Erie, Pa.,—The U.S.S. Wolverine, formerly the Michigan, first iron warship ever built by the U. S. Navy, will be cut up for scrap in the nation’s war program.
The decision has been reached by the Erie City Council, after receipt of a request from First Lieutenant M. K. Henderson of the Cleveland district of the War Department Ordnance District.
The Wolverine, built prior to the Civil War, has laid in Presque Isle Bay here for a number of years and has annually attracted throngs of tourists.
This recent newspaper item indicates that the Navy’s first iron warship, and probably the oldest iron-hulled ship in the world, is going to become a casualty of the present world conflict. The passing of the old vessel, one of the richest in historic background in the whole naval establishment, will bring many a heart twinge to men who spent their boyhood along the shores of the Great Lakes in the days when the sight of the U.S.S. Michigan paddling on her course was an event to be remembered and talked about a long time thereafter.
It was away back in 1842 that the Navy Department ordered plans drawn for a bark-rigged, iron-hulled steamer driven by paddle wheels for use as a gunboat on the Great Lakes. Her hull was designed by Naval Constructor Samuel Hart, U. S. Navy, and the engines and boilers were built in Pittsburgh by Stackhouse & Tomlinson.
The actual construction work started in Pittsburgh in the winter of 1843. The plates, frames, and many other iron parts were made there for assembly in Erie and were transported to that Lake Erie port by teams of oxen, for no railroad had been built at the time. The hull plates were made of so-called charcoal iron, about three-eighths of an inch thick, and were beaten into shape with heavy mauls as they lay in a bed of sand. The actual building of the ship began on ways at the foot of French Street in Erie, and her sides rose from three heavy box keelsons running the length of the ship, while two shorter keelsons formed the foundation for the engine frame.
An iron ship in those days was a radically new idea and the method of propulsion by steam was scarcely less strange to the country. The Michigan was given the latest design of steam engine that her day afforded. She was fitted with two inclined direct-acting condensing engines, placed side by side, the cylinders being 36 inches in diameter and with an 8-foot stroke. The same engines still rest in the ship, after being used continuously during her 80 active years as a man-of-war. Her two original boilers lasted nearly 50 years and were replaced in 1893 by the pair that are now in the old ship’s hull. Wood served as fuel until coal became more readily available at lake ports, and in her earlier years the Michigan carried sails as an aid to propulsion.
The Michigan was commissioned August 9,1843, and made her first Great Lakes cruise in 1844 under the command of Commander William P. Inman, U. S. Navy, who was her captain until October, 1845, when he was relieved by Captain Stephen Champlin, U. S. Navy, a cousin of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who had commanded one of Perry’s smaller vessels, the Scorpion, in the Battle of Lake Erie. Captain Champlin remained in command of the Michigan for three years, after which followed a list of 37 commanding officers, the last being Lieutenant Commander William L. Morrison, U.S.N.R., of Erie.
The Michigan is 163 feet long, has a beam of 27 feet and a normal draft of 10 feet. Her displacement is 600 tons. The two wheels that mount her paddles are 20 feet in diameter and in her many decades of service the ship carried many armaments, guns being replaced as they were invented or improved. The gunboat’s upper works have been changed several times since her launching, the deckhouses being rebuilt to meet the requirements of the work she was doing at the time. The forward deck is mostly clear as the ship stands today awaiting the junkman’s harsh hands.
A large pilothouse serves the double purpose of navigating station and chart- room. There is a roomy open bridge above and bridges extend over the paddle boxes amidships. The captain’s cabin is aft on the main deck and consists of a roomy lounge with easy chairs', table, desk and bookcases, two staterooms and bath, all paneled in rich mahogany. The ship normally carried a crew of 106 officers and men.
