Wyandotte: the salt under the city that built a chemical giant

What made Wyandotte an industrial city wasn’t the river you can see — it was a thick layer of pure salt nobody could. Captain John Baptiste Ford, an old glassmaker, bought riverfront land here on October 17, 1890, drawn by that buried salt and what it could become. Glass needs soda ash, and soda ash you can make from salt and limestone. In 1893 Ford founded the Michigan Alkali Company on the spot.

The recipe was clever. Crews pumped Detroit River water down into the salt beds and pulled it back up as brine, then combined the salt with limestone barged in from Ford’s own quarries up near Alpena. Out the other end came soda ash, baking soda, and lye. The plant fed an industry, and the industry fed the town — Ford gave generously to Wyandotte, paying for its first general hospital in 1926.

The name on the gate kept changing as the company grew. In 1943 Michigan Alkali merged with the J.B. Ford glass works to become Wyandotte Chemical Corporation. Then in 1969 the whole operation became part of BASF, the German chemical giant — at the time the largest investment a German company had ever made in the United States. BASF still runs chemistry on the same riverbank.

The handsomest piece of the story is the 1907 administration building, a brick Georgian Revival hall designed by the Detroit firm Chittenden and Kotting. It’s still standing, still in use — a century-old office sitting on top of an even older bed of salt, the quiet reason a glassmaker ever stopped here at all.