Maritime History of the Great Lakes

Scanner, v. 40, no. 7 (May 2008), p. 6

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

Ship of the Month - cont'd. City Saturday for her first trip of the season, for Alpena and way ports. She encountered 20 miles of rotten ice in Saginaw Bay and reached Tawas City at 2: 00 in the afternoon. The opening is a week earlier than last year. " We believe, from the way the steamer was painted up at the time, that it was during her Lake Huron service out of Bay City that ARUNDELL was given another very interesting piece of de­ coration, the figure of a person (possibly a First Nations man) standing atop the smokestack with what appears to have been a tomahawk raised in one hand. As this figure appears in only one photo, we must assume that it did not last very long. The "Buffalo Morning Express" of May 17, 1891, quoting from the "Detroit Free Press", repor­ ted that ARUNDELL had been repaired and painted up in preparation for her new season's work. It noted, however, that Holt & Cole, her owners, had at first made money running her, but that income had suffered when the Detroit, Bay City & Alpena Railroad had opened, taking patronage away from the steamboat. It stated that the steamer had been taken off the route and sent elsewhere. The "elsewhere" was revealed when the "Toledo Blade" on August 8, 1891, reported that "The prop. ARUNDELL did not make the trip (from Toledo) to Detroit yesterday and many intending passengers were disappointed". It was around this time that ARUNDELL passed into the ownership of the Star-Cole Line, of Detroit, of which one of the principals was Darius Cole (after whom another steamer eventu­ ally would be named), Over the winter of 1891-1892, in order to make her more suitable for the regular Toledo-Detroit service, ARUNDELL was taken in hand by the Wolverine Shipbuilding Company, of Trenton, Michigan, which gave her a major rebuilding that included lengthening. Following this reconstruction, she was shown on the government register as 166. 6 x 26. 5 x 10.7, 339.39 Gross and 257.42 Net Tons. The new measurements were registered at Port Huron on June 6, 1892, but the 1896 "M. V. U. S. " showed her enrolled at Detroit. (It was not until well into the 1920s that owners' names began to be listed in the annual U. S. register. ) In the spring of 1892, after her lengthening, ARUNDELL was chartered for a while to the Graham & Morton Transportation Company for service across Lake Michigan. G & M had antici­ pated having its new steamer CHICORA ready for service in May of that year, but it was sum­ mertime before she was in service, and a temporary stand-in was needed. ARUNDELL went back to Star-Cole service once G & M (sometimes referred to as "The Dustless Road to Happyland") had the ill-fated CHICORA in service. The lengthening may have made ARUNDELL more suitable for the Toledo-Detroit service, but ap­ parently her old machinery was not adequate to keep her on her fast schedule. Accordingly, in 1893, she received new power. According to the 1899 issue of the Great Lakes Register (Bureau Veritas), it came in the form of a fore-and-aft compound engine which had cylinders of 21 and 42 inches diameter and a stroke of 28 inches, which produced Indicated Horsepower of 340 at 105 revolutions per minute. The engine was built in 1893 by S. F. Hodge & Company, Detroit. Steam at 120 p. s. i. was generated by one firebox boiler that measured 10'0" by 15'6". Its two coal-fired furnaces had a total of 40 square feet of grate surface and 2, 575 square feet of heating surface. The boiler was manufactured in 1893 by Love & Schofield, of Port Huron. Her owner was shown by the G. L. R. as Star-Cole Line, Detroit. "The Marine Review" of June 6, 1895, carried a letter from a resident of Bay City, complain­ ing about steamboat racing and the disregard of passing signals on the lakes. Mentioned was a "Detroit Tribune" report of June 3 concerning an incident on Lake St. Clair allegedly in­ volving ARUNDELL, the steel freighter W. H. GILBERT, the wooden freighter COLONIAL and a yacht named ALICE ENRIGHT. It was said that ARUNDELL and the GILBERT "were openly engaged in racing" although we cannot imagine why, as most documented cases of racing involved passen­ ger steamers competing for trade on the same route. "The Marine Review" of February 27, 1896, indicated that ARUNDELL would be operating in a pool of steamers that also included GREYHOUND, CITY OF TOLEDO, DARIUS COLE and IDLEWILD, serving Toledo, Detroit and Port Huron. The principals of this pool were Aaron A. Parker, J. W. Millen, John Pridgeon, Charles F. Bielman, and others. The article did not state it, but this pool would become known as the White Star Line, of Detroit, long a respected operator of Detroit area passenger steamers and, perhaps, best known for its largest ship, the famous TASHMOO of 1900. Although Star-Cole Line remained the owner of ARUNDELL, she began a quite different service in the summer of 1897. The July 17, 1897, edition of the "Buffalo Morning Express" indicated that ARUNDELL would be doing daylight rides from Charlotte (the port for Rochester, New

Powered by / Alimenté par VITA Toolkit
Privacy Policy