Fiborn Quarry's History

The town and business of Fiborn Quarry existed here from early 1905 until late 1935. The quarry plant, crusher and steam engine shop, along with a grade school, a boarding house, and a company store; a population of employees and their families, many living in company houses, formed the core of an isolated community. Saturday night square dances at Fiborn Quarry were one social event fondly remembered by former residents more than fifty years later.

Children playing by the school

During those years most of the unusually pure limestone from the pit was removed by rail to the Canadian Soo, where Algoma Steel, owners of the quarry lands from 1909 until 1987, used the stone as flux in their steel making operations. In 1935, with the permanent closing of the quarry plant, Algoma Steel required workers and residents to move away. Only a single family remained to manage to quarry's affairs, and Fiborn Quarry became a ghost town after thrity years existence.

The earliest use, visitation, or knowledge of these features, unique within Michigan, whether by North American Indians or others during those many years in which this area was largely or totally undeveloped, may forever remain unknown, due in some measure to the eventual quarrying of the most concentrated area of notable surface features and removal of all it contained. Surveyor Henry Brevort noted a cave entrance along his route while establishing section lines here in 1845.

By the 1890's, with the coming of railroads, lumbering, and the settlement of nearby communities such as Trout Lake and Lewis, the caves became widely known among local residents. In 1898, Charles B Smith, then living at Perry's Camp located several miles north of Trout Lake, led Chase S Osborn (governor of Michigan 1911-1912) onto land owned by Isaac Wilman of Newberry. A road led from Lewis Station three miles to the south, passing by several cave openings on the property. Osborn was speculating in limestone which could be used in the manufacture of calcium carbide, an industry then being developed in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.

Osborn bought Wilman's land, which now contains the main body of the quarry, and other adjoining properties (mostly from the State of Michigan) to control around six hundred acres.

In August 1901, State Geologist A.C. Lane visited the property, mapping surface and cave features, providing the most extensive record that remains of what once occupied the quarry site.

Unable to find a commercial buyer for the holdings as originally planned, Osborn and business partner William F Fitch, then president of the Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railroad, put a spur in to the property in the fall of 1904. Quarrying operations began in the new year. The partners named the resulting town Fiborn Quarry in the spring of 1905 (Fiborn being a contraction of Fitch and Osborn).

Engine #5, Fiborn Limestone Co.

In 1909, Fiborn Quarry was sold to Algoma Steel which owned the quarry until 1987, when the majority of the original Osborn and Fitch lands were purchased by the Michigan Karst Conservancy.

Fiborn Quarry existed because of a need for a simple product; crushed limestone of a high purity. That pure limestone outcrops where Fiborn Quarry was placed, and was shown well in a series of cave openings once at the site of the quarry. Behind this set of simple circumstances are the series of relationships, decisions and events marking the normal interactions of people from which Fiborn Quarry emerged.

Fiborn Limestone exposed in quarry wall

Osborn and the Soo Return to Presenting Fiborn Quarry

Source Information

Return To MKC Home Page