Naval Construction on the Great Lakes

The story of naval construction on the Great Lakes is more than the detailing and interpreting of statistics. It is more than numbers of ships built and their tonnages. It is the story of Presque Isle, of shipbuilding “firsts,” of short, narrow locks and shallow channels limiting access to and from the sea. Above all, it is the story of ingenious and able men. It is all of these and much more!

The story started with the sloop Detroit, which our government bought in 1796 to carry troops and supplies between Presque Isle (Erie, Pennsylvania) and other ports in the Old Northwest. She had been built three years earlier by Jim Connoly and Captain Peter Curry, who were early residents on the River Rouge. The acquisition of the 70-ton Detroit, the first United States government vessel on the Lakes, brought Captain Curry into government service as her skipper. Although he had three-years’ experience in operating the vessel in the fur and general merchandise trade, Curry at times had difficulty in securing enough sailors to man all of the vessel’s positions. It seems that sailors were then “. . . few and in big demand.” This shortage was met by detailing soldiers to the unfilled jobs and by paying them an extra $5 per month in addition to their regular $4 monthly salary. Even so, the soldiers could not match the $20 per month paid to sawyers, the $15 paid to teamsters, or the $45 (plus two rations) paid to ship carpenters.

These were the prevailing wages in 1797, when our first shipyard on the Great Lakes was established just below Detroit on the River Rouge. This yard was short lived, but it succeeded in turning out two warships—the 150-ton brig Adams in the spring of 1800 and the 70-ton sloop Tracy. Both vessels immediately began carrying supplies and personnel for the government. In keeping with the spirit of the times, they occasionally carried some commercial freight as well. The resulting revenues helped reduce their annual operating costs substantially.

A highlight in the career of the Tracy occurred in 1803, when she carried a garrison to what is now Chicago. By that act she became closely associated with the founding of the Windy City. Existing records do not record further incidents in the life of the Tracy, but they do record the capture of the Adams by the British, along with the fall of the settlement at Detroit in August of 1812. They also tell us that British gunfire sank the Adams a little later in order to prevent her being recaptured by a group of Americans under the daring leadership of Lieutenant Elliott, a U. S. naval officer.

It would be interesting to have a record of all the vessels built and operating on the Lakes during the 1790’s, but the sources of information are meager. Our lack of records apparently stems from a fire which took place in several offices in the War Department in the year 1800, destroying valuable papers that covered the period. From other references, however, we know that there was considerable shipbuilding activity on the River Rouge. For example, Captain Hector McLean, Commandant of Fort Malden at Amherstburg, complained by letter, dated July 10, 1799, to his superiors at Quebec that he could not get hull repairs effected on His Majesty’s Ship Ottawa because of the number of vessels being built at the “River Rouge yard where the wages are high.”

At the turn of the century there were only two United States naval vessels on the Lakes, but twelve years later the number had grown to 37 built or building, and 34 operating. The majority of these warships were schooners mounting less than seven guns and displacing less than a hundred tons apiece. Eleven of the vessels, however, carried batteries in excess of 18 guns and displaced more than 450 tons each. The largest warship operating on the Lakes was the Superior, 1,580 tons and 62 guns. She was attached to the Lake Ontario fleet and later became Commodore Isaac Chauncey’s flagship. The two most famous vessels—and the largest ones on Lake Erie—were, of course, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s Lawrence and Niagara.

Two-thirds of all the warships on the Lakes were stationed on Lake Ontario, since we needed to counter the vigorous shipbuilding efforts of the British commander stationed there. Lake Erie, with only a third of the vessels on the Lakes, provided the setting for Commodore Perrys’ brilliant naval victory at Put-in-Bay in September, 1813. Most Americans could give the highlights of that victory, but not too many are familiar with the job the people of Presque Isle, under the outstanding leadership of Daniel Dobbins, did in building Perry’s fleet in such record-breaking time.

Dobbins’ letters and papers on file with the Buffalo Historical Society give us a detailed description of that job and of that remarkable leader. They tell us that Dobbins was skipper of the two-masted topsail trading schooner Salina at the time he was captured by the British at Mackinac in July, 1812. He was taken to Detroit and then to Malden, where he escaped a month later by paddling a dugout across Lake Erie to Sandusky. There he procured a horse and rode to Cleveland. Proceeding by canoe to Presque Isle, he gave the first news of the fall of Mackinac and of General Hull’s surrender of Detroit. At the request of General Mead, the officer in command of Presque Isle, Captain Dobbins at once started for Washington as bearer of dispatches giving details of the important events which he had witnessed. The journey was long and toilsome, through the forests to Pittsburgh, thence by the military road to Baltimore.

