Alabaster: the gypsum mine that sent buckets out over Lake Huron

The town is named for a rock. In 1837, the state geologist Douglass Houghton found a fine white variety of gypsum — alabaster — in the shallows off this stretch of Lake Huron shore. A quarry opened here in 1862, and the open pit it started would feed a company town for more than a century. In 1902 it was folded into the U.S. Gypsum Company, and gypsum dug here ended up as plaster in walls across the country.

The strange part was getting the rock onto ships. In 1929 the company built an elevated marine tramway — a cable line on towers that ran about a mile and a half straight out over the water of Saginaw Bay. Buckets full of gypsum rode the cable out to a loading point where freighters waited in deep water, since the shore here was too shallow to bring big boats close. For decades, locals watched two-ton buckets of crushed white rock march out over the lake on a wire, day after day, and dump their loads into the holds of waiting ships.

The tramway is gone now — torn down in the 1990s — but the mine left its mark. The old company village, the pit, and the foundations make up the Alabaster Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. A bike path now runs through part of it, with signs telling the gypsum story to riders who’d never guess this quiet shoreline once shipped rock by the bucketful through the air.

A fire leveled the works in 1891, but they rebuilt fast — fast enough to supply gypsum for the “White City,” the gleaming plaster palaces of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Those walls were gone within a year, much like the tramway that came later.