Her career, in spite of her armament, has been generally peaceful with only three oustanding bits of excitement to enliven her long period of faithful service. The first came to her just before the Civil War, when she was sent to disband a Mormon colony that had settled on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, under the “rule” of “King” James Jesse Strang, a New York lawyer who carried on such lawless practices and flouted local authorities so completely that the United States had to step in. The “empire” was broken up by the Michigan and her crew without gunfire or bloodshed so far as the naval force was concerned.
The gunboat’s second adventure befell her during the Civil War. Confederate refugees in Canada seized the passenger steamers Phil Parsons and Island Queen near Sandusky and set out to hunt for the U.S.S. Michigan. They intended to draw alongside the gunboat, overpower her unsuspecting crew, and turn the little ship into a raider to prey upon Great Lakes commerce and ports, as well as to free Confederate prisoners then held on Johnson’s Island in Sandusky Bay.
The watch on board the Michigan saw the passenger boats coming and became suspicious because of the fact that the two were in company. The gunboat got under way and chased the commandeered steamers into Canadian waters, where authorities collected the would-be raiders behind a stockade.
The Michigan's third bit of excitement was furnished by the Fenian Invasion of Canada in 1866. The self-appointed and entirely unofficial invaders massed at Buffalo to the number of 1,500, with the capture of Canada as their objective. They crossed the Niagara River at Black Rock, with green flags flying, and took possession of the ruins of old Fort Erie on the Canadian shore. A hastily gathered force of Canadian volunteers here encountered the invading “army” and a desultory battle began that ended with the breaking up of the Fenian lines. The invaders retreated in disorder to the river bank seeking to return to Buffalo, and there found themselves confronted by the manned battery of the Michigan.
With the outraged Canadians pressing them from the rear and a business-like gunboat ready for action in front, it was not hard to discover and arrest the ringleaders while the “understrappers” were glad enough to lay down their arms and return home as unobtrusively as possible.
The years of peace that followed the Civil War found the Michigan tracing lake bottoms and doing other survey work. In the Spanish-American War she trained recruits, and during the period of calm until World War I she made periodic cruises with various Naval Reserve detachments from cities along the Great Lakes. In June, 1905, her name was changed to Wolverine, since a big battleship was being launched along the Atlantic coast—one of the early dreadnought class, and carrying the name of Michigan. So the old iron ship up on the lakes had to take the nickname of the state whose name she had previously carried so honorably.
World War I again brought the Wolverine active duty in the training of recruits for the Navy, and then peace came again and she settled into what was to be her final round of easy duty, of summer training cruises, of sunning her aged bones at pleasant wharves in kindly harbors. But even this phase of her life had to end.
The old Wolverine was returning from one of her upper lake training cruises and passing through the Straits of Mackinac on August 12, 1923, when a connecting rod on her port engine broke. The ship drifted while her engineers made temporary repairs and then she resumed her voyage under her own power but unable to go more than 5 knots an hour.
She weathered a summer gale down in Lake Huron and kept doggedly on until she reached her home wharf at Erie. Her sailing days were over, for she was soon stricken from the Navy List and lay forlornly at her wharf for five years before anybody thought to do anything about finding a last resting place for so honorable and faithful a servant of the nation.
Finally two old friends, one her last commander, William L. Morrison, and another an Erie master-mariner, Captain P. J. Grant, arranged to have her towed to her present anchorage at Crystal Point in famous Misery Bay. Tugs took her there in November, 1928, and she has remained there in shallow water ever since under the protection of the police of the Presque Isle State Park which surrounds her berth. These men have watched over the old ship closely so that she would be protected from vandals.
But police cannot stay time in its work, so dry rot has attacked cabins and deckhouses. Her broken connecting rod still hangs where it fell on her last cruise, and her galley ranges, storerooms and iceboxes are thick with dust, while the white tile floor in the once spotless galley still tries to peep through the layer of shore dirt, and her ports yawn darkly minus their guns.
In this berth, within sight of Lake Erie that first bore the gallant old ship and felt her hurrying keel so many times, the old ship is soon to meet the shipbreaker, and when he is finished with her beams and engines and tough old hull she will be but a memory.