Bellevue: the first town in Eaton County, built on limestone

Before Charlotte was the county seat, before there even was a Charlotte, there was Bellevue. Captain Reuben Fitzgerald, a War of 1812 veteran, settled here in 1833, and the little place became the first town in Eaton County and its first county seat — the spot where the early courts met until the seat moved south.

The name is just French for “beautiful view,” and it fit. But the lasting story here is underground. Bellevue sits on top of a thick bed of Bayport limestone, a pale Mississippian-age stone laid down some 330 million years ago. People have been digging it out of the west side of town since the 1830s, quarry after quarry, for the better part of two centuries. Stone from Bellevue went into building projects across mid-Michigan, including work on the Michigan State Capitol up in Lansing.

Limestone shaped more than the skyline. It feeds the lime and cement trades, and Bellevue ran hard at both. A Portland cement plant, the Burt factory, opened in 1904 and grew into one of the largest in Michigan before the business failed and it closed in 1928 — its skeleton still stands at the edge of town. The Cheney family started quarrying lime rock here in 1946 and never stopped.

The oldest relic of all sits in a small county park along Sand Road: the Dyer Kiln, a stone furnace where early settlers burned limestone down into quicklime for mortar and plaster. It’s a surviving pioneer-era lime kiln, a squat stone reminder that this corner of farm country was, from the very beginning, a place that turned rock into money.