Mysterious underground rooms found beneath historic Michigan building

JACKSON, Mich. — Crews working to renovate a historic 19th-century building discovered two large rooms underground and have no idea how they were once used.

The three-story Commercial Exchange Building was built in 1895 after a fire leveled a structure built in 1885 to the ground. The building served as a manufacturing facility for many years until the industrial building was renovated into office space in the late 1960s. During that work, wooden molds and carriage ribs from horse-and-buggy builders that formerly used the space were found.

More recent work to the building unearthed the underground rooms. A piece of heavy equipment started to sink into the ground, revealing them.

“We’re all just blown away – it’s a big mystery at this point,” Sharon Buchte told MLive. “I called all the other employees and told everybody, ‘You’ve all got to see this. It’s a piece of history on Earth.’”

One room is 12 feet by 14 feet and the other is 12 feet by 17 feet. The walls of each room are made from the same concrete blocks as the building. A 28-inch long chute also is in one of the rooms.

The rooms are empty and it’s unclear how they were used.

“I was hoping to find some hidden treasures in there from who knows when,” Charlie Buchte, a member of the work crew who first explored the rooms, told MLive. “We’re still researching, so fingers crossed we get to find something. Regardless, it’s a part of history and it’s a really great thing to find. To be one to find something like that, it was pretty exciting.”

Cox Media Group