Upon reaching Washington, Dobbins hastened to the War Office and laid his dispatches before Secretary Eustis. Up to that time not the slightest intimation of the disaster had been received in the capital. The Secretary of War went at once to the White House to confer with President Madison. The cabinet was hastily summoned, and the news was fully discussed. The intelligence of the double disaster was a crushing blow. It seemed as though our empire in the Northwest was gone and the New York frontier appeared to be in greater jeopardy than ever before. Finally, President Madison exclaimed: “There is one thing to be done. We must gain control of the Lakes. Therein lies our only safety.”

It was decided to place Captain Dobbins in charge of the preliminary work of constructing a fleet on the Lakes. He was commissioned an officer in the Navy and authorized to employ men, purchase supplies, and perform such other duties as might be required to carry out his mission. On his return trip to Erie he engaged several ship carpenters in New York, and they provided the nucleus of his working force.

Dobbins was authorized to draw on the Navy Department for $2,000 to start the building of Perry’s fleet, and one of his first steps was to make contracts for standing timber convenient to the shipyard. The uniform price was one dollar a tree. Coal was hauled from the pits—location uncertain— at 6¼ cents a bushel. Wages ranged from $2.50 a day for the master shipbuilder down to 62½ cents for axemen. Hauling, with horses or oxen, cost $4 a day. Board for the men was $2.25 per week.

Acting largely on his own responsibility, but as he believed with the approval of the Navy Department, Dobbins hastened the preliminary work. In order to set a good example, he himself on October 24, 1812, felled the first tree, a great oak, and hewed out the trunk. It afterwards formed the keel of the Niagara. At the beginning of November, he engaged Ebenezer Crosby of Buffalo as master builder. Their original contract, still preserved, is one of the many interesting documents in the Dobbins papers.

On December 12, Dobbins wrote a progress report to Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton. He told the Secretary that some of the men who were hired in the East had not yet “come on as was expected . . . ” and reported, “ice was forming in the Lakes and would soon form a complete barrier against the British for this winter.” He declared that he was having difficulty in making contracts with the local interests because, “the people of this country are poor and very liable to fail.” Nevertheless, Dobbins stated that he had laid down two hulls of “50-foot keels 17 foot beams, 5 foot hold and from appearances will be fast sailors if you wish me to go on with this work you will please give me orders to draw, I have expended a considerable sum more than the two thousand dollars on account.”

There is nothing among the Dobbins papers which may be regarded as total accounting of the cost of building the fleet. From the accounts of Noah Brown, whom Dobbins selected as Superintendent of Construction, we learn that a total of $19,466.42 was spent during the period from November 1, 1812 to March 27, 1813. This amount included the costs of cutting timber, meeting shipyard payrolls, board for the men, and boating and handling from Buffalo. In these old accounts there is also frequent mention of whiskey—a cost of shipbuilding as commonplace in those days as the weekly board bill.

Dobbins’ pleas for additional funds must have been granted because we find him starting construction of the Lawrence and Niagara early in 1813. Designed by Henry Eckford, the most famous American naval architect of his day, they were 110 feet between perpendiculars, brig-rigged, and armed with eighteen 32-pound carronades and two 12-pound guns.

Iron had to come from Pittsburgh, fitting-out items from Philadelphia, and guns from Buffalo. But even with those obstacles, by July 25—six months from keel date—both vessels were ready for operations, except that they could be only partially manned. Less than two months later, Perry sent his historic message, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

Perry’s victory exerted a major influence on the outcome of the war and a decisive influence on the course of naval construction on the Lakes. The Rush-Bagot Treaty signed in 1817 stipulated amongst other things that thenceforth neither party could maintain more than one warship on Lake Ontario, nor more than two on the upper Lakes. The vessels could not exceed 100 tons, and they could not be armed with more than one 18-pounder.^[1] In keeping with the spirit behind the treaty, a United States Navy inspection party in 1821 condemned all but one of the many warships that we had on the Lakes. As a result, the Lady of the Lake, a schooner of 89 tons, became in 1823 the only armed American ship operating on the Lakes. She brought to a close the earliest and perhaps the most colorful period of naval construction in that area.

