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

CHAPTER III. THE END OF AN ERA (1870-1900) Wooden ships, some of the finest, largest wooden ships ever built on the Great Lakes, were still being launched in the 1890's. But to the men who were building them, it was a question of how long before steel would completely dominate the shipbuilding scene. Even by 1880 most of the major shipbuilding firms had either closed down their launching ways or had moved farther west. Most of the master craftsmen had followed the line of diminishing timber. Some found a niche for themselves in the shipyards dotting the St. Clair River, or they went as far as the small towns lining both sides of Lake Michigan where wooden ships still were being launched to haul lumber down the chain of lakes. Ohio had largely been passed by. This chapter describes the remnant that remained after most builders had fled Ohio's shore. Cleveland still supported the best-known wooden shipbuilding firm in Northern Ohio - Thomas Quayle's Sons - as well as several other wooden shipbuilding companies. When Thomas Quayle retired in 1879, his sons, Thomas F. and George L., together with another brother, William H., continued the operations of the firm in their shipyard in the Scranton Flats area. William had formerly been in business with Thomas F. Murphy (see page 37). The Quayles built some big ships, most of them for the newly developed Lake Superior iron ore trade. In the next eleven years, 1880 to 1891, the Quayles launched twenty-nine vessels; all but three were propellers. Those three - the Champion (1881), Wadena (1887), and Annie M. Ash (1888) - were built as schooner-barges; the age of sail already almost over. Some of the wooden propellers built during this period by the Quayles were the Henry Chisholm and Wocoken (1880), City of Rome and John B. Lyon (1881), Harry E. Packer and Wallula (1882), George Spencer (1884) , James Pickands (1885), Charlemagne Tower, Jr. (1886), Samuel Mather and Robert R. Rhodes (1887), Pascal P. Pratt and Neosho (1888), James C. Lockwood and Olympia (1889), and C. B. Lockwood and R. E. Schuck (1890). In 1887, Quayle's built the propeller Yakima for the Wilson Transit Company of Cleveland. She was said to be the first ship on the Great Lakes equipped with electric lights. They were mounted on the after deck house and aimed to illuminate the deck. The lights were of the arc- light type.1 77