"Last Lake Built Schooner Afloat": Schooner Days MXXXVIII (1038)

by C. H. J. Snider

AT CHRISTMAS time our friend John F. Miller, of Grosse Pointe, Mich., sent Schooner Days a picture of "the last Great Lakes built schooner now afloat." Her name is Helen MacLeod II and she was built by Louis MacLeod, of Bayfield, Ont., in 1925. Mr. Miller, who is a judicious collector, bought her in August, 1950, and brought her from Bayfield to Detroit, where she is moored beside the museum ship J. T. Wing, at Belle Isle park. She will be used by the Sea Scouts and Girl Mariners, for she is sound as a nut.

CANADA FIRST AND LAST

Thus Detroit will have two representatives of the great era of sail on the lakes, which began when the "barque or brigantine" Frontenac came into the Humber River with Father Hennepin and picked up some parched corn and took it to Niagara; Nov. 26-Dec. 6, 1678.

Both "museum pieces" are Canadian born, the Wing having been launched at Weymouth, N.S. in 1919, but although Canada opened the Great Lakes for commerce before the United States was heard of, and contributed hundreds of sailing vessels, Canada has done nothing towards preservation of their memory beyond making bonfires of survivors.

There are two honorable exceptions. The town of Penetanguishene keeps the skeleton of the captured H M.S. schooner Tigress in the park, and the Province of Ontario spent $5,000 twenty-five years ago on raising the remains of the heroic British schooner Nancy and enshrining them at Wasaga Beach. But Canada, the x-Dominion, has done nothing.

TWO WEE ONES

This little Helen MacLeod II happens to be of the exact dimensions of the York fur trader Ann Brown which eventually became the clubhouse of the Belmont Dinghy Club in Toronto. She is 36 feet long and 11 feet beam. She is composite construction, 1 1/4 cypress planking on steel frames, and should last forever. Her rig is more like a mackinaw fishboats than the Ann Brown's seven-piece schooner rig, and her engine housing, etc., speak of the end of the sailing era. She is a valuable addition to the collection which the city of Detroit is forming for its Museum of Great Lakes History. This operates through the Detroit Historical Commission, a going concern of six members, with a budget under the City controller, and an active museum manager in Captain Joseph E. Johnston, who is known as the Marine Museum Director.

APPRECIATED

Fifty-six thousand people visited the museum in the first three months after it was opened. Moderate admission fees and charges for folders keep the museum from becoming a picnic shambles.

The Detroit Historical Commission, of course, deals with everything historical and its interest is not confined to marine matters. In addition to the Marine Museum Exhibitor the commission has a director and assistant director and two consultants, one of whom, Raymond C. Miller, PhD, is also the secretary.

The J. T. Wing, as has been pointed out before, is far from typical of Great Lakes sailing commerce, being an import from salt water at the very close of the schooner era. Still, she served for some years as a pulpwood carrier on the lakes, and as a memorial is much better than nothing, which is Canada's total contribution towards commemorating a great epoch.

Detroit, French for 60 years, British for the next 35, and "U.S.A." since 1796, celebrated its 250th anniversary last year. The great modern city has a sound regard for history.

The HELEN MacLEOD II, built at Bayfield. Ont., 1925, and secured by Jack Miller, of Grosse Point, Mich., for the Detroit Marine Museum recently. Some of the mackinaw type of yachts, like Pequod, or Nahma, or Faith, or Butcher Boy, and schooner yachts which we have known, might dispute the claim of the "last built lake schooner," but these are not commercial vessels. Mr. Miller did unearth a little "commercial" built after the Helen MacLeod, but she is not now alive. We may tell about her next.