Since its inception in 1907, the forbidding Blackhawk Generating Station was the polar opposite of a friendly next-door neighbor to Beloit College’s quaint, leafy campus, located across Pleasant Street in Beloit, Wisconsin. Whenever winds blew from the west, the coal-fired, steam-generating electric power station’s 135-foot-high smokestack would belch plumes of polluted air toward the college green. This continued for years, as the brick, concrete, and steel plant expanded in stages until 1947, and finally ended in 2010 when its owner, Alliant Energy, ceased operations, slating the plant for demolition.
