Death knell tolls: Oldest Great Lakes freighter ‘E.M. Ford’ to be scrapped
August 25, 08 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
by Tom Gilchrist | Source: The Bay City Times
Perhaps no one is closer to the E.M. Ford - believed to be the oldest Great Lakes freighter still afloat - than Tom Daleski.
Daleski, after all, lives on the 110-year-old vessel headed for the scrap yard this year or next. His father, James Daleski of Alpena, once served as captain of the boat sitting at the Lafarge North America cement plant in Saginaw County’s Carrollton Township.
“It’s one of a kind,” said Tom Daleski, 44, who resides aboard the cement hauler - which has sat for 12 years in the Saginaw River as a storage vessel for powdered cement.
“There’s not another one like this in the world; there just ain’t,” Daleski said. “The engine’s original, built in 1897.”
Someday soon, though, officials with Lafarge - the boat’s owner - say the boat will make its final voyage on the Great Lakes, on its way to a scrapyard.
“There’s a very good possibility the boat will go to scrap this year, and if not, it will for sure go to scrap in May of 2009,” said Mark Thomas, vessel operations manager at Lafarge North America’s office in Bingham Farms in Oakland County.
… “Oh my God, I just feel bad about it,” Daleski said. “I was on this boat when I was 5 years old and this was my dad’s first captain’s job. I used to spend half my summers on this thing with my dad.”Freighter lovers, however, may value the boat more for what’s inside the vessel, built by the Cleveland Cliffs Steamship Co.
“It has a 1,500-hsp quadruple-expansion steam engine - that’s what all of the boat nerds are going to remember about it,” Thomas said. “For it to be built in 1898 and to have that much horsepower, was impressive. That allowed it to have speeds of 13 mph.”
Workers in Cleveland built the boat, formerly known as the Presque Isle, as a bulk ore carrier and it later was converted to a self-unloading cement carrier, Thomas said.
The ship was rechristened as the E.M. Ford in 1956, he said.
… Thomas, of Lafarge North America, said Lafarge employees have spent about nine months trying to find a historical group to take the E.M. Ford, but without success.
“We’ve researched with all the major museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, and there is no historical society out there in North America that we could possibly donate the ship to,” Thomas said.
“It would take a lot of money to make that ship worthy of bringing people on it. It’s not a place I would bring children.”
See the entire lovely article (with photos, quotes and much more) at the Bay City Times >>
