Lake Michigan Maritime Marginalia, Volume 1, Number 2
Figure 17. A beautiful color post card, published by "Lichtig" of Mt. Clemens and printed in Germany, showing a jaunty Mineral City steaming on the Clinton River at the height of her career there. William Lafferty Collection.
While the Chicago excursion trade included new gasoline and semi-Diesel boats built expressly for the trade, like the Mary M. and Favorite, a substantial portion of the fleet contained older steam boats that had outlived their commercial usefulness as coasters or cross-lake passenger boats elsewhere on the lakes, and ended their days at Chicago in the less grueling day trip excursion business. Venerable Lake Michigan passenger boats like the John D. Dewar 76571, a fixture between Pentwater and Frankfort during the height of her career, and the Silver Spray 3679 [a Bloomer Girl] and Searchlight 106249 [a Adrienne], both veterans of Little Traverse Bay, among boats with similar backgrounds, gravitated to the Chicago excursion trade during the ‘teens when their economic viability in the short-haul passenger and cargo runs had become eroded by, first, railroad competition and, later, autos and motor trucks. One such vessel was the Mineral City, which had spent her entire career before coming to Chicago running on the Clinton River between Mt. Clemens, Michigan, and into Lake St. Clair. Actually, the Mineral City represented something of an anomaly among the Chicago boats, since her original trade on the Clinton River and Lake St. Clair was quite similar to that in which she engaged at Chicago, primarily daytime excursions. The Mineral City was also among the longest-lived of those Chicago boats, arriving at Chicago in 1913 and enduring until 1931.
The Mineral City was launched during the afternoon of Tuesday, 9 April 1895, at the Mount Clemens, Michigan, shipbuilding yard of Captain William Du Lac, on the Clinton River at Avery Street. William Du Lac, born in 1837 in Harrison Township, Michigan, had left home at age twelve to become a cabin boy on lake schooners. In 1881, by then a well-known master and shipping entrepreneur, he opened his shipbuilding facility adjacent to his Mount Clemens Lumber Company yard, and over the next seventeen years built twenty wooden vessels, ranging from small tugs to tow barges to steam barges. As a partner in both the Tonawanda Barge Line and the Shoal Water Transportation Company, he built a number of vessels, especially tow barges, for his own accounts; the Mineral City would be the next-to-last hull built by the yard. Her owner, Du Lac’s son, Captain Burt Du Lac, intended to operate the
The Mineral City at Mount Clemens, circa 1895
Figure 18. The Mineral City, probably soon after she entered service in 1895, shown at Mount Clemens with the "Leap the Dips" roller coaster ride behind her on the east bank of the Clinton River. Photograph courtesy of the Mount Clemens Public Library.
Mineral City as a day boat on the Clinton River between Mount Clemens and Lake St. Clair, and onto Walpole Island on the Canadian side of the lake. On weekends she would make excursions from Mount Clemens to other parts of the St. Clair Flats, a major tourism area at the turn-of-the-century, as well as Detroit, Port Huron, and Canadian harbors on the eastern shore of Lake St. Clair. On 21 April 1895, the younger Captain Du Lac took the Mineral City on her first trip, a "shake down" cruise from Mount Clemens to the mouth of the Clinton River, with forty invited guests aboard. The following week, she left for Detroit and her first inspection.
The Clinton River and the Lily
Figures 19 and 20. Above, a color post card view of the Clinton River, through Mount Clemens, around 1900, printed in Germany and published by The Rotograph Company, New York. The vessel shown is the small steam barge Lily, a fixture on the river from her building at Du Lac's yard in 1889 as she delivered freight along the Clinton and coal to the numerous hotels that sat on the river's bank, as she does here. Note the brine well on the right: The drilling of these wells led to the discovery of the town's mineral water deposits that established it as a major destination for those who wished to partake of the "cure." William Lafferty Collection. Below, another view of the Lily, showing her diminutive stature. She lasted for nearly forty years, until foundering off Wilson, New York, on 31 July 1924. Photograph courtesy of the Mount Clemens Public Library.
An open, double-decked passenger boat, the Mineral City measured 57.66 gross tons, 28.83 net tons, and had a hull of 70 feet in length, 16 feet in breadth, and 5 feet depth, according to her first enrollment, issued at Detroit on 10 July 1895, which also assigned her official number 92639; a steeple compound steam engine with cylinders of seven and fourteen inches diameter and a twelve inch stroke powered the craft. Her name derived from her home port’s prominence as both a site of popular mineral baths and producer of mineral water, Mount Clemens referring to itself during the era as "Mineral City" or "Bath City." She proved a very popular boat on the Mount Clemens-Lake St. Clair run, carrying as many as two hundred passengers at a time, many being vacationers visiting Mount Clemens's many bath houses and hotels, for romps on the river and visits to the recreational areas of the Flats.
The Mineral City on the Clinton River, 1905
Figure 21. The Mineral City filled with revelers as she snakes up the Clinton, in this post card view from The Rotograph Company, New York, and printed in Germany; the card's copyright date is 1905, so it is quite probable that this is the date of the original photograph, as well. William Lafferty Collection.
