Lower left: Robert T. Smith, first director of the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth.

Lower right: Oceangoing vessels taking on cargo at the Clure Public Marine Terminal — indisputable evidence of Duluth- Superior’s emergence as a bustling world port.

Upper left: Undeveloped except for the cranes, cargo sheds and a small tank farm, the Clure Public Marine Terminal in the 1960s was often called the Port’s “Sahara,” especially when strong winds would heap sand across the roadways. Sometimes its perimeter also became a giant parking lot, as in this photo during a 1964 grain millers’ strike. The port had general cargo service to Japan in the 1960s, and a K Line vessel can be seen working in the slip.

Upper right : The iconic historic photo of the Ramon de Larrinaga as she clears the Duluth Ship Canal.

The Beluga Constitution’s unprecedented visit to the Twin Ports, in July — bringing an import cargo of wind turbine components bound for North Dakota and leaving with an export cargo of different wind turbine components bound for Europe [story, Page 6] — marked just another milestone in the globalization of the Port of Duluth-Superior.

The most obvious previous milestone was the arrival of two saltwater vessels — the Ramon de Larrinaga, at 1:15 p.m. on May 3, 1959, and, five minutes later, the Herald; those were the first two overseas ships to come to Duluth via the St. Lawrence Seaway. That occasion opened a new era of international shipping to and from America’s heartland, via what author Bill Beck, in Pride of the Inland Seas, called “the longest bi-national waterway in the world.”

As Mr. Beck ably explained in Pride, the formal opening of the Seaway marked the final chapter in a political, social and technological story that had begun three-quarters of a century earlier.

A sidebar to the story of the opening of the Seaway was the development of Duluth’s Arthur M. Clure Public Marine Terminal and the creation of the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth (now the Duluth Seaway Port Authority) and the Superior Harbor Commission.

The Clure Public Marine Terminal — originally operated by the port authority itself but today operated by Lake Superior Warehousing Co., Inc. — is recognized worldwide for its facility in handling big and heavy-lift cargoes, among them oil-sands and wind-turbine components. With its six berths; 27-foot depth; twin 90-ton breakbulk gantry cranes; 370,000 square feet of covered storage and 37 acres of paved open storage space; immediate access to rail and highway; and skilled, experienced and well-equipped workers, the public terminal is a multi-modal model of capacity, efficiency and productivity.

The public marine terminal is where Duluth-Superior turns around the vast majority of its international general cargoes, and it might not exist at all if not for the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Toward the end of the 1950s, Duluth-Superior knew it needed a new marine terminal for the coming of big-time international trade. In 1957, with tremendous support at state and local levels, the Port secured a $10 million package — $5 million from the state, $4 million from St. Louis County and $1 million from the city of Duluth. Now all that remained to do was building a terminal. And all that meant was converting raw land (some of it under water) into a site suitable for a terminal. And that meant, again according to Pride of the Inland Seas, massive dredging and “driving 6,000 feet of steel piles and pumping one million cubic yards of sand behind bulkheads that would separate the water of the harbor from the reclaimed land.”

Zenith Dredge won the contract, and over 15 months, as told in Pride, the company “would sometimes work 24 hours a day to transform the 120-acre site into a world-class port.” Once complete, the site was capable of supporting warehouses, tank farms, railroad tracks and roads able to withstand constant heavy rail and truck traffic. The Arthur M. Clure Public Marine Terminal was ready to go to work.

Much of the virtual heavy lifting as Duluth prepared for international shipping was done by Robert T. Smith, the first executive director of the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth. Mr. Smith built the staff that would take SPAD into its international era and at the same time educated the maritime industry and his local community about the port, the port authority and the synergy of their respective missions. By all accounts, he was successful on all fronts.

Those who began the work 50 years ago of preparing the way for the Marine Terminal, the opening of the Seaway and the arrival of the first oceangoing ships dared to dream big dreams. They might never have imagined that wind-turbine components would become one of Duluth-Superior’s hottest import-export commodities five decades later, but if they hadn’t been visionaries, those wind turbines would not be moving through the Twin Ports today.