In spite of the original 100-ton displacement limitation of the Rush-Bagot Treaty, we managed to launch the 685-ton Michigan at Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1843. She was the Navy’s first iron-hulled warship. Her plates were fabricated in Pittsburgh and hauled to Erie by canal and ox teams. Originally rigged as a bark but later changed to a schooner, the Michigan also had two inclined, direct-acting, condensing engines which could give her a speed of 10 knots under power. In 1844, she began cruising the Great Lakes, but with only one of the six guns her plans called for. This change was made to meet the ordnance limitation of the Rush-Bagot Treaty and to satisfy the British Minister.

In 1905, the Michigan's name was changed to Wolverine, so that her old name could be given to a new battleship. The venerable ship made her last trip under power in 1923 and was finally laid up at Erie. In 1943, 100 years after launching, she was stricken from the Navy list and in 1949 she was scrapped. That long life is characteristic of Great Lakes vessels and creates a problem that will be considered later on in this article.

The last half of the nineteenth century saw naval shipbuilding activity on the Lakes at a standstill. From the War of 1812 up to the time of World War I, Great Lakes builders were credited with producing just one warship, the aforementioned Michigan, while the coastal builders produced over 1,500,000 tons. However, this same period saw a tremendous increase of activity in the building of merchant ships, with the output coming to over 5,300,000 gross tons on the Great Lakes alone.

The rivers in the Great Lakes domain were also producing merchant ships. If their 2,000,000 tons are added to the Lakes output, we find that the Great Lakes Trading Area can take credit—thanks largely to the steel industry’s dependence on water transportation—for producing about one-third of the country’s entire merchant ship construction up to the start of World War I.

Although merchant ship construction on the Lakes and rivers declined drastically during World War II, naval construction took up any excess capacity as rapidly as it developed.

The drop in merchant ship construction resulted from the inability of inland shipbuilders to deliver big ships through the restrictive locks and channels leading to the sea, but the inland builders were not prevented from constructing and delivering many of the smaller, urgently needed types of naval vessels. They attacked this task with vigor and with the help of assembly line techniques which Henry Ford proved during World War I could be successfully applied to ship construction.

During that war Ford mass-produced 55 Eagle Boats on the Rouge. Applying his car-manufacturing experience, he set up three assembly lines of seven stations each; through them three hulls proceeded simultaneously. In this endeavor Ford proved the feasibility of transferring hulls almost at will from location to location within a fabricating and assembly area. He showed that through simplified ship designs, jigged assemblies, and other forms of standardization in repeat production, the industry could stretch to the utmost the services of the relatively few fully-trained shipfitters, boilermakers, and coppersmiths, and could make maximum use of unskilled labor.

The Ford idea was aggressively exploited during World War II. Inland builders led the parade. Shipyards emerged in the midst of waterfront farm lands on which crops were still under cultivation. On several of these sites, corn was being harvested on one side of a hastily-erected shipyard fence while LST’s and other hulls on the inside began to hit the water at a rate which forecast defeat for the Axis powers.

By the war’s end, thirty Great Lakes shipbuilders had turned out forty-seven different types of naval vessels totaling 600,000 tons. Included in these types were submarines, destroyer escorts, minesweepers, LST’s, and cargo vessels, as well as various amphibious, harbor, and patrol craft. At the same time, eleven builders located along the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Illinois Rivers had delivered eight different types (above 100 tons each) of naval vessels totaling 900,000 tons. They included small oilers, LST’s and LCT’s, towboats, and several types of cargo barges.

Having summarized the history of ship construction on the Great Lakes, it is now possible to discuss in some detail the current problems of the Lakes shipbuilders. From 1900 to 1909, nearly 45 per cent of all United States merchant ship tonnage was being turned out by them. Then came a decline which was not halted until World War II, and only recently has the peacetime picture begun to brighten. The reasons for the extent of the decline are not altogether clear. Obviously the two World Wars and the depressions contributed substantially to the total decline. We can also surmise, however, that the product was too good—built to last a long, long time. Could it be too long? Quality has always been uppermost in the shipbuilding industry. After all, safety of life and limb—even the fate of a battle—can hinge on the quality aspects of a vessel and its performance. But is it profitable to have a Michigan last 100 years while reaching obsolescence in just a fraction of that time?

