Schooners and Steam – Michigan’s Golden Age of Shipbuilding

Explore Michigan’s shipbuilding legacy from 19th-century schooners to Great Lakes freighters. Learn how towns like St. Clair and Port Huron became shipbuilding hubs in “Schooners and Steam” on The End of the Road in Michigan podcast.

Episode Transcript

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This is the end of the road in Michigan, a podcast where we follow forgotten trails, uncover

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lost voices, and tell the stories of people and places once vital to Michigan's identity.
Today, we take a quiet walk along the St. Clair River, past quiet docks and faded shipyards,
to remember the men, the timber, and the towns that built an empire of wooden halls and
iron steamers.
This is the story of Michigan's shipbuilding heyday, and the river towns that once powered

(00:25):
the Great Lakes.
In the 19th century, Michigan didn't just lead the nation in lumber, it turned that
timber into ships.
Along the St. Clair River, from Algonac to Port Huron, the sounds of hammers and saws
once echoed across the water.
Towns like Marine City and St. Clair were more than sleepy waterfront communities, they
were centers of shipbuilding.

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Men carved entire schooner fleets from White Oak and Pine harvested just miles inland.
According to historical records, over 350 wooden vessels were built along the St. Clair in
just a few decades.
These ships hauled everything from grain to copper, and later, passengers, across the Great
Lakes, they were crafted by hand, beam by beam, by shipwrites who knew the wind, water,

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and weight of wood like few others.
Long before sawmills or schooners, the Great Lakes were traveled in silence, in lightweight
birch bark canoes of the Anishinaabe people.
Later, French Voyagers rode Batot across the inland seas, these shallow draft boats hauled
fur, food, and people along tight river corridors and open lakes stretches alike.
But change came fast.

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In 1679, French explorer Renee Robert Cavallier, Cyr de la Salle, launched the Griffin, the
first European-style sailing ship built west of Niagara.
She left the Niagara River, cross Lake Erie, and entered the pages of legend.
La Salle filled her with fur from Lake Michigan, but she vanished on her return voyage.
No wreckage was ever found.

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To this day, the Griffin is considered the holy grail of Great Lakes shipwrecks.
It wasn't until after the War of 1812 that shipbuilding in Michigan truly began to scale.
In 1818, the United States government ordered a revenue cutter built at Fort Gratchet.
They named her the split log, a modest 34-foot vessel with a broad beam and a deep purpose,
patrol the border and collect customs.

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Then came Captain Samuel Ward, a pioneer with big ambitions.
In 1824, he built the St. Clair, a forerunner of the cargo scooters that would eventually
haul freight all the way to the Atlantic via the Erie Canal, though he was ahead of his
time, ward laid the keel of a booming industry.
By the 1840s, his shipyard was one of the most prolific on the lakes.

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From 1845 to 1857, Ward's yards in St. Clair produced dozens of first-class vessels, many
of them side-wheel steamers, elegant, powerful, and efficient.
These steamers ferried passengers and cargo between Detroit, Port Huron, and Beyond.
William Lee Janks, in his history of St. Clair County, describes a time when the ward company

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dominated the local waterways.
He writes that competitors were seen as trespassers, and Ward's agents sometimes denied rival
travelers meals or even passage.
It was a golden age of rivalry and invention, when a new hull shape, a faster engine, or
a better propeller could make or break a season.
Further north, in the Saginaw Valley, another transformation was underway.

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Michigan's lumber boom created the need for durable, efficient ships.
Sawmills lined the bags of the Saginaw River, and shipyards emerged to meet demand.
By the 1880s, companies like West Bay City Shipbuilding and Defoe Shipbuilding were turning
out massive scooners to carry lumber to Chicago, Cleveland, and Buffalo.
The Great Lakes became a floating forest.

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Each ship built in Saginaw Bay was a promise that Michigan timber would fuel America's
growth, and as railroads pushed west, ships carried the bones of city's eastward.
As wood gave way to iron, Michigan adapted again.
In 1902, the Great Lakes Engineering works opened in E-course.
They built steel freighters, bigger, stronger, and faster than anything before.

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Among their most famous vessels was the Edmund Fitzgerald, launched in 1958, a thousand
feet long and designed for ore transport, she was the pride of the lakes.
Her loss in 1975 became a national tragedy, at a haunting symbol of the power and peril
of Great Lakes shipping.
Glue closed in 1961.
Its final ship The Arthur B. Homer, launched that same year.

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It marked the end of large-scale shipbuilding in Metro Detroit.
Today, the shipyards are mostly silent.
But their legacy lives on, in freighters still plying the lakes, in museums like the Dossine
Great Lakes Museum on Bel Isle, and in stories passed from fathers to sons who once worked
the yards.
In Fissel, built in 1861 by Captain Ward and St. Clair, was the region's first ship dedicated

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solely to freight, she weighed just 112 tons, but her influence was profound.
The four runner of the 1,000 foot orboats we see today, Michigan didn't just build
ships, it built an identity, one plank and one rivet at a time.
That's it for this episode of The End of the Road in Michigan.
From the decks of wooden scooners to the halls of iron giants, the story of shipbuilding

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in Michigan is one of resourcefulness, ambition, and local pride.
It's also a reminder that the rivers and lakes that shaped our state are still with us,
waiting for their stories to be told again.
If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review, share it with a friend, or find more
stories at thumbwind.com.
Until next time, thanks for listening.