The Emmet County Transportation Quest Geo-trail will take participants on a tour to discover the interesting historic transportation places in the county. Each cache will provide a specific answer to a question on the passport. Information and the passport can be downloaded from the Emmet County web site http://www.emmetcounty.org/geocache/
Once 25 of the caches in this tour have been completed, the passport can be taken to Emmet County Building, Suite 178 or mailed to Beth Eckerle, Emmet County Building, Suite 178, 200 Division St., Petoskey, MI 49770 to receive a collectable souvenir coin for this series.
Close your eyes and imagine Great Lakes freighters coming into port here to load important Michigan products – cement and limestone. The Petoskey Portland Cement Company went into production in 1921 and had a dock with ship loading facilities as well as a silo for storage.
Powdered cement is an alkaline chemical that, when mixed with water, sand, and aggregate stone, transforms itself into solid concrete. When reinforced with steel rods or heavy-gauge mesh wiring, concrete panels and layers can be a durable, inexpensive building material. High-quality northern Michigan limestone for cement, concrete, or steel mill flux has long been a key export commodity of port towns like Petoskey grouped around the Straits of Mackinac.
The Petoskey Portland Cement Company was sold to Penn-Dixie in 1954 under whose management it grew to be one of the largest employers in the area with an annual payroll of $3.4 million. Business started to suffer in the 1970s and by 1980, the company filed for bankruptcy. With clever visioning, the opulent resort community of Bay Harbor took shape here in the mid 1990s.