.... Missing Town of Marlborough
**Click right on the map to make it bigger**(Map is from Farm Ownership Plat Book, circa 1930s)
Yes indeedy!!
Lake County has its own ghost town
and it is quite a mysterious place indeed.
The story goes like this:
Many moons ago when Potawatomis
still roamed the lush Manistee woods,
when Aishcum County had just recently
been renamed Lake County,
and lumber barons were busy harvesting
the immense pine forests
(but before Al Capone laid-low like the low-life he was
somewhere on Big Star Lake),
a village literally sprang-up overnight,
a village that was dedicated to the manufacturing of
ta da
cement.
Yes, cement. Possibly used in the death of Jimmy Hoffa.
Read what Bob Sculley a reporter from the
Grand Rapids Press had to say on September 12, 1971:
"Swallowed amid the scrub oak and sassafras
of the Lake County hinterlands
are the massive remains of a huge ghost factory,
its crumbling concrete buildings, some of them
larger than two football fields,
are all that's left of
the Great Northern Portland Cement Company,
an industrial dream that turned into a nightmare..."
(Okay, it doesn't quite rival the Coliseum,
but this is Baldwin, people!)
These photos were taken in October 0f 1978.
Sculley continues: "The town, the lakes
and surrounding property of the company
covered 8000 acres in Lake and Newaygo counties.
Workmen were brought into Lake County in 1902 to construct
the cement plant and Marlborough.
The town's initial construction included
an 88 room hotel, 72 homes, a large general store,
opera house, school,
a mile-long railway connecting to the Pere Marquette Railroad,
an electric plant and a municipal water company...
time has dimmed local knowledge of the plant.
Nowadays, many area residents know little or nothing
of the old factory.
Some will tell you the name of the
ghost town is 'Mulberry'...
The factory holds a fascination for visitors...
but in its present state, the plant's
gaping crevices and crumbling walls,
unmarked by any warning signs, constitute what
attorneys call an 'attractive nuisance',
sort of an accident waiting to happen."
This photo is titled,"Accident waiting to happen", 1978
According to Sculley: "The idea for the cement plant
was born in 1901 when a group of Eastern investors
created the GNPCC with an initial capital of $4 million...
the area south of Baldwin was chosen for the cement plant
because that region is rich in a substance called 'marl',
then used in making cement.
Farmers, some of them from as far away as Indiana,
swapped their lands for stock in the cement company,
and took jobs building the plant.
A boom-town atmosphere gripped Marlborough.
In one Marlborough home, 30 workmen labored on
three shifts, using the beds in three shifts.
The cement plant, which opened in 1903,
consisted of 14 grinding mills, 9 kilns,
a warehouse, machine shop, boiler plant, blacksmith shop,
pattern shop and utility buildings.
The plant produced 1200 barrels of cement a day.
In 1904, the company was a prominent industrial exhibitor
at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.
Deb Hoogstrate atop one the "crumbling walls".
Eunice Hoogstrate and Lois Mulder walking the walls.
Both photos are dated 1970
Bloggers, please read on: "But the nation's cement industry
was then undergoing rapid technological change.
And in the midst of Marlborough's boom,
someone somewhere else had perfected a cheaper way of making cement...
By late 1906, the Michigan Trust Co.
of Grand Rapids was appointed receiver of the firm...
On May 5, 1908, the property was sold
on Lake County courthouse steps at Baldwin
for the giveaway price of $85,000...
So there in the Lake County wilderness,
stood a newly-built but totally obsolete
multi-million dollar factory and its
handsome model city of Marlborough.
Eunice Hoogstrate says, "The End"
