The Wreck of The M. Stalker
Duncan A. Virostko, Museum Assistant
“Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; A shining gloss that vadeth suddenly…” ~ William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim, XIII
“M. Stalker”, Watercolor Painting, Charles W. Norton, Ca. 1862 (Dunham Tavern Museum)
When Dunham Tavern Museum was first founded in 1936, a battery of massive Hullet Unloaders still toiled away along the shores of Lake Erie and innumerable ore boats churned their way up the Cuyahoga River. Cleveland’s shipping industry was a going concern and forefront of mind. This may be one of several reasons why, when the Tavern’s taproom was first restored, an antique watercolor painting of a Great Lakes schooner found pride of place above the mantle.
This dynamic artwork is the last testament of a ship’s vanished beauty; her wreck now lies broken on the bottom of the Straights of Mackinaw, hundreds of miles away. There is beauty in such an irony: an ephemeral artwork has out lasted the solidity of the vessel it depicts. Beauty is impermanent, and yet it is that impermanence which gives it meaning.
Dunham Tavern taproom, ca. 1940, showing M. Stalker watercolor above the mantle. (Dunham Tavern Museum)
The watercolor, now on display in the Tavern’s upstairs hallway, is of the M. Stalker, a typical early lake freighter.
Sailing ships such as the M. Stalker, a two masted, schooner rigged vessel, were the most common form of freighter on the Great Lakes, even after the advent of the steamship. Early steamships were expensive and sometimes mechanically unreliable vessels whose principal strengths were their speed and ability to move independent of the wind. The engines that powered them also took up significant space inside the ship. These characteristics made them ideal for serving on passenger lines with regular stops, and carrying packages and perishable items, but unsuited to carrying iron ore, grain, lumber and the other bulk cargoes that made up the lake trade. Such expensive vessels were also often financially out of reach of the average individual shipowner or small consortium of owners typical of the period. For such owners, tried and true sailing vessels of all sizes were the ships of choice.
It would not be until the rise of the iron and steel hulled freighters of the late 1800s, and massive shipping lines owned by steel barons as part of vertical monopolies, that steamships would come to dominate the bulk freight trades on the Great Lakes.
Detail of print, view of Cleveland ca. 1853, vantage point Ohio City (Dunham Tavern Museum)
In the early 1800s, Cleveland’s harbor could have been aptly described as “a forest of masts”, as much as the city could be called “Forest City”. A lithographic aerial view of Cleveland from this era, on display in Dunham Tavern’s front hall, shows similar sailing vessels to the M. Stalker exchanging their cargoes with canal boats, at what was called the “Sloop Basin” at the end of the Ohio & Erie Canal. The canal boats would carry goods farther inland, providing a link for transshipment via the Ohio River, and bring cargoes from inland as well. They were as much an integral part of the early trade on the Great Lakes as the schooners and other sailing vessels.
The Dunham family did not confine themselves to land transportation, through the Tavern’s stagecoach connections, but also partook in the lake trade.
Loretta Dunham, daughter of Rufus and Jane Dunham, married Robert Pier, who was a prominent Cleveland businessman at the time. Accordingly, he owned a share of the schooner Summit.
It was a nearly identical ship to the M. Stalker, but built some twenty-one years earlier in 1842 by Roderick Calkins. The Summit was 126 ft long, 26 ft wide, and drew 10 ft of water. The Piers later sold her to new owners, and she wrecked in a storm, September 28, 1872, killing two people, one of whom was a woman, who worked as her cook. Female cooks on the Great Lakes were sometimes the wives of the Captains, so the Cook’s loss likely would have been keenly felt.
The Summit’s wreck now sits on the bottom of Lake Huron, weighed down with a final load of iron ore, off Au Sable Point. Her cargo reflected the shift in the lake trade away from the previously dominant grain and lumber to iron ore carrying. Ships like the Summit were capable of carrying any number of loads, but were limited in size and carrying capacity. As technology evolved to lessen the burden of loading and unloading ships, moving from back breaking work with wheelbarrows and shovels to steam cranes, they also became less suited. As schooners wore out, they became barges, and eventually either sank or were burned to dispose of them.
No depictions of this ship survive, which was probably the initial impetuous for the museum’s acquisition of the portrait of a similar vessel.
