The Quarry

by John B. Anderson

The quarry was the finest swimming hole of the multitudes of swimming places around Manistique. The quarry was spring fed, light blue, filtered by the limestone that surrounded it. It was a football field long with fifteen-foot cliffs around the south side. The north side tapered off to shallow water, but the south side was 80-feet deep.

This was one of the first limestone quarries that were mined by Inland Lime and Stone Company. The limestone was shipped to Gary, ID and East Chicago, to be used in the production of steel. When the company discovered that the limestone was more accessible west of Gulliver, it moved the limestone operation there, along with developing Port Inland. Without the pumps working all day, every day, the Manistique quarry filled up with beautiful blue water.

Sometime after the quarry mining operations shut down, some folks drove their cars into the quarry. We found a couple of these cars about 20-feet down, but we couldn't dive further, because of water pressure on our ears.

My mom was afraid to let me swim at the quarry. I assured her that, if I could swim at the “Cope,” I could certainly swim at the quarry. Mom accompanied me on my first try in the quarry. She said later that she couldn't have done anything for me, had I sunk to the bottom that day, but, fortunately, she didn't have to do a thing.

Prior to my swimming at the quarry, an older boy, Billy Reno, (?) reportedly did a running dive from an upper ledge, hit Barb in the head, bounced off a rock into the water. My neighbor, Jim, told us about how Billy had drowned, and how he had been fished out of the water. The description made me nauseous and very sad, but not enough to deter me from wanting to swim there.

The city put up a chain link fence around the quarry to keep us out, but that wasn't going to be the case. We crawled under the fence as did a lot of our friends. In those days, my friends and I were the, “Tornados.” (Probably, no one else knew us as that, but we knew who were were.) Ron, Ron, Bill and I dressed in black when we went to gatherings, to let people know we were something.

At the quarry, Ron would do a running dive from the highest cliff, grab his ankles half was down, and cause a giant cannon ball. Bill jumped on my back, and the two of us ran and jumped from the high cliff. The extra weight on my back caused us to fall backwards and crash into the water right on Bill's back. That must had really hurt. Bill said, “Let's do it again. The girls really liked it.”

The three of us dared Bill to bang the sand out of his bathing suit ten times, while he was naked. We all expected that Bill would count to ten quite quickly, but that was not the case. Bill yelled, “One!” All the girls looked, then looked away in horror. “Two!” slowly to ten. We paid Bill the 75 cents.

The quarry was a wonderful place for us to swim all summer long. We couldn't swim in Lake Michigan, as our city sewage was dumped into the lake, untreated at that time. The Cope was way out of town, and sometimes, it was hard getting a ride out there. The quarry was perfect, as we could walk there.

Our swimming was stopped with the tragic death of Joe Greenwood. Billy, like his parents, had very limited hearing and limited speech. As the story went, Billy had attended the school for the deaf in Flint, and he was making good progress. It was said that he also was taking swimming lessons at the school. One hazy Sunday, Billy was seen, by himself, at the quarry, pushing an inner tube in front of him, and swimming up to the tube. Maybe he pushed to tube too far, and went to the bottom.

Scuba divers from the Ford Foundation traveled to Manistique to help with the search for Billy. This was to no avail. While they were in Manistique, the divers also went to the Big Spring, and recovered thousands of dollars from the spring that tourists had thrown into the water. An ocean diver, complete with all the deep sea diving equipment also tried to find Billy. Again, to no avail.

Inland brought in their heavy duty pumps, and pumped the water into the Manistique River. This whole process took a couple of weeks. Finally, Billy was found toward the bottom of the quarry. We still swam in the quarry after that, but there was always a certain sadness around the place.