Leland Blue & the Iron Works

While we're here, let me give you the best beachcombing secret on this coast — and correct a bit of folklore in the process.

If you walk the beach around Leland you may find smooth, glassy pebbles in an extraordinary blue — sometimes grayish, sometimes almost turquoise, occasionally purple. They're sold in every shop up here as Leland Blue, and they get talked about like a gemstone.

They aren't a stone at all. They're SLAG — industrial waste. Between about eighteen seventy and eighteen eighty-five there was an iron smelter here, the Leland Iron Works, with fourteen beehive charcoal kilns and a furnace that could turn out up to forty tons of iron a day. The impurities floated off the molten iron as slag, it got dumped, the lake got hold of it, and a hundred and forty years of waves have tumbled it into these beautiful blue pebbles.

The works died because the charcoal ran out and there was no real harbor to ship from — the same two problems that killed half the industry on this coast.

So the prettiest thing on the beach is factory garbage, polished by time. I think that's better than a gemstone, personally. Look for them at the waterline after a blow.