In 1923, Stanley Newton published, “The Story of Sault Ste. Marie and Chippewa County.” This is part eighteen of a continuing series about the history of Sault Ste. Marie and area in its early years. I have left punctuation and grammar intact. – Laurie Davis
The Steamer Independence
The Independence, the first steamer on Lake Superior, was a stern-wheel propeller built of wood and was about 150 feet in length. She was hauled over the portage in 1845. There is a story, that she was intended when building, to carry grain from Chicago to Europe. But her speed did not exceed five miles per hour, and her coal-carrying capacity was not sufficient for half the voyage across the Atlantic so she was transferred to Lake Superior. She was a success as a lake carrier, but in November 1854, her
boiler exploded and she sank a short distance above Sault Ste. Marie. Her antique propellers or wheels may be seen in the park near the Poe Lock.
The Julia Palmer was the second steamer on Lake Superior, a side-wheeler about one hundred feet in length. In 1857 she was made a permanent part of a wood dock at Sault Ste. Marie. Schooners on the lake at this time included the Napoleon, the Algonquin, the Swallow, the Chippewa, the Fur Trader, and the Merchant. The Fur Trader tried to shoot the rapids in 1847 and turned over on the rocks. A little later the Merchant, with Captain Brown and fourteen passengers and crew, cleared the Sault
for Grand Portage. She disappeared, the forerunner of many another larger and finer Lake Superior craft. Months later, a battered door from her cabin was picked up on the north shore.
The First Railway
The American Fur Company’s Agent at the Sault in the early thirties was Gabriel Franchere, an early employee of John Jacob Astor. He had grown up in the business and knew every angle of it. He was succeeded in 1838 by John Livingstone. Under the latter’s incumbency in 1839, the large
warehouse was built which still stands, appropriately inscribed, on Water Street near the Bingham Avenue slip. In the same year, the first railway in the Upper Peninsula was constructed by the Fur Company from the above warehouse up Water Street to the present Douglas Street, where it curved
over to Portage Avenue and extended up to the head of the rapids, where the Company built another warehouse for merchandise transferred from the schooner Astor and other boats. This railway was an iron strap affair on wooden supports, and the motive power was oxen, horses, and mules.
The company’s retail store, at that date, still stands on the south side of Water Street and is known as the Hursley home. This store, the warehouses above and below the rapids, and the strap railway passed into the hands of McKnight Bros & Tinker about the year, 1846. They improved the railway and organized the Chippewa Portage Company, which handled in 1850, six thousand tons of foodstuffs and wearables, machinery, copper, and bloom iron, at a transportation charge of about one dollar per ton. They were in competition with Spalding & Bacon from 1851 to 1853, the latter
firm constructing warehouses with a connecting plank road. The advent of the canal, of course, put the portaging firms out of business.
When Peter White Arrived
When Peter White came north in 1849, bound for the iron country and unsuspected fame, he found Fort Brady, called old by that time, at the water’s edge, with a few houses below it, but the principal part of the town above. Water Street, the one-wide roadway, extended west from the Fort grounds, with a few very narrow little streets reaching out from it a short distance southward. He estimated the population of the Sault to be about 500, many of them French, some half-breeds, a few Americans, and a number of resident Indians. The post-commander was Captain Clark, and the garrison numbered about 50. There were three or four stores and two hotels, the Van Anden and the Chippewa. Landlord Smith of the Chippewa lost his hotel by fire after Peter White’s visit. He afterward bought the Van
Anden House and rechristened it the Chippewa.
The inhabitants of Sault Ste. Marie had forgotten apparently, the origin of the name of the village. One of the party asked Peter Barbeau, a prominent man of the town, how it came to be so curiously named. “That sir,” said Mr. Barbeau, “is a corruption. This town was originally named after a lady called Susan Maria, and by mispronunciation, it has become “Soo Ste. Mary.”
The State Commissioners contracted in April 1853, with the St. Mary’s Falls Ship Canal Company, to construct the canal and locks, the Company being headed by Mr. J. P. Fairbanks of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The company received as pay, 750,000 acres of land, granted by Congress.
Superintendent Charles T. Harvey turned the first spadeful of earth in June. Work was interrupted in 1854 by the cholera epidemic which swept the country, many of the sixteen hundred workmen dying on the job. June 18, 1855, the first boat, the steamer Illinois, Captain Jack Wilson, locked through, bound west. Aboard her were General Cass and Father Bingham. The same day the steamer Baltimore passed eastward with a cargo of copper. The Baltimore had voyaged up Water Street some years before on rollers.
Soo-ites Refused to Give Help
The establishment of the canal did not meet with local approval. A breach in the embankment occurred in 1857 and Superintendent Calkins’ appeal for help to the townspeople, was met with no response. Had it not been for the crew of the Government steamer Michigan, who volunteered for work,
serious consequences to the canal might have resulted.
This canal was a little over a mile long, 100 feet wide at the water line, and was twelve feet in depth. There were two locks end to end which were on the present site of the Poe lock. They were 350 feet long and 70 feet wide, and each had a lift of nine feet. The total cost was practically one million
dollars.
The tremendous size of these locks, for that day, met with vigorous disapproval from the vessel interests. Lake captains wrote to newspapers protesting their too-great dimensions, and fearing they never would be finished, or needed if they were completed. It is hard to say who were the more short-sighted, the Saulteurs or the ship owners.
The canal tonnage of 100,000 in 1855 increased in 1870 to 700,000. Officials were recommending an additional lock and the deepening of the canal. The 49ers of Lake Superior had uncovered more mineral wealth in the region than ever was found in California, and the canal was constantly crowded during the navigation season. The narrow and crooked channels of St. Mary’s were being straightened and deepened.
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