elescope JANUARY • FEBRUARY, 2001 Volume XLIX; Number 1 iH srnvfl*; MEMBERSHIP NOTES • It is with deep regret that we announce the death of Life Member Gordon P. Bugbee on October 29, 2000. Gordon served on the Board of Director's until 1983. He had been teaching architecture full-time at Lawrence Tech since 1978, and class schedules conflicted with Board meetings. Gordon left the Board, but still remained active in supplying articles to Telescope. To sum up the early contributions that Gordon made to the Institute was best expressed by Robert Radunz in 1966 when Gordon was stepping down as Editor of Telescope. "The name GORDON P. BUGBEE appeared in Telescope for the first time in the July, 1953 issue. In fact it appears twice. First in a list of new members. Then it appears in a story about the model exhibition to be held in August, 1953. Gordon was one of the members who could be contacted for tickets. Since then, the name GORDON P. BUGBEE has appeared in the pages of Telescope hundreds of times. He has been one of our most loyal workers. His articles about Great Lakes shipping would make a volume in themselves. In fact, a group of articles he wrote about the D & C Line were published in a separate booklet by the Institute. During the period he has been editor of the Telescope, we have seen it grow to one of the outstanding marine publications in the country. Telescope and the Institute have received national recognition that was due in no small part of the work of GORDON BUGBEE." Gordon Bugbee served as Telescope editor from 1962 to 1966, when he moved to Kalamazoo and found it difficult to make regular trips back to the museum to research future Telescope issues. He published two books that were printed by the Institute: The Lake Erie Sidewheel Steamers of Frank E. Kirby (Great Lakes Model Shipbuilder's Guild, 1955) and The D-III (City o f Detroit I I I ) in 1976. Both books are out of print, but are still used by researchers at the Dossin Museum. Our newer members have seen reprints of Gordon's articles in Telescope recalling the early days of passenger ships on the lakes. Several of these articles were provided to passengers on the special Bob-Lo boat cruises up the St. Clair River. In this issue we have reprinted part of his Northwest article that appeared in the June, 1966 Telescope. One can see the in-depth research that Gordon did, covering both the vessel's history as well as the company's history. CALENDAR OF EVENTS - See Page 25 CONTENTS • The Ocean Liners of The Lakes................................................................................................................................ 3 Great Lakes & Seaway N e w s ............................................................................................................................... 11 Calendar of E v e n ts ................................................................................................................................................... 25 OUR COVER PICTURE . The NORTH WEST, as depicted on a postcard mailed August 27, 1897 to Miss Lottie Herrington in Bad Axe, Michigan. Telescope© is produced with assistance from the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, an agency of the Historical Department of the City of Detroit. Visit our Website at: http://www.glmi.org Published at Detroit, Michigan by the GREAT LAKES MARITIME INSTITUTE ©All rights reserved. Printed in the United States by Macomb Printing, Inc. JANUARY • FEBRUARY, 2001 Page 3 THE OCEAN LINERS OF THE LAKES by Gordon P. Bugbee June, 1996 Telescope Almost-legendary splendor surrounds the memory But the NORTH WEST and NORTH LAND of the twin Great Northern Railroad liners North West were built about a decade before this more abundant and North Land. Now and again one hears that they group of lake ships. In 1895 there was nothing in their were the most magnificent passenger liners the Great class on the lakes. Their promoters turned instead to Lakes have ever known. Other lake people measure the grandest ocean liners of the day for a yardstick of them against features of more recent, more familiar superlatives. NORTH WEST and NORTH LAND ships - public rooms of CITY OF DETROIT III or the passed separately from passenger services by the First ASSINIBOIA dining room - and wonder how this World War, so few remember their cruises today. could be so. Little in print substantiates their claim, other than / ' Photo from Photo from Dossin Museum Collection NORTH WEST with a bone in her teeth "running at a rate of speed exceeding 20 knots," as shown in Northern Steamship Co.'s monograph of 1895. Much of the material in this issue comes by courtesy of J. Michael O'Brien. TELESCOPE Page 4 handsome views in Dana Bowen’s books, or Ken Smith’s account in Ships That Never Die. In one sense, however, they are still with us. One person who spent childhood vacations on NORTH LAND summer cruises, boarded the SOUTH AMERICAN for the