only a free-will donation. It is a working Catholic shrine, so it is quiet and reverent, but visitors of every background are welcome to walk the grounds and take it in.

Give yourself half an hour to an hour: enough to stand beneath the cross, walk the wooded Stations, and step into the church and the doll museum. In summer the pines are cool and green; in winter the whole scene turns to snow and stillness, and the great bronze figure looks even more austere. Either way it is the kind of place that lingers with you well down the highway.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.