Last "Laker" Salt Water Born: Schooner Days DCCLXXXII (782)

by C. H. J. Snider

WHEN we came across the J. T. Wing, once Atlantic tern schooner and rumrunner converted to Great Lakes pulp carrier and training ship, as a sunken hulk in Marine City, Mich., last summer, "her leaky hull the waters drank and she had sailed her last."

It wasn't quite as bad as was the case of the Conductor, whose crew Abigail Becker rescued, producing Amanda Jone's quoted ballad. Being very substantially built originally, with ribs 12 inches by 12 and 7-inch planking, and having been repaired expensively, the J. T. Wing was going to have another $17,000 spent on her to fit her as a marine museum of the history of Great Lakes shipping. She was to have a concrete dock to hold her in an artificial lagoon on the Canadian side of Belle Isle, fifty miles or so from where she was lying when we found her. The city of Detroit had accepted her from Grant H. Piggott, one of her owners and donors and himself a Detroit citizen.

Mr. Piggott bought her in Noank, Conn., in 1935, when she bore the name J. O. Webster. She had come into American registry in 1923. He renamed her J. T. Wing, after a border gentleman. It was his announced intention to use her as a training ship, possibly on Gustav Erikson's plan in Finland. Erikson was able to make old sailing ships pay by getting crews from ambitious young Finnish lads who would work for low wages or even pay a premium for a thorough training in sail. The youth of America likes navigation knowledge on easier terms. Mr. Piggott's purchase arrived on the Great Lakes in 1936.

The J. T. Wing continued in the cedar, pulpwood and log trade between Detroit, Goderich and Green Bay for seven years. Somewhat spasmodically, for sometimes she was seized by the customs for carrying freight between the wrong ports, and sometimes couldn't get sailors, and sometimes she couldn't get trainees.

She needed a crew of at least six good men, and, outside of yachtsmen, six competent schooner men are about all you will find now between the St. Laurence River and Skilagabee.

In 1939, renamed Oliver Perry, after the commodore who won the Battle of Lake Erie, she operated as a training ship for Sea Scouts out of Chicago. Scouts are no sissies, but the Chicago office of the Boy Scouts of America gave as a reason for discontinuing the arrangement the profanity to which the boys were exposed.

If this was so, the Boy Scouts management showed good judgment. Long experience has proved that the foulest mouthed tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor or what have you is the least efficient in his respective job and least capable of showing anybody anything except his own inadequacy. A clean mouth and a clear head is the best insurance on every voyage. A dirty mouth is the sign of a half-baked softshell masquerading as a man.

Early in 1942 the Oliver Perry, ex-Wing, ex-Webster, became the J. T. Wing again and the property of the Chippewa Timber Co. of Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., and up to the end of 1943 she carried timber from Manitoulin to Detroit.

Then she was laid up for lack of crew. Henry Ford backed her as a training ship, either in the Sea Scout era or later, but it takes more than backing to find schooner men on the lakes. The revived Wing sank in the ice in the St. Clair River, was floated and dragged into this cut at Marine City and settled on the bottom again. In 1945 Joseph A. Braun, of the Braun Lumber Co., Detroit, Grant H. Piggott and Oscar Johnson, of Marinette, Wis., bought her back from the Sault Ste. Marie company, to present her to the city of Detroit for a historical lake marine museum. A commendable purpose, unfortunate in the detail that the craft selected to represent the great fleet of lake schooners, once fifteen hundred strong, should be as different from them as is a truck from a stage coach. The Wing was designed, built and rigged for the Atlantic coastal trade. The schooners which once plied the Great Lakes in their hundreds were capable of doing Atlantic voyages—some did even after the Great War—but were radically different in rig and appearance.

TYPICAL ATLANTIC SEABOARD TERN SCHOONER

THE J. T. WING of SAULT STE, MARIE, ex OLIVER PERRY of CHICAGO, ex J. T. WING of DETROIT, ex J. O. WEBSTER of WEYMOUTH, N. S., under full sail with a cargo of pulpwood for the paper mills of Green Bay, Wis. Schooner Days is indebted to Capt. Harry Kirk and to Don Twaits of the Imperial Lite Assurance Co., former mate of the Riverton, for other pictures of the Wing under canvas. More about Marine City, where the Wing s last flutter was made, next week.

TYPICAL GREAT LAKES CANAL-SIZE SCHOONER

THE EDWARD BLAKE of PORT BURWELL, built to fit the locks of the second Welland Canal. She was little shorter than the J. T. Wing, but notably different both in hull and rig.