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Page 64 M/V STEWART J. CORT Begins 25th Season 2007 marks the 25th anniversary of the first 1,000-foot vessel on the Great Lakes. When construction plans for the CORT were announced, a new era in Great Lakes shipping history had begun. The CORT would be the first of three 1,000-footers built by Bethlehem Steel Corp. to handle the increasing demand for iron ore shipments. The design of the CORT would follow the traditional "pilothouse-forward" of lakers, but would be the only 1,000-footer to do so. We have reprinted Cecil Stein's article with the technical information on the CORT. Cecil saw the CORT sail up the Detroit River in May, 1972 and sadly passed away after a heart-attack in August, 1972. THE NEW CALITHUMPIAN By Cecil E. Stein Reprint from Sept., 1971 Telescope Almost three hundred years ago, in the spring of 1679, the black-clad Recollect friar, Hennepin, standing on the bank of Cayuga Creek, two leagues above Niagara Falls, intoned his blessing upon the forty-five ton sailing vessel GRIFFIN, "The assembled company sang Te Deum, cannons were fired: and French and Indians warmed alike by a generous gift of brandy, shouted and yelped in chorus as she glided into the Niagara River." So was the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes launched. She was built for thirty-six year old Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, an early North American explorer of homeric stature. Henry de Tonty, La Salle's lieutenant, an Italian officer, supervised the construction. For the following 149 years sails alone propelled the vessels across the lengths and breadths of the lakes until, in 1818, the Lake Erie Steamboat Company of Buffalo built and launched at Black Rock, also on the Niagara River, the first steamboat on Lake Erie. Her builder was Noah Brown. The name of the ship was WALK-IN-THE-WATER. She was 135 feet long and 32 feet wide. Until 1841 all vessels on the Great Lakes were constructed of wood. On September 9, of that year the United States Senate authorized "the construction and armament of armed steamers upon the waters of Lake Erie." The first such vessel was designated by the President USS MICHIGAN .. .it was the first iron ship on the lakes. The Hon. A.P. Upshur, Secretary of the Navy, in a letter dated June 8, 1842, explains: "I determined to build this vessel of iron instead of wood for two reasons. In the first place, I was determined to aid, as far as I could, in developing and applying to a new use of immense resources of our country in that most valuable metal; and in the second place, it appeared to me to be an object of great interest to ascertain the practicability and utility of building vessels, at least for harbor defense, of so cheap and indestructible a material." The USS MICHIGAN was fabricated by the firm of Stackhouse & Tomlinson in Pittsburgh under the supervision of Samuel Hart, with a contract stipulating a set price of thirteen and three-quarters cents a pound, launched. The individual pieces were marked, disassembled, shipped to Cleveland by way of the newly-opened Ohio-Erie Canal. At Cleveland the fabricated pieces were placed aboard steamboats and carried to Erie, Pennsylvania, where they were again put together. Launching proceedings were begun December 5, 1843, and completed December 6th. The vital statistics of this first iron ship on the Great Lakes were: displacement, 685 tons; length 163'-3"; width 27'-1 V2", plus ten feet for the paddle wheels; draft 7'-10" light, 9' loaded; horsepower, 170; speed 8 1/2 knots. As the MICHIGAN was the first iron ship, so also did she carry a new invention guaranteed to reduce fuel consumption by twenty-five percent. This was the Sickles Cut-Off Valve, which was the first poppet valve for steam. With this valve controlling the admission of steam to the cylinders, five cords of wood lasted seven hours and fifteen minutes.