Great Lakes Navigation and Navigational Aids Historical Context Study By Theodore J. Karamanski prepared for the National Park Service United States Department of the Interior 2017 1 2 Contents 5 List of Figures & Illustrations 7 Introduction 11 Wilderness Waters 21 A Market Revolution on the Lakes 49 The Era of Bad Feelings,1839–1860 83 Lighting the Way Forward,1860–1880 113 Era of Expansion, 1880-1910 149 Heartland Arsenal: The Inland Seas in War and Peace, 1910-1945 179 May Their Lights Continue to Shine, 1946-2000 205 National Landmark Status and Great Lakes Aids to Navigation 215 Recommended Great Lakes National Historic Landmarks 263 Acknowledgements 3 4 List of Figures & Illustrations 27 Figure 1. The wreck of the steamer Walk-in-the-Water with the poorly sited Buffalo Lighthouse in the background. 29 Figure 2. Chicago Harbor Lighthouse adjacent to Fort Dearborn. 31 Figure 3. Stephen Pleasonton Fifth Auditor of the United States and head of U.S. Lighthouse Administration, 1820-1851 37 Figure 4. The Erie Canal at Lockport, NY. Engraving made from 1839 painting by W.H. Bartlett. 42 Figure 5. Erie, Pa. Harbor before improvement. 45 Figure 6. Early attempts to force a harbor entrance through the sand bar at Chicago. 52 Figure 7. Eber Brock Ward. Ship Captain, ship builder, industrialist. 54 Figure 8. Sault Ste. Marie Canal. 56 Figure 9. The schooner Hattie Hutt, built in Saugatuck, Mich., 1873, wrecked 1929. 58 Figure 10. A Great Lakes propeller steamer, the United Empire. 61 Figure 11. The wreck of the steamer Lady Elgin, 1860. 68 Figure 12. Millard Fillmore 70 Figure 13. The wreck of the steamer Griffith, 1850. 80 Figure 14. Cut-away of a lantern room with a Fresnel Lens. 82 Figure 15. George Gordon Meade, photograph by Mathew Brady. 90 Figure 16. Eber Brock Ward’s Eureka Steel Works. 94 Figure 17. Aaron Sheridan, disabled veteran and lighthouse keeper. 96 Figure 18. General Orlando Poe. 97 Figure 19. Historic American Building Survey (HABS) drawing of Orlando Poe’s Grosse Point Lighthouse, a National Historic Landmark. 99 Figure 20. Poe’s design for Spectacle Reef Lighthouse. 105 Figure 21. Harriet Colfax, longtime lighthouse keeper at Michigan City, Indiana. 108 Figure 22. St. Clair Flats Ship Canal, c.1910. 114 Figure 23. World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 117 Figure 24. Harper’s Weekly cartoon shames U.S. Government into doing more to save mariners lives. Caption reads: Death on economy. U.S. “I suppose I must spend a little on life-saving service, life-boat stations, life-boats, surf-boats, etc.; but it is too bad to be obliged to waste so much money.” 120 Figure 25. Increase Lapham, the Wisconsin scientist behind the creation of Great Lakes marine weather forecasting 125 Figure 26. Whaleback steamer in Sault Sainte Marie Lock. 127 Figure 27. A passing tug showing unloaders at work on both sides of harbor, Conneaut, Ohio, c.1905. 132 Figure 28. Chicago Lumber District. 135 Figure 29. Lake steamer loading iron ore in Duluth harbor. 136 Figure 30. Panorama of Duluth Harbor. 142 Figure 31. The lightship LV-82 before the Great Storm of 1913. 150 Figure 32. Bird’s eye view of U.S. Steel Gary Works, 1908. 152 Figure 33. George Putnam in his office. 155 Figure 34. This c. 1905 advertisement for the Clark Wireless Telegraph and Telephone Company fancifully illustrated wireless communication between stations in Detroit, Buffalo, and a ship on Lake Erie. 156 Figure 35. Headline of Detroit News after the 1913 storm. 160 Figure 36. U.S. Emergency Fleet Corporation Poster, 1918. 169 Figure 37. Gyrocompass on the USCG icebreaker Mackinac. 171 Figure 38. Livingston Channel, Detroit River, sometime between 1909 and 1915. 5 174 Figure 39. USS Robalo ready to be launched in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, 1943. 175 Figure 40. Aircraft carriers USS Wolverine and USS Sable docked near Navy Pier, Chicago. 181 Figure 41. Marblehead Lighthouse, Lake Erie, 1936. 182 Figure 42. Collision Warning Radar ca. 1949, Western Electric Radar First on Great Lakes Fleet. 186 Figure 43. Detroit River Lighthouse that bested the MV-Buffalo in a 1997 incident. 188 Figure 44. St. Lawrence Seaway. 192 Figure 45. Silver Bay-Reserve Taconite Mining, Magnetic Concentration Plant, Babbitt, St. Louis County, MN. 201 Figure 46. St. Helena Island Lighthouse saved and restored through the work of the Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association and the Boy Scouts. 215 Figure 47. Location of areas under consideration. 217 Figure 48. Buffalo Harbor Maritime Cultural Landscape, New York 218 Figure 49. Ships safely anchored in Buffalo Outer Harbor, c.1910-1920. 220 Figure 50. Lackawanna Ship Canal c.1968. Coke ovens on the right. 223 Figure 51. Chicago Harbor Maritime Cultural Landscape, Illinois 224 Figure 52. Chicago Harbor Lighthouse, 2008. 