Part 1
The story of the loss of the Andaste begins in Grand Haven, a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Grand Haven is about 30 miles northwest of Grand Rapids and is located at the mouth of the Grand River. The town had been a hub of trade since Rix Robinson established a trading post in the area in the early 19th century. Its importance as a trading center over the years lay in the fact that Grand Haven was one of the few towns on either side of the Lake Michigan shore line with a protected navigable harbor. As the 19th century progressed, its importance as a center of commerce diminished with the obliteration of the pine and hardwood forests in the region of the Grand River and the growth of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo as the dominant industrial and trade centers on the Great Lakes.
While down, Grand Haven was far from out. By the early 1920’s, she boasted the Eagle Ottawa Leather Company, at the time the largest producer of upholstery leather in the world. Also based in Grand Haven was the Story Clark Piano factory. Its huge smokestack towered over the town and was one of the first things you saw as you entered the harbor. Lining the riverside of Grand Haven were the docks and warehouses of several companies, most notably the Goodrich Steamship Line, a passenger and package freight shipping company, at the foot of Washington Street, Grand Haven’s main street. Just up the river from the Goodrich Line were the rails and docks of the Grand Trunk Milwaukee Car Ferry Company which carried rail cars across Lake Michigan to Milwaukee. Finally, about a mile up the winding river from Grand Haven was the Construction Materials Corporation (CMC) yard on the north side of the river at Ferrysburg.
A quick aside; the company has been referred to in various sources as Construction Materials Company, Construction Materials Corporation, and later as Construction Aggregates Corporation. As the company had been selling stock as Construction Materials Corporation by the time our story takes place, I’ll be referring to it as Construction Materials Corporation.
CMC started in Indiana, along the Lake Michigan shoreline, as the Sensibar Sand Company. Jacob R. Sensibar and his father moved to the shore after the family farm in northern Indiana was wiped out by crop failure and flooding back in early 1907. In an interview in the Chicago Tribune printed February 2, 1952, Sensibar said, “All we knew how to do was dig dirt…” Jacob had only just finished his Junior year of High School when he and his father started the Company. They got a contract to level an area of the Indiana sand dunes, not far from the Lake, which then became the site of part of the United States Steel Company town of Gary.
Over the next decade, J. R., as he was known to his friends, and his father sold sand from a sand pit for building and road projects in Chicago, shipping it first by horse and wagon, later by train. After a fire wiped out their barns, horses, wagons, and equipment, the decision to change methods of transportation was rather easily made. Loading the train cars by hand then having to pay seventy cents, on every dollar made, for shipping costs, J. R. started thinking there had to be a better way. He began thinking about shipping sand to Chicago by water. During the next few years he visited many shippers around the country to see how they hauled their sand and what the difficulties might be.
In Detroit he saw a boat which could pump sand from the bottom of the lake and bring it to shore where it would be unloaded with what was known as a “whirly”, a crane with a bucket. The loading was fast, taking hours to accomplish, but the unloading took days to finish. During that time the crew was unemployed and the boat, obviously, was tied to the dock and unable to haul more loads. Clearly both the owners of the boat and the crew were losing money.
Sensibar decided it would make sense to use the same equipment to unload a boat as was used to load it. Through trial and error, he perfected what he referred to as “sand soup”. Using the pump with which he brought sand from the bottom of the lake to the hold of a ship, he reversed it while, at the same time, pumping water into the hold. The water allowed the pump to take the sand out in a mixture of about 15% sand and 85% water. The “soup” was pumped into the area to be filled. The water ran off and the sand was left behind in a relatively flat and solid base to be used for the construction of large buildings.
- R. had never used the technique in actual construction, but, in 1916, he entered a bid for filling the area where the new Field Museum in Grant Park was to be built on the lake shore of Chicago. His bid was 30% lower than the next lowest bid but included a condition: his company was to be allowed to use a new technique for reclaiming land, the “sand soup” technique, and be provided the equipment with which to do the work. A long, very impressive, story made short, J. R.’s company filled the area, which was under 15’ of water. When the work was completed, the site stood 40 feet above the lake level. The Field Museum was built on that site with some 340,000 cubic feet of marble and still stands proudly overlooking the Chicago lakeshore.
