Cement City and the Besser block

When the great pine forests around Alpena were finally logged out in the late 1800s, the town didn’t fade away. It dug down instead. Beneath the stumps lay enormous deposits of limestone and shale, the raw stuff of cement, and Alpena became a cement town, so much so that people took to calling it Cement City.

The plant that grew up on the lakeshore became, for a time, the largest cement plant in the world, and even today it is among the biggest anywhere. It has worn several names over the years — Lafarge, then Holcim, and most recently Amrize — but through all of them it has kept shipping cement out across the Great Lakes by freighter, and you can still watch the lakers come and go from a lookout near the quarry.

Alpena gave the world more than cement, though. In 1904 a local man named Jesse Besser perfected a machine that could press wet concrete into solid blocks, quickly and cheaply, and it changed how buildings go up everywhere. His Besser Company, still headquartered here, became the world’s leading maker of block-making machinery, and for decades a “Besser block” was simply what people called a concrete block. Jesse left much of his fortune to the town in the form of the Besser Museum for Northeast Michigan, where you can still dig real fossils out of the local limestone. You can learn more at bessermuseum.org.