226 Figure 53. Grosse Point Lighthouse, 2006. 227 Figure 54. Location of Grosse Point Lighthouse, twelve miles north of the Chicago River. 231 Figure 55. Manitou Passage Maritime Cultural Landscape, Michigan 233 Figure 56. North Manitou Island Life-Saving Station. 237 Figure 57. Northern portion of Detroit River Maritime Cultural Landscape, Michigan 239 Figure 58. Southern portion of Detroit River Maritime Cultural Landscape, Michigan 240 Figure 59. Fort Gratiot Lighthouse Station. 243 Figure 60. William Livingston Memorial Lighthouse, Belle Island, Detroit, Michigan. 247 Figure 61. Duluth-Superior Maritime Cultural Landscape, Minnesota, Wisconsin. 248 Figure 62. Duluth South Breakwater Outer Light. 249 Figure 63. Duluth South Breakwater Rear Inner Light, 2012. 250 Figure 64. Duluth North Breakwater Light. 251 Figure 65. Superior Entry Breakwater Lighthouse. 252 Figure 66. Duluth United States Lighthouse Service Buoy Depot. 255 Figure 67. Apostle Islands-Ashland Maritime Cultural Landscape, Wisconsin. 256 Figure 68. Lighthouses at Michigan Island. 257 Figure 69. Raspberry Island Lighthouse. 258 Figure 70. Sand Island Lighthouse. 259 Figure 71. Devil’s Island Lighthouse. 260 Figure 72. Outer Island Lighthouse. 6 Introduction Water is an alien element to humans, as a drowning victim well knows. Water is essential to all life on earth, yet it has the power to destroy most terrestrial flora and fauna. In small amounts, it is life- giving. In the form of oceans, rivers, and glaciers it has the power to tear, gouge, and heave the earth in spasms of creative destruction. Water is the dominant feature of the earth. To use it, understand it, to attempt control over it has been at the core of the development of human civilization. People live today on all of the earth’s great land masses because of their success in navigating the sea. Yet the water is always an element of latent danger. Step from the warm sand of a beach into cool water or from the solid surface of a wharf and on to the heaving deck of a ship and you have entered the cold embrace of an elemental power. Joseph Conrad understood the existential nature of the human relationship with water when he wrote “to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” That quotation from Conrad’s epic novel Lord Jim encapsulates maritime history, the story of our struggle to live and work in the world of water.1 This context study was written far from the ocean in the heart of a continent yet on the shore of a vast inland sea. The City of Chicago stretches for miles away from Lake Michigan with most of its residents living out of its sight, unthinkingly taking life from its waters piped mysteriously to their faucet. Tap water is tamed of its destructive power, processed and filtered of impurities. The raw nature of the Great Lakes of North America only becomes apparent to those who walk its wave washed shores or better still attempt to sail its dark waters. Only a few feet from the metropolis, with all if its urbane comforts, is a wilderness of beauty, adventure, and menace. More than three- hundred years after the first ship’s crew went shrieking to their deaths beneath its waves, more than ten-thousand years since the first Paleo-Indian canoe was launched, the Great Lakes are a vast expanse of untamed primal energy, a domain alien to terrestrial life. This context study is about the people and the technologies that have made it possible to use the wilderness of North America’s inland seas for commerce, communication, and recreation. In some ways this, is an environmental history since its focus is on the way North Americans attempted to settle a watery wilderness. While the Great Lakes remain wild, the development of charts, lighthouses, buoys, improved channels, locks, harbors, and cities were all attempts to domesticate these great inland seas. Those features are as much a part of the process of “settlement” as such well-recognized markers of terrestrial development as roads, farms, factories, and towns. Yet while most environmental history places nature as the main narrative actor this study looks instead at the 1 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, (New York: McClure, Phillips, & Company, 1900), 199. 7 technologies developed to harness the lakes to first build a region, then a nation, and eventually to impact the world. The Great Lakes, some 90,000 square miles of open water shape a distinct region of the continent, although that region has received considerably less attention from scholars than other regions, such as New England, French Canada, the Deep South, Great Plains, or the Desert and Mountain West. Yet the communities that line its shores and are grouped into parts of eight American states and the Canadian province of Ontario share a common history of using, abusing, loving, and living with vast lacustrine resource.