The success of the reclamation of swamp and lake for the Field Museum garnered new jobs from the City of Chicago and other customers. Sensibar’s Construction Materials Corporation, he changed the name around the time he got the Field Museum fill job, was hired to fill much of the Chicago shoreline in an ambitious plan to create parks and beaches lining the entire shoreline from Lincoln Park to the north to Jackson Park to the south and beyond. By his own accounting, J. R. estimated that CMC was responsible for about 65% of all the fill along the Chicago shoreline.
With the success of his “sand soup” process and the attention CMC was receiving nationwide, Sensibar was able to get contracts for all types of aggregate for the many building projects planned in and around the Chicago area. As reported in the Chicago Tribune, the source for sand for the shoreline filling project was a “natural sand bar east of Gary”. The need for larger gravel and stone, to meet the new contracts for roads and new buildings and foundations, and a place to process it, took CMC on a search around the Lake Michigan shore for areas which might provide such a source. The proper location had to be accessible from the “Big Lake” to allow for the cheap transport of materials to various job sites around Lake Michigan. The search settled on an eleven-hundred-acre parcel of land about 12 miles up-river from Grand Haven. It was at a spot near the Bass River, which fed into the Grand River from the south.
Having found what would be referred to as the Bass River gravel pits, CMC needed a place on the river which was reachable by lake freighters. It had to be far enough away from populated areas to allow them a long flat uninterrupted stretch of shoreline to construct docks and warehouses, and the space to sort out and store the different sizes of gravel. At the same time, it had to have ready access to roads. They found just the spot about a mile north of Grand Haven near the village of Ferrysburg. The property was immediately west of the railroad swing bridge which spanned the Grand River.
The land would have to be cleared and the wetlands along the shoreline needed to be filled to provide a solid base for the construction and storage space they’d be needing. Naturally CMC knew exactly how to take care of that process, so, in 1921, the company purchased the pieces of property and, under the supervision of Peter Boet the Assistant Superintendent of CMC, and a Mr. Morley who was in direct charge of the construction, began the process of filling the swampy scrubland and transforming it into an operating yard.
At various times, CMC had older wooden boats which had worked hard on the lakes but were on the far side of life and were cheaply purchased. The L.L. Barth was one such boat. CMC purchased her in 1917. They mounted the equipment necessary for dredging the lake bottom and, using that material in the “sand soup”, to fill areas of the lakeshore. They then put her to work along the Chicago shoreline project. In 1921, after they purchased the Ferrysburg property, the company sent a sand sucker, quite likely the Barth, up the Grand River to do the fill work there.
The charts of the Grand River from 1907 and 1923 show identical water depths meaning that the government probably hadn’t done any dredging of the river prior to CMC purchasing the property at Ferrysburg. Since the L.L. Barth’s draft was almost fourteen-feet and the river’s depth was less than that in many areas, we can presume that she was used to dredge the river to the plant’s location, the dredgings most likely used for some of the reclaiming of the shoreline.
When the work on the riverbank was completed, CMC built a dock along the riverside about one thousand feet long. Meanwhile a crew was building a warehouse and storage facilities for the various types of aggregate they would be shipping through this site. When all was said and done, Construction Materials Corporation had a state-of-the-art facility adequate for docking a freighter and several barges at a time with a wide variety of aggregate for use in construction projects all around the Lake Michigan area.
In Part 2 of this entry, I’ll be focusing on the shipping of materials from Construction Materials Corporation in Grand Haven to Chicago and other ports along the Lake Michigan shoreline. In particular, I’ll be exploring a couple of the freighters they used to do the hard work of hauling aggregate before they brought the Andaste in to help fill their needs.
Part 2
In the early 1920’s the economy was hot! Automobiles and homes were becoming more affordable, factories were expanding due to the increasing demand for products and new companies were being formed rapidly taking advantage of the growing economy. The demand for materials for the expansion of the road system, new breakwaters and other navigational improvements, housing and factories was huge and the purchase of the Bass River gravel pits and the Ferrysburg yard by Construction Materials Corporation put them in a solid position for filling the many contracts they had outstanding.
By the Spring of 1922, production and shipping of aggregate was well underway under the supervision of Peter Boet, the Assistant Superintendent of CMC. The crew was hard at work excavating aggregate at the Bass River gravel pits and shipping it down river. At the outset, the screening and grading of gravel took place at Bass River. The resulting product was then loaded onto wooden barges, using conveyer belts, and brought down river by a wooden steam powered tug, the Freedom, which CMC had at Ferrysburg.