Burt Du Lac sold the Mineral City on 26 February 1903 to J. F. McCormick of Detroit for $5,000, probably as part of winding up the affairs of Du Lac’s late father, who had died the previous October. McCormick appears to have continued the vessel in the same trade. Six years later, on 25 October 1909, McCormick sold the Mineral City to a local man, Captain William J. Wood. Captain "Jim" Wood, born in 1855 at Morpeth, Ontario, had been a Mount Clemens resident since 1882. When William Du Lac died, Wood purchased part of Du Lac’s shipyard and established the Mount Clemens Boat Works on the property, where he built and repaired pleasure craft. Just four months before Wood acquired the Mineral City, the Mount Clemens Monitor remarked:
The river excursion business seems to be fading away. The Uarda [25243, another popular local boat] has gone to Houghton, and the Mineral City, at the shipyard, like the bucentaur, ‘lies rotting, unrestored.’ With about a hundred gas boats on the river, the business is seriously interfered with. Electric roads and automobiles are hurting the business likewise. They are even running automobiles to the river club houses, in place of boats.
It seems ironic that Wood's primary business, boat building, may have spelled the end of the Clinton River excursion trade: Wood sold the Mineral City to two prominent Chicago excursion boat operators, Thomas Young and Thomas Barry, on 14 April 1913. However, the Clinton business may have not been all that moribund, since Wood assumed ownership of Young and Barry’s unusual side-wheel steam boat J. Bonner 77521 on 19 July 1913, renamed her Bath City (a name honoring her home port, reminiscent of Mineral City), and put her back on the Clinton River. Built in 1902 at Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, by Lewis Van Winkle, the Bath City was dismantled at Mount Clemens, her document finally surrendered in 1923. Although of a larger length than the Mineral City by over thirteen feet, it is probable that the paddle wheel configuration of the Bath City may have made her more manageable on what the Mount Clemens Monitor often called the "uncertain Clinton River."
The Mineral City was ideally suited to Chicago’s lakefront excursion trade: With her relatively large passenger capacity and open decks, her profile was a virtual paradigm for the typical Chicago excursion steam boat of the era. For the next fourteen years, the Mineral City would be a popular boat on the Lincoln Park route, without nearly the ownership turnover that marked many other craft in the trade. A great-grandson of the famous "Commodore" Barry of Revolutionary War fame and with his five brothers a principle in the Barry Transportation
The Mineral City at Lincoln Park, circa 1919
Figure 22. An usual view of the Mineral City at the boat landing at Lincoln Park; the Illinois seems to be in the foreground. That Lake Shore Drive on the eastern edge of the park was a popular promenade for the city's glitterati is obvious from the elegantly garbed folks in this photograph. William Lafferty Collection.
Company, a noted Lake Michigan passenger line of the turn-of-the-century, Barry on 18 March 1914 purchased Young’s share of the boat and, keeping a one-third share for himself, sold the other two-thirds to three others, including Rix and Orville Newton, also prominent lakefront vessel operators. Young assumed full ownership nine months later from the group, on 17 December 1914, and kept it for the remainder of the vessel’s existence, serving as her master for most of that time.
The sad aspect of the story of the Mineral City begins with her final day of operation, which happened, not coincidentally, to be the day of the Favorite disaster. As mentioned in the discussion of the Favorite, that fateful day the Mineral City ferried survivors plucked from the Favorite to Municipal Pier. In the hue and cry that attended that tragedy, the powers-that-be in Chicago mounted a highly visible campaign to reinspect the lakefront excursion fleet, and to purge from its ranks those vessels that, in the post-Favorite era, were deemed too long in the tooth to continue. The zealots found the Mineral City of both deficient safety equipment and a rotting oak hull, and she was refused a license to continue in operation. Thomas Young parked his boat on the south side of the Ogden Slip, and there she sat for the next four years.
The Forlorn Mineral City, circa 1930
Figure 23. The Mineral City in a definite state of disarray, heeled over against the wall on the south side of the Ogden Slip, circa 1930. Her advanced state of deterioration is obvious in this rare view. William Lafferty Collection.
It's not clear if Young intended to refurbish the Mineral City to reenter the excursion trade, but by the time the vessel had been condemned, the excursion trade was already on the wane. She sat forlorn in the Ogden Slip, eventually becoming a home for vagrants and a target of vandals, while her seams parted and she developed a pronounced list to starboard. Finally, in the spring of 1931, amid a city-wide crackdown seeking to rid Chicago's waterways, especially the North branch, of the remnants of old hulks judged eyesores by city fathers and the press, the old Mineral City was lifted from the muck of the Ogden Slip by the Great Lakes Dredge & Dock derrick barge No. 5, the same piece of equipment that had raised the Favorite the evening of the day the Mineral City last ran, brought out into the lake, and scuttled.
The End of the Line
Figure 24. The Mineral City, left in the muck on the bottom of the Ogden Slip for almost four years, is plucked from her resting place by the Great Lakes Dredge & Dock derrick barge No. 5, which had lifted the Favorite from the bottom off Lincoln Park the day of the Mineral City's last trip. William Lafferty Collection.
Thanks and a tip of the Lafferty hat goes to Ms. Deborah J. Larsen of the Mount Clemens Public Library, Mount Clemens, Michigan, for her invaluable help. Visit the library's excellent website for more on Mount Clemens history.
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©1999, William Lafferty
![Lily [mcpl].jpg (39787 bytes)](Lily_mcpl.jpg)
