Floating Palaces of the Great Lakes by Joel Stone

Author:Joel Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Chapter 9

New Era, New Business Models

The transition between the antebellum and postwar steamboat industries was gradual and almost seamless. The men and companies that came to dominate the lakes after 1865 had their roots in businesses in the first period of development. This chapter will explore several of the dominant players through the latter half of the nineteenth century and how they became entwined with every facet of the region’s history. With their origins in the first period of the steamboat age, these entities were the basis for businesses that controlled the lakes and survived through the industry’s final period in the twentieth century.

Albert E. Goodrich had a career that personified this era. Born near Buffalo in 1826, his father was a hotelier and an early investor in New Buffalo, Michigan, on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. His uncle Captain Harry Whittaker was a shipowner and mastermind of New Buffalo’s development. When the town became the western terminus of the Michigan Central Rail Road’s line from Detroit in 1849, business boomed at the Goodrich Hotel. More than one hundred thousand travelers arrived in New Buffalo that year. Some folks stayed, and local land prices soared. Most pressed on to Chicago or Milwaukee, riding Ward Line steamers across southern Lake Michigan. The trip from Detroit to Chicago took about a day and a half—remarkable for the period.1

Young Albert Edgar, or simply “A.E.,” learned the hospitality trade in his father’s hotel. Drawn to the lakes, he secured a job aboard the A.D. Patchin in 1847, a vessel leased to Ward concerns by his uncle. Albert was soon elevated to clerk and later captain, serving aboard Ward’s Pacific, Traveler, and Cleveland. Business was brisk in New Buffalo until 1852, when both the Michigan Southern Rail Road and the Michigan Central Rail Road completed through-routes to Chicago. By 1853 a trip from Detroit to Chicago took less than half a day, requiring no transfers. The lucrative cross-lake steamship trade suffered immediately. The Ward Line consolidated its business on the eastern and northern lakes, leaving the Lake Michigan trade open to all comers.

Captain Stephen Clement leased four forlorn Ward vessels in 1855 and formed the Clement Steamboat Line in 1856 to serve Lake Michigan ports out of a base in Chicago. Several former Ward personnel invested in the venture, including A.E. Goodrich. Within months the itch of entrepreneurial adventure piqued the young man, and by the end of the year, he and another Clement investor, George Drew, had left the enterprise and formed what became familiarly known as Goodrich’s Steamboat Line.

Drew and Goodrich leased another available Ward boat, the side-wheeler Huron, and secured dock space in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin. By the end of the Civil War, Goodrich had purchased the Huron and the propeller Ogontz and acquired the new steamer Comet from Ward’s Newport (Marine City) shipyard. Later he purchased the Wabash Valley, the Union (engines from the Ogontz), the Sunbeam (engines from the Wabash Valley), and the Lady Franklin. These vessels were typical of the fleet that carried on after the demise of the huge palace steamers.

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