The yard at Ferrysburg was a flurry of activity as barges of screened and graded gravel from Bass River were being unloaded by “whirlys”, cranes with their clamshell buckets digging out stone trying to unload each barge faster than the last. Try as they might, it still took the better part of a day and often more to unload each barge. As soon as a barge was unloaded the Freedom took it back upriver to be loaded again. The gravel was moved to holding areas waiting for the return of the Company’s freighter to take another load to Chicago.
The L.L. Barth had done the dredging and land reclamation work at Ferrysburg and, apparently, she was kept on the Chicago-Ferrysburg run once the local operation was up and running. The Barth, as I mentioned in Part 1 of this post, was an old boat when CMC purchased her for sand sucking and land filling. She was built in 1889 by James Davidson in West Bay City, Michigan. She was 185’ long and was originally named the Wilhelm. It’s unclear who the original owner was but in 1900 she was purchased by the Edward Hines Lumber Company in Chicago and used to haul lumber from the forests of northern Michigan to Chicago. In 1903, she was renamed the L.L. Barth after Edward Hines’ Vice President Louis L. Barth.
Varying sources split here but, she appears to have been sold to the Hamilton Transportation Company in Michigan City, Indiana on February 3, 1915. She stayed there for about two years when she was purchased, as we talked about earlier, by J.R. Sensibar and the Construction Materials Corporation on or about February 17, 1917. At that time CMC was still located in Gary, Indiana. Within a couple years their home office would be in Chicago.
If the Barth were a steel boat, being 33 years old in 1922 wouldn’t necessarily have been a big deal. However, being a lumber hooker for so long was hard on the old wooden girl and a future of carrying tons of aggregate for CMC didn’t promise to be any easier on her. Aggregate was a hard cargo on any boat but especially wood boats and the beating they took from being loaded with shore bound conveyors and unloaded by the clamshell buckets of “whirlys” was tremendous. She filled their need heroically, though. She was on the small side, but they loaded her with as large a cargo as safety would allow. They had a great demand for aggregate, but it wouldn’t make sense to overload the old Barth for two reasons: First, a cargo at the bottom of Lake Michigan wouldn’t do anyone any good. Second, J.R. Sensibar had a strong sense of right and wrong and was recognized as being an ethical businessman. As such, he had instilled in the leadership of his company, both his executives and the men who oversaw the hands-on day-to-day activities, an understanding that the safety of both his employees and his boats was paramount.
Let me step aside from our story here with a little editorializing. As we’ll see reflected in several incidents coming up, men who worked in the yards, the gravel pits, or on the various boats and tugs owned by CMC were not simply thrown away as an operating cost towards higher profits. This was not to say that working conditions then were as they are today. The work days and work weeks were longer and harder. The work that was done was dangerous at times. The diesel- and gas-powered equipment, while advanced for the time, was still in its early stages of development and evolving. By today’s standards the machinery was dangerous. People were injured and some did die in work accidents, by much larger numbers than we see today, but the culture around CMC, from the few snapshots we’ll see in the future, appears to have been one that valued their workers. Once again though, this is all relative. Viewed through today’s lens CMC may be seen as a culture of greed and corruption with no concern for their people, only their equipment. However, in its day, from what I’ve read and hope to show, it was a more employee-oriented company than many other companies at the time.
As I was saying, before I so rudely interrupted myself, the L.L. Barth was hauling as much cargo as could be safely loaded onto her. However, with the growing demands of their customers for aggregate and the speed with which the sand and gravel was being produced, it didn’t take long to see that the Barth wouldn’t be able to keep up with the transportation of all the aggregate available. Sensibar and executives at the LaSalle St. office, in Chicago, started looking for another freighter to help fill the demand.
Before the 1923 shipping season began, the Lake Shore Stone Company, an aggregate company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sold their old self-unloading freighter, the Hennepin, to Construction Materials Corporation. The Hennepin, like the Barth, was an old wooden vessel, in this case a bulk freighter, which was built in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1888. She was just under 209’ in length and over the next thirteen years she worked successfully as a bulk freighter and, for a time, a package freighter hauling goods for the Soo Line Railroad, which chartered her for the run from Gladstone, Michigan to Buffalo, New York.
Apparently her thirteenth year proved to be somewhat unlucky for her as she caught fire on Lake Michigan, on the 27th of May 1901. She had just been purchased a month and a half earlier by the Manistee Transit Company in Milwaukee. Although she was badly damaged, the crew managed to put the fire out and she was towed to Mackinaw City in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan. From there she was towed to Buffalo, New York where she was tied up to a wharf on the Blackwell Canal. As bad luck would have it on the 27th of June, one month to the day after her fire on Lake Michigan, she caught fire again while on the Blackwell Canal.
