With these words the aggregate industry trade magazine Pit & Quarry heralded the launching of the Material Service in March 1929.   That journal’s pronouncement as to the significance of the Material Service was hardly hyperbole, since the vessel represented the synthesis of several contemporary advancements in marine engineering and cargo handling technology.   The genesis of the Material Service grew from the partnership of two men, Rufus Putnam and Leathem D. Smith, in an engineering consulting and design firm devoted to shore-based loading and unloading systems, Maritime Engineering, Inc., formed by the men at Chicago in 1927.   West Point graduate Putnam had been the District Engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers from 1921 to 1926, when he resigned his commission to enter private consulting, supervising the development of the Chicago Harbor Plan of 1926.    Over the course of the previous decade, Smith, a 1909 civil engineering graduate of the University of Wisconsin, had become a noteworthy personality in both the quarrying and shipbuilding industries in the Midwest.    During World War I he resurrected the moribund and antiquated Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, shipyard of the family’s Leathem & Smith Towing & Wrecking Company, building nine hundred-foot wooden harbor tugs for the United States Shipping Board;   after the Armistice, he turned his attention to resuscitating the fortunes of the family’s nearby stone quarry, launching a massive expansion that turned the plant, the Leathem D. Smith Stone Company, into one of the region’s largest and most technically advanced stone producers.  While immersed in building the stone company, Smith devised his innovative "Leathem D. Smith Patented Tunnel Scraper System," a less costly self-unloading system using dragline scrapers as opposed to the conventional belt conveyors then in use on self-unloading lake vessels.  [As mentioned, a complete overview of the development of Smith’s self-unloading schemes can be found in my chapter in Brehm’s A Fully Accredited Ocean.]   By the time Smith and Putnam had formed their partnership,  Smith’s shipyard entity, the Leathem D. Smith Dock Company, had converted six freighters to self-unloaders using his system, and had embarked upon steel construction at the yard on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers, building a derrick scow for the Chicago District and the dredge Winneconne for use on Wisconsin’s Fox River.   It is a safe assumption, I think, that it was during the construction of the Chicago District’s vessel, the DK-S 4 [b 504 (US 292246)] that Smith and Putnam became acquainted.

Early Steel Construction at the Leathem D. Smith Dock Company

Figure 2.  Above, the first steel construction produced by the Leathem D. Smith Dock Company,  the U. S. E. C. derrick barge DKS-4, a few weeks before her launching on 11 April 1926.   As the 504   292246,  she is still in service for Durocher Dock & Dredge Company out of Cheboygan, Michigan.   William Lafferty Collection.

Figure 3.  Below, the U. S. E. C. dredge Winneconne takes shape, August 1926, the second in the Smith yard's first two steel contracts, both for the Army Corps of Engineers.  The Winneconne  still exists as a crane barge, undocumented, on Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin, for the Bob Radtke Construction Company.   William Lafferty Collection.                                                                                                                                   

        Smith had practical knowledge in shipbuilding, quarry operation, cargo handling systems, and vessel operation;    Putnam was intimately acquainted, through his Army service, with not only the planning and designing of inland waterways, but of the particular commercial demands placed on the unique waterway system that surrounded his former command, the Chicago metropolitan area, and, it may be safe to assume, had a personal familiarity with the firms that exploited those waterways and those firms' personnel.  According to C. Ray Christianson, who worked his way up through the Smith shipyard from "gopher" to superintendent (and later founded the Christy Corporation upon the remnants of the Smith yard in 1947), it was Putnam who in mid-1927 approached the Crown brothers, who controlled Chicago’s powerful Material Service Corporation, with the idea of the Smith firm constructing a shallow draft, self-unloading motorship, to be operated by the Smith-Putnam partnership, on behalf of the Material Service Corporation.   At the time, Material Service operated four building material yards with waterborne access among their dozen around Cook County:  on the North Branch of the Chicago River, at North Halsted Street;  at 34th Street on the South Branch;  at Lawndale Avenue at Summit, on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal;  and at 92nd Street and the Calumet River.    Putnam knew the Crowns would be receptive to such a proposal, since at that time Material Service was engaged in constructing a mammoth, state-of-the-art quarry and stone processing facility near Lockport, Illinois, on the Sanitary and Ship Canal.   The firm’s new Paul Ales plant would be capable of producing crushed rock at the rate of over 500 tons per hour.   At the time, Material Service contracted with outside towing firms to service the yards;    Putnam’s proposal seemed an ideal solution to  deal with the increased production the plant would afford, transporting efficiently the plant’s production not only to the firm’s four waterfront yards, but also, where feasible, to building sites along the Chicago and Illinois Rivers, the Sanitary and Ship Canal, the Cal-Sag Channel, and nearby Lake Michigan ports.    According to Christianson, Henry Crown agreed to a ten-year charter of the proposed vessel, and, befitting the power the firm wielded, dictated to Putnam what his and Smith’s profit margin, beyond costs, would be for the term of the charter, numbers to which, apparently, Putnam immediately agreed.

        Armed with Material Service’s commitment as collateral, Smith and Putnam, as the Leathem Smith-Putnam Navigation Company, secured a $175,000 mortgage from the Chicago Trust Company on 1 June 1928 to finance construction of the vessel, due in ten years.   Although the Leathem D. Smith Dock Company’s experience in steel construction had been limited at that point to the two Corps of Engineers vessels and what would become a famous fish tug, the Chambers Bros. 228149 [b Recovery], then abuilding, according to Christianson the Crown Brothers’ considerable "pull" in Chicago facilitated the neophyte firm to secure financing for the Material Service, something Smith had never been able to do on his own when he explored building his own self-unloader to service his quarry seven years before.

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