Mancelona's iron town, and the tar lake it left behind

There used to be a whole town here called Furnaceville. In 1882 John Otis & Company put up a charcoal blast furnace just south of Mancelona, platted a settlement around it, and the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad ran a line right to the gate. Four years later Grand Rapids investors bought the works, renamed it the Antrim Iron Company, and renamed the town, too — plain “Antrim.” A short street called Otis still nods to the man who started it.

The furnace ran on wood. Instead of coke, it smelted iron with charcoal cooked from the hardwood forests all around — beech, maple, birch — fed in by the cordful and burned down in rows of beehive kilns. For about sixty years, from 1882 to 1945, the company turned trees into iron and chemicals and steady paychecks. It was one of the bigger employers in this part of the state, and it ran long after the easy timber was gone.

But cooking wood that way leaves a sludge. The plant ran the leftover wood tar and chemical waste into a low spot that locals came to call Tar Lake — a four-acre pond of the stuff. After the works shut down, the tar stayed. Roughly 20,000 cubic yards of it sat buried in that depression, and benzene and other compounds worked their way into the groundwater.

That’s how a quiet corner of Mancelona Township ended up on the federal government’s list of the worst contaminated sites in the country. The EPA added Tar Lake to the Superfund National Priorities List in 1983 and spent decades hauling out tar, cleaning soil, and treating the water. Most of the site has since been cleared and handed back. The pond is dry now, and the iron town is a scatter of houses — a hard reminder that the smoke and the wages came with a bill that took fifty years to pay.