Long Ships Passing, Story of the Great Lakes, is a Timeless Classic
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Walter Havighurst (1901-1994) was a professor at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, with more than two dozen book credits and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
Long ships passing on the icy Great Lakes, illustration by John O'Hara Cosgrave II in Havighurst's story of the lakes.
We can never learn enough about the Great Lakes and a timeless book by Walter Havighurst should be part of every Michiganian's education.
I discovered Havighurst's masterpiece of lakes literature this Christmas when the book "The Long Ships Passing: The Story of the Great Lakes" (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1942, 291 pages) was lent to me by Jack Randall, my neighbor.
A retired dentist, Dr. John Randall in his youth was a crewman on a lakes freighter braving the tossing Lake Superior seas described by Havighurst, who also had been a merchant seaman.
In the chapter, "Sawdust on the Wind," author Havighurst describes the days when seamen heading for Bay City and Saginaw could find port on while still out on Saginaw Bay.
"In fog a keen-nosed captain could steer his ship into the river by the sharp, sweet sawdust smell," he wrote.
"The first pavement in Bay City was made of pine blocks that floated away during high water after a winter of deep snow," he reported.
Describing the start of the pine timber trade, Havighurst recalls the pioneer lumberman Harvey Williams who built the first steam sawmill on the Saginaw.
As the story went: "He brought with him, on a schooner's deck, afamous steam engine. He trundled it ashore and set it up in the shadow of the vast pine tracts. the hissing of that boiler meant the end of Saginaw pine."
That steam engine had powered the first steamboat on the lakes, Walk-in-the-Water. When she went down after three years the engine was salvaged and installed in the steamboat Superior and served 10 more years. Williams adapted the old engine to sawing machinery and for 20 more years it cut 2,000 board feet a day, finally succumbing to a millfire on July 4, 1854.
When the pine timber grew sparse, shipyards rose up using Michigan oak, said superior to that of old England, and then salt was drawn up from the depths to keep the local economy going.
Havighurst doesn't mention Midland's Dow Chemical Company, but no greater use of salt brine has likely ever been made by any company. The flow of products from simple brine has provided an endless economic cornucopia for mid-Michigan for more than a century.
We also recently learned that the partner of John D. Rockefeller, one Henry Flagler, earned his business spurs in the Saginaw salt blocks in the 1860s. And that a spare knowledge of salt production was enough leverage for a Bay Cityan, Dr. Esson Gale, to become chief advisor to the Chinese Salt Administration in the early 1800s, introducing honest, efficient business administration to that primitive economy now so dominant in the world.
Another Bay City legend, Capt. James Davidson, also is dipped in Havighurst's ink, weaving other tales we have never heard before. Davidson's fortune began when a rowboat he built as a boy was used to ferry seamen to their vessels in the Buffalo, New York, harbor.
Havighurst recalls Davidson: "In 1871 he established his shipyard at Bay City on the Saginaw, close to the finest lumber that the continent possessed. Before his building was done he had launched more than a hundred ships and had left his name written large in the lakes story."
Havighurst weaves tales of the Great Lakes from Etienne Brule's fearless missions in the service of Champlain beginning in 1610 to talk of an ocean connection that later became a reality in the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959.
The book is masterfully illustrated in steel engravings by John O'Hara Cosgrave II.###
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