St. Anthony's Rock is one of several "sea stacks" in the Straits Area. It is made of Mackinac breccia, a type of stone formed 350 million years ago, when the roofs of deep caves collapsed into stacks of fragmented rock. Calcium carbonate in circulating groundwater cemented the stacks of limestone, dolomite and chert into much harder formations than surrounding unbroken limestone. Much later, glaciers covered this area, then began melting about 12,000 years ago. Wave action in the resulting lakes eroded the adjacent soft stone, leaving St. Anthony's Rock exposed by 2000 B.C.
Sometimes called Goudreau Rock after a prominent St. Ignace family, the rock formation is better known as St. Anthony's Rock. This name may well have been given it by Father Louis Hennepin or the famous Great lakes explorer, Sieur de la Salle. On August 26, 1679 the Franciscan priest was aboard La Salle's famous ship, the "Griffon", when it encountered a violent storm in Lake Huron. Father Hennepin wrote:
"At this time the sieur de la salle adopted in union with us Saint Anthony of Padua as the protector of our enterprises and he promised God if He did us the grace to deliver us from the tempest, that the first chapel he should erect...should be dedicated to that great Saint."
Upon safe arrival at the thriving fur trade center of St. Ignace, the men may have named this rock, then dominating the landscape, after Saint Anthony. the Italian priest would have likely suggested an Italian patron and, in fact, later assigned the name to the falls at Minneapolis.
Interesting enough, La Salle's GRIFFON, the first European trade ship on the Upper Great Lakes, sank in Lake Michigan in 1679 and has never been found.
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St. Anthony's Rock Waymark