Trenton: named for the rock that became Arm & Hammer baking soda

The box of baking soda in your cupboard has a thread that runs back to a quarry just south of Detroit. Trenton sits on a band of gray stone that geologists call Trenton limestone, and the town took its name straight from the rock. The riverside post office went from “Monguago” to “Truago” and finally, in 1847, to Trenton — after the limestone being dug out of the ground all around it.

Solomon Sibley got there early. He was a heavyweight in the young Michigan Territory — Detroit’s first appointed mayor back in 1806, then the territory’s first U.S. attorney, and later a territorial chief justice. In 1823 he bought a limestone quarry in the village that came to carry his name, Sibley, which Trenton later absorbed. Quarried Trenton stone went into buildings across Detroit, including the old fort on the river.

The kitchen connection comes from what happened to that stone next. The quarry passed to Austin Church, and Church wasn’t interested in stone for walls — he wanted the chemistry inside it. Limestone is calcium carbonate, and with the right process you can turn it toward sodium bicarbonate: baking soda. Church sold his under the family brand, and that brand was Arm & Hammer. The red logo that’s sat on American shelves for generations traces part of its story to a hole in the ground in Wayne County.

The Sibley quarry is long quiet now, a gray scar between Trenton and Wyandotte, flooded and fenced. But every time someone scrubs a sink or freshens a fridge with the orange box, there’s a faint echo of Downriver stone.