It's been called "black diamonds."

COAL IS DISCHARGED by the ship Herbert S. Jackson
in Greilickville in the early 1980s.

But some people don’t want it. That is to say, they don’t want to see new coal-fired electrical generating plants built in Michigan, primarily because of air pollution concerns.

Protesters expressed their concern in the county last month at the site of the large wind-driven electrical generator in Elmwood Township. It was one of seven organized protests held around the state to voice opposition to the proposed construction of eight new coal-fired plants.

Because of its harbors on Grand Traverse Bay, Leelanau County once received thousands and thousands of tons of coal each year, and it was burned in countless places – not simply at electrical generating plants.

At the turn of the last century, pictures of large plants emitting clouds of black coal smoke denoted prosperity. Indeed, coal was said to be “the world’s greatest source of industrial power,” and it was “the chief fuel for the home, the office and the factory,” the New Human Interest Library stated in 1928.

Coal used to arrive in Leelanau by the boatload. Beginning in the mid 1930s, as many as a dozen boatloads a year were routinely deposited at the coal dock in Greilickville. Coal was also delivered to docks in Suttons Bay.

Suttons Bay had two coal docks. Fifty years ago, the Leelanau Coal Company there claimed it could handle “any size ship,” although the depth of water at the dock was given as only 14 feet. The Suttons Bay Coal Dock, on the other hand, had 16 feet of water but ships were restricted to a maximum length of 365 feet – about the minimum size of any self-unloading vessel. The dock’s storage capacity was given as 6,000 tons – a small bulk cargo by today’s standards.

By contrast, the Burke coal dock in Greilickville had 22 feet of water and a capacity of 18,000 tons. It claimed the ability to handle “any size ship” and, indeed, vessels in excess of 700 feet in length unloaded there.

Although coal is found in the state, most of it is shipped in from elsewhere. This despite the fact geologists estimated the Michigan Basin contained eight billion tons of coal, primarily found south of Saginaw and Bay City. The downside was that it was of inferior quality and harder to mine than deposits elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the value of Michigan-produced coal in 1914 was put at $3 million. By 1946, however, the state’s limited production of the “black diamonds” ceased altogether.

The last major local “customer” for coal was Traverse City Light and Power, which acquired ownership of the Burke dock some years ago but stopped receiving coal shipments when it began phasing out its bayfront power plant.

The “coal pile” in Greilickville was once a familiar Leelanau landmark. When two tourists once wanted to eat at the former Sweitzer’s Restaurant (now Freshwater Lodge), but didn’t know how to find it, they were given directions: “if you pass the coal pile on your right, you’ve gone too far.”

The poor couple ended up 26 miles up the road in Northport – it just happened that the dock had been cleared of its coal!

When coal was a common fuel, there were thousands of area customers – homeowners and businesses – in the area. In the course of time, it was superseded by fuel oil, natural gas, propane, and even electricity. In recent decades, we have even seen a limited reversion to the use of wood as a source of home-heating fuel.

During the Korean War, a “coal famine” was feared in Leelanau one winter, but the arrival of a few loaded rail cars forestalled it. Upon their arrival, the Enterprise noted that coal wasn’t as widely used in home heating as it once was, anyway.

At one time, coal powered America’s railroads and steamships. The Great Lakes fleet was slower in abandoning coal (even the lost Edmund Fitzgerald, launched in 1959, was built to burn it) than were ocean-going fleets but today only one coal-burning steamer remains.

You’ve probably heard of this ship and may have ridden on it. It’s the S.S. Badger out of Ludington.