East Jordan sits at the quiet south end of Lake Charlevoix, considerably less trafficked by summer tourists than its larger neighbor Boyne City across the water, and the town's understated profile makes its single most famous export all the more surprising: East Jordan is the hometown of the company that has manufactured manhole covers, sewer grates, and municipal castings for cities and airports around the entire world, a genuinely unlikely global manufacturing footprint for a town this size and this far from any major industrial corridor.
The Small Town Behind the World's Manhole Covers
William Malpass and his father-in-law Richard W. Round founded what would become East Jordan Iron Works in 1883, originally casting parts to service the logging industry that dominated northern Michigan's economy at the time, and when Malpass's brother James joined the operation in 1886 the company took on the East Jordan Iron Works name it would carry for more than a century afterward. As the region's lumber boom wound down around the turn of the twentieth century, the company pivoted its castings business toward water-works valves, fire hydrants, sewer grates, and manhole covers, a shift in product line that turned out to be considerably more durable than the timber economy it replaced.
That pivot eventually made East Jordan Iron Works genuinely famous within its specific industry: when New York City wanted commemorative manhole covers designed and cast for its millennium celebrations, it commissioned the work from this small Antrim County company rather than any larger urban manufacturer, and airports as far away as Charles de Gaulle in Paris and Lisbon's Portela Airport have likewise ordered castings from the same East Jordan foundry. The company rebranded as EJ Group Inc. in 2012, but its headquarters, true to more than a century of continuous operation, never left the town whose name it carried for so long.
Life on Lake Charlevoix's South Arm
East Jordan's setting on the south arm of Lake Charlevoix gives the town a genuinely scenic waterfront considerably quieter than the busier main basin further north near Boyne City and Charlevoix itself, its downtown built along the water where the Jordan River empties into the lake. The pace here favors longtime cottage owners and locals over the more heavily marketed tourist traffic that fills the lake's northern reaches each summer, giving East Jordan a lower-key identity that pairs an internationally significant manufacturing legacy with an almost defiantly unassuming small-town waterfront.