Back in 1813, Noah Brown offered some good advice to a perfectionist working on the Lawrence and Niagara at Presque Isle. He said: “We want no extras; plain work, plain work is all we want. They are only required for one battle; if we win, that is all that will be wanted of them. If the enemy is victorious, the work is good enough to be captured.”

Brown was not advocating slipshod work but was cautioning against “gilding the lily.” Can we today afford to gild the lily when technological changes are coming so rapidly that new vessels are likely to be white elephants fifteen years hence? Can we afford the luxury of 100-year hulls? Should we not enlist the aid of value engineering to help guard against such costly luxury? The Navy’s Bureau of Ships has taken positive action in this direction, and the results are encouraging, considering the newness of the program and the small number of fulltime value engineers employed.

What is the current status of Great Lakes shipbuilding? The Korean conflict gave a new impetus to naval construction on the Great Lakes and called attention once again to its limitations as well as to its potentialities. When the North Koreans started south in 1950, our most pressing needs included new minesweepers and small amphibious vessels. This work was in the main taken on by the smaller shipbuilders around the country. Although there was a large number of vessels under contract, their individual and total tonnage was comparatively small. Of the 880,000 tons built and building in the United States between 1950 and 1956, some twenty Great Lakes builders have accounted for 67,000 tons, including various types of vessels and small craft. The latter were built for the various services—Navy, Army, and Air Force—under the Navy’s supervision in accordance with the Single Service Procurement Program.

After getting those smaller vessels under way, the Navy shifted its emphasis to Forrestal-type carriers, Nautilus-type submarines, missile-firing ships, and various other prototype vessels, as well as to the modernization of existing combatant ships. In this phase, fewer but heavier vessels are being worked on; spectacular technological advances like the nuclear power plant, the angled-deck aircraft carrier, the guided missile, the use of increased steam temperatures and pressures, the application of plastics in small boat construction, fittings, and components, the lamination of wood structural members, and phenomenal advances in electronics are being made with breath-taking speed.

The Great Lakes builders have contributed to this technological revolution. The Defoe Shipbuilding Company has made a major contribution to the art of plastic boat construction. In June, 1956, this company finished a 56-foot MSB which, at the time of award and even up to 1956, was the largest known plastic boat ever attempted. During the past two to four years, plastic dinghies have been produced for the Navy at Toledo, Ohio, while in Manitowoc and Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, shipbuilders have become proficient in laminating wooden structural members for our various minesweepers.

Nevertheless, the tonnage of Great Lakes naval shipbuilding relative to total United States production during the period of 1951 to 1956 has been relatively small—about 5 per cent. At least two important factors help to account for this situation. One has been the reluctance on the part of some of the larger Great Lakes shipbuilders, who were experiencing a revival of merchant ship construction, to compete for Navy contracts during the early months of the Korean conflict. The other factor boils down again to those old familiar obstacles—locks and channels leading to the sea being too short and narrow for many of our combatant and large auxiliary vessels. Nevertheless, the percentage of combatant vessel construction relative to total naval construction has steadily increased on the Lakes for the whole period between World War I and the present. More and varied naval silhouettes will be seen framed against our Great Lakes horizons as this trend continues, and it is bound to continue because we are doing something now to eliminate, or at least reduce, the restrictive influence of the navigational bottlenecks which have plagued our Great Lakes shipbuilders throughout the past.

By 1959, the many short locks—some as small as 252 feet long, 44 feet wide, and 14 feet deep—now found between Ogdensburg, New York, and Montreal, Canada, will have been replaced by fewer but bigger locks. The new ones will be at least 800 feet long by 80 feet wide and 30 feet deep over the sill. Channels between Lake Ontario and Montreal will be deepened to 27 feet minimum and several bridges will be replaced or modified to give greater masthead clearance.^[2] Some restrictive navigational features will still be with us after 1959, but the position of the Great Lakes shipbuilder will certainly have been greatly improved for the delivery of many types of larger naval vessels.

