About

This collection documents the Cliffs-Dow plant on Lakeshore Boulevard in Marquette, Michigan. The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company originally developed the property in 1902 for the purpose of manufacturing charcoal pig iron. In 1935, the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company and the Dow Chemical Company created a joint company called the Cliffs-Dow Chemical Company to run a wood processing operation at the site. The plant produced acetic acid, methanol, and charcoal until 1969. In 1968, the Georgia-Pacific and E.L. Bruce companies purchased the site. The plant closed in 1969. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed the site on the Superfund program’s National Priorities List (NPL) in the late 1980s. In 2000, following clean-up efforts, the site was removed from the list. The City of Marquette purchased the property in 1997.

Many of the documents in the collection are environmental impact studies conducted on the site, while others document various development plans that the city has considered in the area.

This collection is an artificial collection of digital government documents put together by the Lydia Olson Library at Northern Michigan University and made accessible online by the Central Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan University Archives. The original documents are not available at the archives.

See the full finding aid here.