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Chelsea: Cement Plant at Dexter Chelsea Road and Railroad Tracks Photographer: Eck Stanger

Chelsea: Cement Plant at Dexter Chelsea Road and Railroad Tracks image
Year:
1938
Published In:
Ann Arbor News, March 18, 1973
Caption:
From Our Pictorial Archives: Ann Arbor 1938: Not a battered, fire-blackened medieval castle, but the remains of the old Chelsea Cement Plant on the Dexter-Chelsea Rd. where it is crossed by the Penn Central Railroad tracks. This picture was taken in 1938, about 10 years after the plant near Four Mile Lake was abandoned by the state, which had operated it for some years with prison labor - convicts from Jackson. The McKune Memorial Library in Chelsea filled some gaps in our recollections. The White Portland Cement Co. acquired the land and built the plant in 1904, using manufacturing material from the area. A Jackson bank foreclosed a mortgage on the property in 1909, and Nathan Potter, Jackson and Ann Arbor capitalist, reorganized the company in 1911. The state leased the plant from Potter in 1923. The pile of rubble just north of the road and tracks is barely visible today.