In October, 1954, the Chief of the bureau of Ships recommended to the Chief of Naval Operations that the depth of the entire waterway outside the locks be at least 32 feet in lieu of 27 feet, that the locks have a width of at least 100 feet in lieu of 80 feet, and that bridge vertical clearance be at least 140 feet in lieu of 120 feet. He stated that these increases would expand substantially the shipbuilding, ship repair, and water transportation capabilities of the Great Lakes area, particularly in event of mobilization. Specifically, such changes would permit the transit of vessels otherwise excluded, generally expedite the movement of vessels, and reduce the likelihood of damage to vessels in transit. Other activities are also on record as favoring even larger dimensions. The Detroit Chamber of Commerce, for example, in late 1954 advocated 35-foot depths. Regardless of the dimensions finally reached, the improvements being made right now are so substantial that we could probably use a breathing spell before going on to new achievements.

The Great Lakes shipbuilder is soberly aware of the fact that when the new seaway is opened, his own competitive strength rather than navigational obstacles will determine his naval construction workload. He realizes that his plant may need some refurbishing. His shears, his milling and boring machines, his rolls and brakes, his drills, and his overhead and mobile cranes may need to be reappraised with respect to thicker shell plating, to STS armor, to subassembly weights, and other heavier and larger construction materials. In addition to this physical refurbishing, he wonders how much his know-how with ordnance equipment, with electronics, and, yes, with nuclear power plants needs to be increased.

Our Great Lakes shipbuilder also finds his position improved because he sees additional navigational projects encountering less and less opposition. One of the most important of these future projects is the deepening of the connecting channels between Lake Erie and Lake Huron and at the Straits of Mackinac to a depth of 27 feet. This work will cost about $100,000,000, but it will save an estimated $10,000,000 per year in transportation costs. Congressional authorization for this work has progressed far already. H. R. 2552 has been approved by the House, and the Wiley bill (S. 171) is receiving Senate consideration.

The second, and almost equally important project, is to build a twin set of locks for the five single locks in the Welland Canal. When that is done, all of the eight locks will have counterparts, and the canal’s potential will be increased by an estimated 16,000,000 tons annually. Since the canal is located entirely in Canadian territory, this project depends on Canadian approval. In spite of the estimated $100,000,000 price tag for the job, most authorities feel that Canada will act affirmatively in time so that Welland will not be the bottleneck some shipping circles have predicted it will be in a decade or two.

How will we use the seaway that is now being built? An increasing number of small vessels, especially foreign ones, have been using the present outmoded seaway. Their number could increase to undreamed-of proportions and competitive power when the gates are opened two years hence. If automobiles can make the all-water trip from Chicago to Rotterdam at an estimated seventeen per cent saving in freight, and farm implements can realize a whopping 43 per cent saving, there is little doubt that the new seaway will be used. But, by whom? Who will build the vessels? Will the Great Lakes and Great Rivers shipbuilders raise the inland shipbuilding industry to the same commanding position that their associates in the area have done in other industries? Will the Great Lakes ship operators insist on increasingly efficient vessels so that they can set new cost records like the fifth of a cent per ton-mile for bulk cargos that has been equalled nowhere else in the world? Will our shipbuilders staff themselves adequately for the jet-propelled technological changes underway? Will they let “past practice”—that almighty law of shipbuilding—control, or will they use it meaningfully for greater achievements?

The challenge of the seaway is going to tax the resourcefulness of Great Lakes shipbuilders. They enter an era of broader and stiffer competition. Judging from past performance, however, we have good reason to believe that the success story of naval construction on the Great Lakes will be continued.

Graduated from the U. S. Naval Academy in the Class of 1930, Captain Gluntz took graduate work in naval construction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then had duty in the Boston, New York, and Bremerton Naval Shipyards. He has served on carrier and battleship staffs and was Head of the Industrial Department, Naval Operating Base, Guam, at the end of World War II. For the past two years he has served as Industrial Manager, Supervisor of Shipbuilding, and Naval Inspector of Ordnance in the Ninth Naval District, Chicago.

★

MAID OF HONOR

Contributed by MRS. WENDELL G. SWITZER

My husband—who is an admiral—and I invited his aide, a young lieutenant, his wife, and their three children to our quarters for an Easter visit. Just before the lieutenant and his family left their house to come over, some neighborhood children stopped by. The lieutenant’s children explained that they were getting ready to go over to the Admiral’s house. “Oh, do you know the Admiral?” asked one surprised little neighbor.

“Yes, we do,” replied the six-year-old, and then he added impressively, “You see, my father is the Admiral’s maid!”

(The Proceedings will pay $5.00 for each anecdote submitted to, and printed in, the Proceedings.)