Author: Neel R. Zoss
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738551432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
During the last years of the 19th century, the Duluth Harbor, situated between the sister cities of Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, was the birthplace of a bold and innovative and decidedly odd-looking class of Great Lakes barges and steamships known as whalebacks. Capt. Alexander McDougall and his American Steel Barge Company built the curved-decked, snout-nosed whalebacks on the shores of the harbor, first at Duluth's Rice's Point and later in Howard's Pocket at Superior. The vessels were a radical departure, in design, form, and construction, from the standard shipbuilding concepts of the era but proved themselves more than capable as a number of the boats sailed the Great Lakes and the seaboards of America until the 1960s. All the whalebacks are gone now--either scrapped or sunk--with one exception. After sailing the lakes for more than 70 years, the last whaleback, the SS Meteor, returned home to Superior in 1972 and is now continuing its service as a magnificent maritime museum on Barker's Island.
Author: C. Roger Pellett
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814344771
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
A history of the American Steel Barge Company and the vessels that it built and operated. The whaleback ship reflected the experiences of its inventor, Captain Alexander McDougall, who decided in the 1880s that he could build an improved and easily towed barge cheaply by using the relatively unskilled labor force available in his adopted hometown of Duluth, Minnesota. Captain McDougall’s dream resulted in the creation of the American Steel Barge Company. From 1888 to 1898, the American Steel Barge Company built and operated a fleet of forty-four barges and steamships on the Great Lakes and in international trade. These new ships were considered revolutionary by some and nautical curiosities by others. Built from what was then a high tech material (steel) and powered by state-of-the-art steam machinery, their creation in the remote north was a sign of industrial accomplishment. In Whaleback Ships and the American Steel Barge Company, Roger C. Pellett explains that the construction of these ships and the industrial infrastructure required to build them was financed by a syndicate that included some of the major players active in the Golden Age of American capitalism. The American Steel Barge Company operated profitably from 1889 through 1892, each year adding new vessels to its growing fleet. By 1893, it had run out of cash. The cash crisis worsened with the onset of the Panic of 1893, which plunged the country into a depression that mostly halted the ship-building industry. Only one shareholder, John D. Rockefeller, was willing and able to invest in the company to keep it afloat, and by doing so he gained control. When prosperity returned in 1896, the interest in huge iron ore deposits on the Mesabe Range required larger, more efficient vessels. In an attempt to meet this need, the company built another vessel that incorporated many whaleback features but included a conventional Great Lakes steamship bow. Although this new steamship compared favorably with vessels of conventional design, it was the last vessel of whaleback design to be built. Whaleback Ships and the American Steel Barge Company objectively examines the design of these ships using the original design drawings, notes the successes and failures of the company’s business strategy, and highlights the men at the operating level that attempted to make this strategy work. Readers interested in the maritime history of the Great Lakes and the industries that developed around them will find this book fascinating.
Author: Al Miller
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814328323
Category : Shipping
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
Tin Stackers tells its story of the role of the U.S. Steel Corporation's largest commercial fleet.
Author: Jim Burnham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997312607
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
15 Years of the best photography from the creators of LelandReport.com, a photo-a-day diary from Leelanau County, Michigan
Author: Kathryn Bishop Eckert
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814328071
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Eckert stresses the importance of the building materials as she explores the architectural history of a region whose builders wanted to reflect the local landscape.
Author: Robert Campbell
Publisher: Thunder Bay Press Michigan
ISBN: 9781933272504
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Robert Campbell's Classic Ships of the Great Lakes presents a visually stunning array of historical and present-day inland shipping including passenger ships, whaleback, bulk carriers, self-unloaders, cement carriers, oil tankers, car ferries, super ships, and more.
Author: George Woodman Hilton
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804742405
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
This is the definitive account of the rise, fall, and extinction of steam passenger transportation on Lake Michigan from its origin in the late 1840s to the demise of the last steamers in 1970.
Author: John Vincent Jezierski
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814324516
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
The story of the most prolific African American photographers in North America. From its beginnings in York, Pennsylvania, in 1847, until the death of Wallace L. Goodridge in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1922, the Goodridge Brothers Studio was the most significant and enduring African American photographic establishment in North America. In Enterprising Images, John Vincent Jezierski tells the story of one of America's first families of photography, documenting the history of the Goodridge studio for three-quarters of a century. The existence of more than one thousand Goodridge photographs in all formats and the family's professional and personal activism enrich the portrait that emerges of this extraordinary family. Weaving photographic and regional history with the narrative of a family whose lives paralleled the social and political happenings of the country, Jezierski provides the reader with a complex family biography for those interested in regional and African American, as well as photographic, history.
Author: Paul Taylor
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814339301
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Readers interested in American history, Civil War history, or the ethnic history of Detroit will appreciate the full picture of the time period Taylor presents in "Old Slow Town."
Author: Mark L. Thompson
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814338356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakestraces the evolution of the Great Lakes shipping industry over the last three centuries. The Great Lakes shipping industry can trace its lineage to 1679 with the launching on Lake Erie of the Griffon, a sixty-foot galley weighing nearly fifty tons. Built by LaSalle, a French explorer who had been commissioned to search for a passage through North America to China, it was the first sailing ship to operate on the upper lakes, signaling the dawn of the Great Lakes shipping industry as we know it today. Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakes is the most thorough and factual study of the Great Lakes shipping industry written this century. Author Mark L. Thompson tells the fascinating story of the world's most efficient bulk transportation system, describing the Great Lakes freighters, the cargoes of the great ships ,and the men and women who have served as crew. He documents the dramatic changes that have taken places in the industry and looks at the critical role that Great Lakes shipping plays in the economic well-being of the U.S. and Canada, despite the fact tat the size of the fleet and the amount of cargo carried have declined dramatically in recent years. Spanning more than three centuries, from LaSalle's voyage in 1679, through 1975 with the mysterious sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, to life aboard today's thousand-foot behemoths, this important volume documents the evolution of the industry through its "Golden Age" at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, with a downsized U.S. fleet that numbers fewer than seventy vessels.
