The Battle of Fort Whitney has been waged at picnics and family reunions, church socials and during canasta games, and once it was even fought at the annual liturgical conference of Lutheran ministers (Missouri Synod).

All this fuss over that big concrete thingie (let’s call it "The Structure") on the Duluth shoreline in front of the Hampton Inn on Canal Park Drive (which, of course, used to be First Avenue East).

The most persistent rumors maintain that The Structure was a fort, a bastion of defense erected there to protect Duluth residents from Badger State barbarians, from Michigan’s mythical Yoopers, or perhaps from Canadians. Lots of people believe one version or another It does look like a gun emplacement, doesn’t it?

Another legend insists that The Structure is or was an ice house. Nobody really seems to have an explanation for that theory, but it seems to have greatest support among East Side Duluthians. Maybe they know more about it than they’re saying, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that it ever served that purpose.

Still another story that makes the rounds is that The Structure was a lighthouse. Wrong again! Although, interestingly enough, there actually was a lighthouse located just inshore from that location from 1870 to 1878 or so, but it was an open-framework wooden tower used as a rear range light for vessels rounding Duluth’s original breakwater about a half-mile out in the lake. It was torn down a couple of years after the breakwater broke up in a storm.

After the Duluth Ship Canal was dug in 1871, hardly anybody used the old docks out on the lakefront anyway.

The Structure was a loading dock, believe it or not … really an unloading dock, erected in 1920 by the Whitney Sand & Gravel Company of Duluth to unload scows full of … guess what? … sand and gravel!

In those days there was a tremendous market for sand and gravel for road work and construction, and the Whitney derrick- barges Clyde and The Limit used to excavate it up the shore at Lester River and Burlington Bay or over at Sand Island in the Apostles.

The barges would tie up close to the shore and dig some 300 or 400 yards of gravel with their steam-powered clamshell rigs, then the big steel tug William A. Whitney would tow them down to the Duluth waterfront to discharge.

The Whitney brothers — William A., E. Harvey, W.W. and Everett A. — began operating as marine contractors in 1889, and they incorporated in 1904 with offices and docks near the old Globe Elevator in Superior. They had several tugs, scows and derrick-barges, and eventually built the innovative unloading facility out on the Lake with its concrete hopper for sand and gravel and a steam-driven conveyor system to carry the raw materials ashore to big stockpiles.

It was a great idea — but it worked well only when the lake was calm. It was difficult to tie up the 150-foot barges alongside The Structure and to work the derricks when there was a sea running, even a small sea. So it seems that the Whitney dock soon won the soubriquet of Whitney’s Folly, and not long afterward, when the conveyors were dismantled, became known, somewhat derisively, as Fort Whitney.

For many years in the late 1920s the Clyde and The Limit delivered their cumbersome loads to docks inside the harbor. Whitney Brothers reorganized in 1930 as Merritt Chapman & Whitney, and the old wooden derrick-barges were sold off to other owners not long after that. Merritt Chapman & Whitney used the tug William A. Whitney until it went to the Zenith Dredge Company fleet in 1962, and it remained based in Duluth until 1974.

The tug has been inactive in the Chicago River for several years now, but she is still afloat.