When they desired a smoke in the spring of 1912, gentlemen passengers aboard the new City of Detroit III sought out the vessel’s Gothic Room. The sanctuary’s ornate woodwork was one of naval architect Frank E. Kirby’s great flourishes in designing the massive steel-hulled, side-wheel steamer that launched from the Detroit Shipbuilding Co. yard in Wyandotte.
“Ample provision has been made for timorous males who prefer the society of their own,” a newspaper reported. “There is the lounge, located on the upper deck at the stacks, where English oak has been wrought in gothic style with consummate skill. Five panels of Tiffany stained glass exemplified a ‘heraldic design.’ ”
The City of Detroit III was the ultimate in Kirby’s series of “night boats” for Detroit and the Cleveland Navigation Co. It whisked 1,500 passengers at 22 miles per hour down the darkened Detroit River and across inky Lake Erie to Cleveland or Buffalo for business meetings in the morning.
Born in Cleveland in 1849, Kirby watched his shipbuilder father at work there and in Saginaw, where the family moved. While still in his youth, he worked for Allaire Works, a producer of steam engines in New York.
During a return trip to Michigan in 1870, he met with industrialist and shipbuilder Eber Brock Ward, which resulted in Kirby and his brother, Fritz, accepting an offer to supervise Ward’s Wyandotte shipyard. Their first effort, an iron-hulled tug, proved successful.
One of Kirby’s ship designs was the Chief Wawatam of 1911. Based at St. Ignace, this train-and-passenger ferry was built in Toledo, with icebreaking capability for winter crossings of the Straits of Mackinac. Stretching 338 feet in length, with a 62-foot beam, the Chief may have been the largest ice crusher at the time. It could carry up to 26 rail cars at once; back-and-forth crossings brought the total to more than 30,000 cars per year.
A bow propeller drew the boat forward and sloshed water from beneath the ice, which crumbled beneath the heavy hull. There also were two stern props. Although the 5-mile crossing could take hours, passengers endured the journey in a commodious lounge before docking at Mackinaw City. The Chief remained in service until 1984, and Wawatam Park in St. Ignace preserves its memory.
In Detroit, Kirby’s legacy extended to excursion steamers. The 306-foot Tashmoo carried up to 4,000 passengers to Tashmoo Park on Harsens Island. Launched on New Year’s Eve of 1899, it continued in service until being disabled following a 1936 accident.
More recent and longer-lived were the Bob-Lo boats that served the amusement park of that name on Bois Blanc Island. The Columbia (1902) steamed away on a moonlit July night for its maiden voyage, and passengers waltzed on a dance floor that spanned more than 5,600 square feet. Sensational publicity came later, when the Columbia raced the Frank E. Kirby, a self-titled nautical work that usually operated between Detroit, Sandusky, and Put-in-Bay.
After being “stimulated with all the ginger in their makeup,” according to a local reporter, the Columbia claimed victory by 200 feet. A decade later, the Ste. Claire came along to help carry up to 500,000 Bob-Lo passengers each season.
Kirby’s papers at the Detroit Public Library show he invented an unsinkable lifeboat. He also supervised assembly-line production of the Eagle-class patrol boats produced by Ford Motor Co. on the River Rouge during World War I. Another contribution to the United States Navy was the 1942 conversion of his Greater Buffalo excursion steamer to an aircraft-carrier training vessel.
One aviator who qualified for carrier service was George H.W. Bush, who would extend his own legacy in 1988 as president of the United States.