What was bad luck for the Hennepin’s owners was good luck for the Lake Shore Stone Company. The owners of that Company had ideas of a self-unloading freighter to haul their materials to Chicago and other ports. Clearly, they wouldn’t have wanted to build a new ship with experimental unloading equipment when it would have been far more economical to experiment on an existing boat. Since the Hennepin not only needed to be totally rebuilt but could be had very cheaply, Lakeshore bought her and, using a system designed and installed by Webster Manufacturing Company, out of Chicago, she was indeed rebuilt as the first self-unloading freighter on the Great Lakes…some say in the world! I can’t argue with that not having found information to the contrary!
Never the less, in April 1902 the Hennepin was back in-service running between Milwaukee and Stone Haven, on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan. Located about two miles east of Belgium, Stone Haven was the name of the area where Lake Shore Stone’s loading operation took place. It is now the site of Harrington Beach State Park and there is little evidence of its existence, but in the early 20th century it was the home of a huge excavating operation. The quarry was a half mile inland and was the source of dolomite lime stone. Once the stone was excavated by the steam powered equipment on-site it was taken to the lake shore by a system of cable-drawn railcars.
At the lakeshore the cars were pulled out onto a trestle built upon a pier which reached out into the lake. The cars were emptied into chutes on the side of the trestle which in turn fed the stone into the holds of the Hennepin. The Hennepin’s hold was separated into two, length-wise, and the steel floors of each were sloped in a “V”. The holds each emptied into a tunnel, at the bottom of the “V”, through which a conveyor belt ran bringing the gravel from each hold aft to a hopper. From that hopper another belt brought the load forward and up to the deck and emptied it onto a final conveyor belt mounted on a loading boom, supported by a huge A-frame, which could off-load the stone to the shore without the aid of shore-bound equipment.
Once she was loaded, the Hennepin steamed south 35 miles to Milwaukee to unload her cargo of limestone at the Milwaukee location of the Illinois Steel Company. There the limestone was used as flux in the steel making process. She could make the round trip in sixteen hours, which was unheard of at a time when similar sized boats would take more than a week just to unload by hand; men with shovels, wheel barrows and hoists. Furthermore, the Hennepin proved another advantage of a self-unloading freighter. She could not only deliver cargoes to small harbors that didn’t have facilities for unloading freighters, but she could easily unload a partial cargo and bring the rest to other sites thus expanding her market substantially.
All this travelling and work wore out old wooden boats and the Hennepin was no exception. In 1916, at the grand old age of 28 years old, she was rebuilt, and she came out of the dry dock longer, at 214’. She worked on the lakes for Lake Shore Stone Company for another four years until Lake Shore stopped making lake deliveries. At that time, Lake Shore leased the Hennepin to Leathem Smith of the Leathem D. Smith Stone Company, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. He used the Hennepin for three years hauling his stone to harbors around the Great Lakes for use in building roads and break waters and for making concrete to fill the growing demand for various construction projects in the region.
For several years Leathem had thought about the best way to convert existing freighters into self-unloading boats. The belt system for unloading, which the Hennepin and one or two other boats had, was considered too expensive to retrofit into existing tonnage. To install a system like that into an existing steel freighter would require one of two things: either the system would have to be installed on top of the ballast tanks which were built into the bottom of the hold, thereby reducing the storage area and raising the center of gravity to such an extent that the holds wouldn’t be able to contain enough cargo to pay for itself, or it would require removal of the ballast tanks from the floor of the hold, rebuild them into the sides of the hull and then install the self-unloading equipment into the hold. The cost of such a remodel was far too high to be economical.
Smith finally settled on the idea of a “tunnel scraper” system. He apparently came to this design by watching a dragline working at his quarry. Once he had perfected his design and built a working scale model of the system, Smith travelled to shipping companies around the Great Lakes in an attempt to convince one of them of the relative ease of retrofitting a bulk freighter with his system and the economic returns on their investment.
Leathem found a convert in A.E.R. Schneider, the chief freight agent for Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company. After a bit of negotiating Smith acquired one half interest in and installed his system into the hold of a small steel freighter, not much bigger than the Hennepin, named the Andaste. It was then, in the early days of 1923, that Smith gave the Andaste a new lease on life and returned the Hennepin to Lake Shore Stone. Lake Shore turned around and sold the Hennepin to CMC and they put her to work running gravel not only to the Chicago yards, but to smaller harbors around Lake Michigan, much as she did for Lake Shore Stone.
