How a 26-person shop in Whitehall ended up in jet engines

There’s a road in Whitehall called Misco Drive, and it’s the last visible trace of how the White Lake area quietly got into the jet-engine business.

In the early 1950s a small crew of engineers landed in Whitehall and started a company called Misco — short for Michigan Steel Casting — with about 26 employees. Their specialty was investment casting, the ancient “lost wax” method dressed up for industry: sculpt a part in wax, sheathe it in ceramic to form a mold, melt the wax back out, then pour molten metal into the cavity it leaves behind. Done right, it produces metal shapes too intricate and precise to machine any other way.

That happened to be exactly what the dawning jet age was starving for. Misco’s castings turned into the turbine blades and hot-section parts that aircraft engines live and die by — components that have to hold their shape while spinning in a furnace. As the work grew, the company changed hands and names more than once, passing through Howmet, then Alcoa, then Arconic, before settling into its current form. Today it runs in Whitehall as Howmet Aerospace, working in titanium, superalloys, and aluminum, and standing as one of the largest employers and manufacturers in all of Muskegon County. Misco Drive still connects two of the plants, the name outlasting the original company by 70 years.

It scrambles the usual picture of the White Lake area. The lakeshore reads as orchards, beaches, and summer cottages — and it is all of those — but it’s also a serious node of high-precision aerospace work. Live around Whitehall long enough and the odds are good that somebody a few houses down spends their shift helping build the inside of a jet engine.