Bay County
Chimneys in Bay County’s Older Housing
Bay County sits at the base of Saginaw Bay, with Bay City as its centre and flat, low-lying terrain throughout. The housing stock reflects the city’s industrial history – a large share of it built between the 1890s and the 1950s, much of it brick, and a great deal of it originally heated by coal.
Bay City has some of the oldest continuously occupied housing in mid-Michigan, and chimneys of that age are typically on their second or third heating system. Each conversion left a flue sized for the fuel before it.
Saginaw Bay Moisture and Masonry Damage
Low elevation and proximity to the bay keep humidity high, and the flat terrain offers chimneys very little wind shelter. The combination drives moisture into masonry that, in century-old housing, was built with soft lime mortar rather than a modern portland-based mix.
That matters for repairs: repointing soft historic mortar with a hard modern mix causes the brick face to spall instead of the joint, because the joint is now stronger than the brick around it. On Bay City’s older housing we match the mortar to what is already there rather than defaulting to standard mix.