It was the heyday of the hooker

The turn of the century a hundred years ago was a colorful era at the Head of the Lakes. The last of the ponderous old schooners were still eking out a living carrying salt, coal and lumber, although their numbers had dwindled from 2,000 in the 1870s to about 250 at the end of the 1890s, and most were on Lake Michigan.

Passenger steamers called regularly at Twin Ports docks, flying the house flags of outfits like Erie & Western's Anchor Line, Lake Superior Transit Company, Northern Navigation, James J. Hill's Northern Steamship Company and Booth's U.S. & Dominion Line.
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McKenzie Photo / U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Visitors Center Collection The Charles H. Bradley, an old timber hooker, lumbers into Port, with two barges in tow, around 1910.

Also plying the waters of Lake Superior and the Twin Ports were sleek package freighters, a grand variety of bulk freighters and dozens of commercial fishing vessels, ferries and tugs.

The harbor boasted 112 commercial docks in those days and more than 4,000 ship arrivals and departures annually.

The federal government was investing huge sums in the harbor. New concrete entries were being built at both Duluth and Superior, the cross-channel was being dredged, much of the waterfront was being readied for industrial use and miles of deep channels were authorized. It was the dawning of the industrial era for the Twin Ports.

One of the most important industries was lumber. Timber harvesters and marketers had moved to Duluth in the early 1890s when the Michigan forests were depleted. Dozens of huge sawmills were built on the St. Louis River. By the end of the 1890s, Duluth had become the largest lumber market in the world.

The annual cut was so great that the industry would soon run out of trees here, too, and move on to the West. While it lasted, however, the Twin Ports lumber business provided jobs for tens of thousands of loggers and mill workers. And handsome profits for investors.

Working in and out of the harbor to haul forest products down the Lakes to Chicago, Buffalo and Tonawanda was a parade of little wooden lumber steamers called "hookers." (This isn't exactly what you thought this story was going to be about, is it?) The vessels were single-decked wooden ships varying from 100 to nearly 200 feet in length. Most towed ancient schooner barges, sometimes two or three at a time, all freighted deep with cargo.

It was not uncommon to find lumber hookers or their barges dating back to the 1870s or even the 1860s. Some had originally been crack passenger steamers, long since cut down to serve the lumber trade.

These little ships would bring up a load of salt or coal and take back down the Lakes with them 700 or 800 tons of lumber, lath, shingles, barrel staves or fence posts. Some hookers carried square timber, telephone poles or railroad ties. They were loaded at docks all over the Twin Ports, invariably by hand, by gangs of "shovers" earning $2 a day.

When the forests of Minnesota and Wisconsin were depleted, by around 1910, the sawmills shut down one by one and the colorful hookers and barges disappeared, retired to boneyards all over the lower Lakes.

From 1866 to the turn of the century, 800 of the distinctive little hookers were busy at work. A few survived until the Great Depression, carrying bulk coal, sand, salt or stone products, but by then the heyday of the hookers was just a memory.

Pat Labadie is the director of Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center.