Rails for the Iron Horse: Schooner Days CMXIV (914)

by C. H. J. Snider

Three Antelopes

ANTELOPE was a favorite name in the days of sail, suggesting speed and a light graceful motion. There were three schooners named Antelope on the Great Lakes, and more on salt water, but by 1925 not one could be found in the whole Dominion register.

Perhaps the first was built by John and James Abbey at Port Robinson on the Welland Canal in 1854. Her dimensions were 106 ft, length, 19.7 ft. beam and 9 ft. depth; registered tonnage 220 to 180 as measurement whims shifted. She carried over 400 tons deadweight, and was counted a fine vessel when new, with an insurable value of $8,000. Edward Brown of Hamilton, wharfinger, was an early owner, and John McKinty her first captain soon followed by Captain Masson.

In her first year, 1854, she was one of six schooners that carried iron rails and fishplates to Whitby for the new Grand Trunk Railway which English capital was stretching along the north shore of Lake Ontario. Probably the Antelope's was a deckload, for she only paid import tolls on 29 tons at Port Whitby. The other schooners, all smaller, had larger cargoes; the California, 190 tons; Caledonia, 131; Marco Polo, 80; Quebec, 50; Morning Star, 180.

The iron horse spelled the schooner's ultimate doom. It was touching to see these proud products of man's art and industry swimming Lake Ontario happily with iron rails in the hold, or even a locomotive on deck, or taking risks later, in 1880, on the wild shores of Lake Superior, with railway equipment and contractors supplies when the Canadian Pacific Railway was building along that rockbound coast, which was to be bound in steel.

It is said that the first Grand Trunk locomotive was landed by schooner at Port Britain, Ontario, when William Marsh launched the third vessel he had built there, the Caroline Marsh. His fleet of schooners and the port he made vanished 60 years ago through the onslaught of three railway lines crossing Marsh's Creek. All the six schooners mentioned however as paying Port Whitby tolls lived out their "natural" lives and died by stress of weather instead of the slow starvation of competitive freight rates.

The Mediterranean, a handsome white American two-master of 297 tons register, built by D. Rogers for Morley Bates and Co. at Great Sodus on Lake Ontario, arrived in Manitowoc on Lake Michigan on a Sunday, June 22, 1871, with the locomotive "Ben Jones" for the Wisconsin Central Railway, The locomotive commemorated Mantowoc's foremost citizen. She had freighted this tribute 700 miles from Buffalo at the foot of Lake Erie, The Mediterranean foundered off Sheyboygan, Wis., twenty years later.

This Antelope of which we are speaking fared well for twenty years. Her insurable value had dropped to $4,000, when the Horn brothers of Hamilton owned her in 1864, but each passing year always bore heavily on insurance valuations until a lake schooner had been rebuilt or had her "large repair," which usually occurred in her first decade. It was by reason of extensive repairs and one or more rebuildings above the light waterline that lake vessels came to be alive for the sixty or seventy years that some of the old bottoms could claim. This Antelope was so good that Alva Rose, Nelson Hudgin and Dan Wood had to pay $7,000 for her when they bought her on the Fourth of July, 1874.

The schooner tide was still running strong at that time, for deepening canals were offsetting rail competition for bulk freight, and larger and larger vessels were being built for the long hauls. This was the era of the "Old Canallers" from Lake Ontario, which could carry up to 26,000 bushels of grain from Chicago to Kingston, or Milwaukee to Oswego or Ogdensburg, after the enlargement of the second Welland Canal. Voyages overseas to England Ireland, Scotland, Russia, the West Indies, South Africa, even around the Horn to San Francisco had given the lakers a wider if no more profitable field.

Capt. John Ewart, senior, of Cobourg, with four sailor sons, all captains, had bought the Antelope and traded her, with something to boot, to Capt. Sol Collier and L. S. Wilson of Marysburg Township for a new three-masted schooner which Jack Tait, the famous Prince Edward County shipwright, had just completed at Roblin's Cove in the Bay of Quinte. This vessel was called the Pacific and made a successful voyage from Chicago to Liverpool then to Dominica in the West Indies and thence to New York. She was lost on the coast of Newfoundland.

Collier and Wilson sold the Antelope, which they had received in trade, just in time. Advent of these new three-masters, of seven or eight hundred tons carrying- capacity, ousted from the long-haul grain trade vessels which like the Antelope could only carry about half that load but required crews numerically as large.

So Messrs. Rose, Hudgin and Wood found to their sorrow. They had a good vessel, too expensive to operate, and requiring more and more repairs in her third decade. They sold her at a loss. T. W. Rose of South Bay, a son of Alva, recall her as a handsome white schooner with green painted bottom and four jibs. But not a money-maker.

Another Antelope, One the Muir Brothers Built at Port Dalhousie in 1873.

There will be more about this next week.