The Hennepin worked tirelessly for CMC for two or three years when, after her hull had weakened greatly, the decision was made to remove her machinery. The self-unloading equipment was still in good shape and it was hoped that by removing her propulsion system they might be able extend her life. The tugs UFASCO and Lotus were chartered to haul the Hennepin to her various ports of call.
This arrangement worked for a few more years until 1927. On the 18th of August of that year the Lotus was towing the Hennepin back to Ferrysburg after unloading at the South Chicago yard. In 2007, The Joint Archives Quarterly, a publication of The Joint Archives of Holland History Research Center, published an account of the loss and discovery of the Hennepin written by Valerie Olson van Heest. She is a co-founder of the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association (MSRA), the organization which discovered the Hennepin. In the article she describes an oral history recorded by Vern Verplank, of Spring Lake, Michigan. Verplank was a crewmember of the Hennepin when she went down.
He explained that the Hennepin always took on water, but the ten bilge pumps were normally able to keep up with it. On this day, around 10:30 a.m., the Captain, Ole Hansen noticed the water was gaining on the pumps. Verplank’s supposition was that the Chief Engineer, one Abe Lyons, whom he described as being “notorious for slacking”, most likely hadn’t kept the pump filters clean. At any rate, around 2:30 p.m. Lyons sounded the whistle to alert the tug there was a problem and Captain Hansen ordered abandon ship. Ernie Casperson who was the cook “took quarters of beef out of the cooler…” and the crew safely rowed away from the Hennepin in their lifeboat. The weather was calm and mild and there was no sense of panic; almost like they were just bringing some food to the Lotus for a bit of a party before moving on.
When the Hennepin went down the entire galley house ripped from the hull and floated over the barge’s grave. Captain Albert Anderson, of the Lotus, began ramming the house to break it up. It obviously posed a navigational hazard and Anderson would have none of that. He had proven and would continue to prove himself to be a safe captain always looking out for his boat and her crew. After the galley cabin was reduced to kindling, Anderson brought the Lotus on a heading for Ferrysburg.
Upon returning to their home port, Captain Ole Hansen invented a story that the Hennepin went down in a storm, which was repeated in the Grand Haven Daily Tribune the next afternoon. You have to wonder what the response was from the others who were present when the Hennepin went down. Whatever the response was, Ole Hansen drifted into the mists of history after that, unlike the Hennepin. The memory of the first self-unloader on the Great Lakes would live on and several members of her crew and that of the Lotus would figure largely in the story of the Andaste as we continue down this path.
As soon as the Lotus got back to the harbor with the news of the Hennepin, Peter Boet informed the Chicago office. At that time, CMC was left with only the L.L. Barth for transporting their gravel. J.R. Sensibar and Roy Brinkman, who was the Superintendent of CMC and in charge of arranging for the steamers used for transporting their cargo, immediately started looking for a replacement for the Hennepin. The pressure was really on since the L.L. Barth was barely holding her own. In the fall of 1926, her engines had been removed in an attempt to extend her life, much like the Hennepin. She continued life as a barge, most likely towed by the Lotus or the UFASCO, which ever wasn’t towing the Hennepin at the time.
There’s a good chance plans may have already been underway regarding finding another freighter to haul their aggregate before the Hennepin ever went to the bottom. Even with the removal of her engines, the Barth was quickly falling apart, and the company must have been preparing for her replacement. By the end of the 1927 season she had been beached on the east side of the river, just downstream from CMC, where she sat abandoned for years before the wood from her cabins and her hull was scavenged, right down to the waterline, for building projects and firewood.
Shortly after the Hennepin went down, Sensibar and Brinkman were able to secure the charter of the Andaste, a small self-unloading sandsucker owned by the Andaste Steamship Company in Cleveland, Ohio, a subsidiary of either Leathem Smith-Cliffs Co. of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin or of Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company of Cleveland, Ohio. Regardless of who owned her, CMC took possession of her in 1927, probably in the fall. Captain Albert Anderson, who was the captain of the tug Lotus when the Hennepin went down, went to Cleveland with Captain Charles Brown, the new First Mate of the Andaste, to bring her to her new home at Ferrysburg.
In the next few entries we’ll explore a little of the history of the Andaste and the men who served on her.
90 Years Ago Today 