From Cement Plant to Bay Harbor

West of downtown, along the bay, lies one of Michigan's strangest transformations, from heavy industry to luxury resort. The rich Devonian limestone under Little Traverse Bay is ideal for making cement, and in the early nineteen twenties the Petoskey Portland Cement Company opened a plant here. It began modestly, but grew into a giant.

By the nineteen fifties the works, then owned by the Penn Dixie company, was producing cement on a huge scale, its kilns and smokestacks looming over a landscape of dust and quarry pits. The industry declined through the nineteen seventies, and the plant closed around nineteen eighty, leaving behind a scarred shoreline and two enormous limestone quarries. Then came an audacious plan.

In the nineteen nineties, developers dynamited the old smokestacks to launch a new community called Bay Harbor. They flooded the quarry pits to create an inland harbor and marina, and built an exclusive village of homes, shops, and a golf course along the water. It stands as a vivid reminder that even the most industrial ground here has many layers, and that the limestone shaping this coast has been both a resource and a canvas.