first time four decades later, and felt immediately at home. For the Georgian Bay liners were bom close to the image of NORTH WEST and NORTH LAND, just when those ships were ending their own brief passenger careers. It is fascinating to rediscover these handsome ships in something more than their external aspect. In the midnineties when they came out, their cabins were well illustrated both in the Marine Review and in the bound monograph of 1895, The Northern Steamship Co's North West and North Land. Until the Seaway came, the Great Lakes enjoyed a rather self-contained shipping history. Few lake ships came from beyond or went elsewhere to trade. It has thus been easy for historians to keep track of them. In its isolation, the lake trade created its own patterns of ships. The best known of these were the engines-aft “propellers” and "steam barges” and “whalebacks”, and their descendants, the ore carriers of today. But there have been times when lake men looked eastward to the Atlantic and beyond for inspiration. The Lake Erie night steamers took their form from Fall River Liners of Long Island Sound. Niagara Navigation steamers of Lake Ontario had a touch of British Channel ships. Recent ships have shown ocean manners - AQUARAMA and the new Canadian package freighter like FORT YORK. One early example of ocean fashions on the lakes was Lake Michigan’s pair of 250-foot ferries DETROIT and MILWAUKEE of 1859. They seem to have been the lakes’ only Ocean Fashions in Lake Ships (from drawings by Samuel Ward sidewheelers having paddle boxes fully exposed Stanton) top - MILWAUKEE, 1859; upper middle -OWEGO, in the manner of contemporary Cunard or 1887; lower middle - VIRGINIA, 1891; bottom - MANITOU, Collins liners of the Atlantic. In such fashions, 1893 ; below - Cunard liner ETRURIA of 1884, drawing from their cabins were contained within the shape of Ocean Steamships. the hull, with little more cabin work than the pilothouse standing exposed to the weather. Ocean styling flourished on the lakes briefly in the eighties and nineties while lake carriers were searching for their modem forms. Package freighters of the Lehigh Valley and Erie Railroad fleets were the best examples of their trend. Bulk carriers like MARYLAND and CENTURION also had their machinery placed JANUARY • FEBRUARY, 2001 Page 5 nearly amidships. Largest and fastest on the lakes then cargoes in the late eighties. To carry these cargoes were Erie Railroad’s 350-foot package freighters eastward, he circumvented the Lake Superior Transit OWEGO and CHEMUNG of 1887-88. pool of eastern railroad ships and built his own vessels. They were modeled closely after Atlantic coastal Cleveland’s Globe Iron Works had grown into the freighters of the Mallory Line. Their powerful engines lakes’ principal supplier of steel bulk and package and fine hull lines gave them laurels in impromptu races freighters since its initial venture in metal with other package cargo liners of the Chicago and shipbuilding, ONOKO of 1882. In 1887 it had just Buffalo trade. built the bulk freighter CARNBRIA with the lakes’ Lake Superior then had less glamorous American- first triple-expansion engine. And it was laying down flag freighters than those on the Chicago run. They were the first of the ocean-style Lehigh Valley package principally wooden Ward Line propellers, or older tonnage pooled by various railroad fleets to make up the Lake Superior Transit Company. But three Canadian ships of 1884 were the finest passenger-cargo steamships of the lakes, ALBERRA, ATHAB ASKA and the unfortunate ALGOMA. These actually came K from shipyards overseas in Scotland. And they introduced many modern ocean innovations to the lakes, such as the “Plimsoll line”, which other lake ships needed a decade or more to begin adopting grudgingly. But in appearance the Canadian Pacific ships and Algoma ‘s replacement, MANITOBA of 1889, were less transplanted ocean liners than greatly modernized engines-aft traditional propellers. The Canadian Pacific was part of the great spectacle of western railroads pushing toward the Pacific between the sixties and the nineties. Another of these railroads began in the Lake Superior region as the St. Paul and Pacific Railway. But it made very little progress westward before financial grief reorganized by a Red River steamboat Stem of NORTH WEST is like lower part of that of operator named James Jerome Hill. Now it SOUTH AMERICAN (drawing from Ocean Steamships) was less pompously rechristened the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway. Hill encouraged Canadian friends to finance it, as the railroad freighters. Hill passed over the Lehigh Valley model now hoped merely to reach the Canadian border and in favor of one closer to CAMBRIA. So Globe built meet feeders of the growing Canadian Pacific system. the six 312-foot “Manitoba boats” for Hill's new But in a few years the Canadian Pacific began pushing Northern Steamship Company.