Maritime History of the Great Lakes

Scanner, v. 36, no. 7 (April 2004), p. 8

The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Ship of the Month - cont'd. 8. given a "doghouse" (for additional crew quarters) right aft on the boat deck, and she also sported a raised Number 6 hatch. FAIRMOUNT never re­ ceived either of these improvements. The "Whig-Standard" of Tuesday, April 7, 1953, reported that "The C. S. L. ca­ nal-size carrier STARMOUNT was the first vessel to take on cargo at the Prescott elevator at Johnstown for the 1953 season, taking a full cargo of rye for trans-shipment at Montreal Saturday morning. Capt. Lapierre was ho­ noured by Mayor J. P. Doyle and members of the Chamber of Commerce upon his arrival, receiving a gift of Prescott-made products. " Concerning a 1955 accident, we have an unsourced clipping from an Ivan Brookes scrapbook. "Ship Aground, Toss Salt Cargo into St. Lawrence, Can at a Time. Special to 'The Star', Cornwall, Sept. 17. - If the residents of Cardinal, 30 miles west of here, are experiencing a briny taste to their drinking water, it is because a 2, 500 ton cargo of salt is being dumped into the St. Lawrence River from the stranded C. S. L. freighter STARMOUNT, which ran aground in a heavy fog on Monday [Sept. 12]. The freighter has to be lightened before it can be refloated and officials have decided the cheapest way is to jettison her cargo. Getting rid of the salt is a laborious job be­ cause the 25-man crew has to lug it by hand from the holds in cans before dumping it over the side. The STARMOUNT missed the western entrance to the Galops Canal and ran aground in 11 feet of water. She is leaking badly. Of­ ficials believe a change in the currents caused by nearby St. Lawrence Sea­ way construction may have caused the ship to run aground. When the cargo has been dumped, the tugs SALVAGE PRINCE and SALVAGE QUEEN [the latter actually was S. A. QUEEN -Ed. ] will pull the STARMOUNT free. The dumping process is expected to take several days. " We hope that they were reasonably large cans but, even so, it must have seemed to the crew that the process was as slow as if they had been using table shakers! A relevant photo appeared in the December 7, 1955, edition of the "Whig- Standard", showing a number of ships going into winter quarters at Kingston. The cutline: "Freighters KEYBELL, KEYSHEY, KEYNOR, KEYBAR and KEYWEST in winter berths while FAIRMOUNT, PENETANG and ACADIAN are at the C. S. L. dock. " FAIRMOUNT was reported leaving Kingston next spring on April 12, 1956. During the 1950s, hardly a day passed without Canada Steamship Lines package freighters calling at Toronto. However, it was only very rarely that one of the company's canal-sized bulk carriers would be seen in the port during the regular season. Nevertheless, that situation changed in 1958 when many of them came to Toronto with loads of pipe sections for the transcontinental gas pipeline. FAIRMOUNT and STARMOUNT both were included in this operation, and each of them made several calls here, unloading the pipe on the east side of the Jarvis Street slip. But 1958 was to be the last season of operation for many C. S. L. canallers, and both FAIRMOUNT and STARMOUNT remained in lay-up at Montreal for 1959, the year the St. Lawrence Seaway opened. Neither would operate in 1960, either. In 1961, STARMOUNT was sold to Diesel Sales & Service (Burlington) Limited, of Burlington, Ontario, of which Arthur W. Hill was manager. He purchased an eclectic collection of vessels with the idea of running a barge service in the Seaway. He had STARMOUNT towed by his big tug E. E. JOHNSON from her Montreal berth to a pier on the west side of the Burlington Ship Canal, where she arrived on July 1, 1961. There he stripped her of her forward ca­ bins and her smokestack. Hill, however, died late in 1961 and none of the members of his "fleet" ever saw any meaningful service under his ownership. During the winter of 1961-1962, STARMOUNT, renamed (c) GOOD STAR and regis­ tered at Hamilton under the name of Arthur W. R. Hill, was blown away from her berth in a storm and grounded on a sandbar east of the Hamilton harbour

Powered by / Alimenté par VITA Toolkit
Privacy Policy