Ever wonder what happened to steam side-wheelers (aka paddle-steamers) once so prominent on Lake Superior waters?
Here’s a look at the timeline of the legendary Forest City, which spent more than 30 years operating on Lake Superior. A classic vessel, she was among the finest on the Great Lakes. A steam side-wheeler is a large boat that uses two large paddles amidship on each side, driven by steam to move through the water.
She sailed under three different names, starting out as Montauk in New York and the U.S. East Coast, then King Edward on Lake Erie, Forest City on western Lake Superior, and finally back to the original name Montauk in Minnesota and Michigan. There were more than 15 official owners, and when she stopped operating in the 1940s, she was one of the last (if not the last) steam side-wheelers on Lake Superior.
So, what did this side-wheeler do during the decades of service? Where did she end up?
Launched as Montauk on March 31, 1891, she was built by Harlan & Hollingsworth in Wilmington, Delaware for Montauk Steamship Company to operate in the New York City area and along the U.S. East Coast. Her dimensions were 175 feet long, 31 feet wide, and 9.6 feet deep. She had four watertight bulkheads, an iron hull, walking beam engine, one cylinder, two steam Scotch boilers, two decks, and luxurious state rooms in mahogany and cherry woods.
After a succession of short-term owners and being renamed King Edward, she was sold in May 1903 to Algoma Central & Hudson Bay Railway in Ontario’s Sault Ste Marie (“Soo”) for a route from Cleveland, Ohio to the Soo. However, she was listed on the British Registry at St. John, Newfoundland, to avoid paying Canadian duty. At the time, Newfoundland was a British dominion and didn’t join Canada until 1949.
On May 26, 1910, King Edward was renamed Forest City and sold to Ontario & Ohio Navigation Company to operate across Lake Erie from Cleveland to Port Stanley, Ontario. That lasted just a year until Richard Clayton Eckert and Everand Handel North purchased Forest City in 1912 for a Lake Superior route from Cleveland to Fort William (now part of Thunder Bay).
In October of 1912, when the Silver Islet Navigation Company became the next owners of Forest City, they brought her to Lake Superior and until 1922, she operated between Silver Islet, Isle Royale, and Port Arthur. And it was this connection with Silver Islet that gave her legendary status in Canadian history books.
Though the Silver Islet Mine—once the world’s largest silver mine (1870-1884)—had long ago shut down, and the miners’ houses had been sold to folks as summer residences, the site became one of the most popular summer resorts and day-excursion destinations in the district, with Forest City bringing in thousands of passengers. Interestingly, one passenger later wrote that Forest City was “an antiquated marine atrocity that makes the trip across Thunder Bay.” Nonetheless, she continued to bring cottagers, visitors, and picnickers for 10 years, as well as bring supplies to the community. As the story goes, world-famous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of the Sherlock Holmes series of books) was reported to have conducted séances while visiting Silver Islet—supposedly twice (1914, 1923).
On the move again in 1922, Forest City ended up on Lake Michigan and renamed back to her original name of Montauk after being bought by Katherine Murphy of Sturgeon Lake, Wisconsin, to operate as an excursion boat in the Chicago area. That too was short-lived because the following year (1923), Montauk headed for Duluth after being sold to Duluth’s Clow & Nicholson Transportation Co. For the next almost 20 years, until 1942, she operated tours, excursions, and moonlight sails along the St. Louis River from Duluth to Fond du Lac. And it was in Duluth where she served the longest in one place.
Alas, after a couple of ownership changes in Duluth, her cabins and engines were removed by 1944, reducing the once-luxurious side-wheeler to a deck barge. She was then sold to Lyons Construction Company in Whitehall, Michigan. Three years later, in 1947, her documentation was changed to “undocumented” status. According to marine records, she was towed in 1972 to Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay, near Michigan’s Bay City, where she was abandoned and slowly sank after a makeshift cabin on her hull was destroyed by a fire in 1977.
After having worked for decades on Lake Superior under three different names in two countries—Montauk in the U.S., and King Edward and Forest City in Canada—the final resting place for this historic side-wheeler was Saginaw Bay in Michigan.
Trivia: The world’s oldest operating paddle-steamer is the Skibladner on Norway’s Lake Mjosa. She was launched on August 2, 1856.