The M. Stalker herself was built at the very end of the era of sailing trade on the Great Lakes, when it was starting to shift from wheat & lumber towards shipping iron ore to Cleveland’s first steel mills. She was built in 1863 in Milan, Ohio at Ballintine Fries’ shipyard along the Milan Canal conencting to the Huron River and Lake Erie, by master shipwright William Reynor, and was 135 feet long, 25 feet wide, and drew 11 feet of water. Her owner was A.P. Mowrey of Milan, Ohio and she was named for her first Captain, Malcom Stalker.
The ship had a typical career for a lake schooner, lasting some twenty years in the freshwater of the lakes where wooden ships rot slower than salt water vessels, and marine parasites like barnacles do not exist to eat into and foul ships’ hulls. In 1884 she had new owners, and a new home port: Vermilion, Ohio.
Then in 1886, bound for Cleveland from the ore mines at Escanaba in Minnesota, she found herself facing a winter gale in the narrow and perilous straights of Mackinaw, linking Lakes Huron and Michigan at the northern most point Michigan’s lower peninsula.
The Death of the M. Staker: The Barge Muskoka. Montreal, Quebec, ca. 1910. The cylindrical structure on the barges deck is a donkey engine, a small steam winch used by later-day sailing vessels to help hoist sails and rig tow lines. It is the origin of the popular shanty and lumbering song “Riding on A Donkey”. Many vessels such as this were part of the thriving lumber trade that eventually shifted from America to Canada due to deforestation. (Alpena County Public Library)
Sensibly, she decided to anchor and wait out the storm. However, she was soon shrouded by the fog and in the dark of 2 AM, with little more than a few oil lamps to light her, she was nearly invisible.
The barge Muskoka , which was being towed by the steam freighter Issac May, struck the unseen M. Stalker.
Being towed by a steamer was the end of life for many Great Lakes schooners, and it was so effective in increasing the amount of cargo that could be moved by a single powered ship that purpose built barges like the Muskoka were soon taking former schooners’ places. She was larger than the M. Stalker, 149 feet long, 26 feet wide and drawing 11 1/2 feet of water. She was also ten years newer, being built in 1872, and much more heavily built though still a wooden ship.
With a blunt blow, the heavy barge plowed into the old schooner’s stern, and carried it away.
Fatally wounded, the M. Stalker weighed anchor and tried to make sail for the shore, but failed. Realizing the ship was doomed, her crew boarded her whale boat, an open rowboat that was both the ship’s only life boat and utility boat, and headed for Mackinaw City. Fortunately, they escaped without loss of life. But the story of the M. Stalker as a ship ended that fateful night of the 5th of November 1886.
Her wreck, however, has survived. She was rediscovered in 1967 by famous wreck hunters Fred Leete, Dick Campbell, Dick Race, and John Steele, with her name board being recovered at that time. Now, her mortal remains lie under the present day ferry route between Mackinac Island and Mackinaw City, Michigan, as part of the area’s shipwreck preserve, which protects the wreck from further salvage. She is rated as an intermediate to advanced SCUBA diving experience Her location is N45° 47.620′ W084° 41.062′, and the wreck is usually marked with a diving buoy… however a boat strike on the surface destroyed this buoy in September of 2023, and whether it has been replaced is unknown to me. Because the wreck is in the middle of an active ferry lane, divers must raise a dive flag when diving on the wreck, and maintain a lookout aboard their dive boat.
The watercolor painting of the M. Stalker also survives, giving us a glimpse of how she would have looked in life. It may have been made in 1862 to celebrate her launch. The work was done by Charles Wardlow Norton, an early marine artist who lived in Detroit, Michigan. Born in 1848 to tugboat Captain John Norton, he was like most artists of his time, self-taught. However, his primary work as a newspaper reporter of ship passages, a telegrapher and an agent for shipowners gave him an eye for detail that others lacked, making him a popular amongst shipowners. Whilst his depiction of people is often minimal (being only tiny dots), and his paintings usually focus on only a single vessel with limited backgrounds, the meticulous technical detail of his works lends them their own beauty.
As a self taught, commercial artist Norton’s primary goal was to accurately depict his clients vessels, for the purpose of promoting the ships to potential shippers. Therefore, accuracy in detail of the painting’s subject rather than artistic composition was his overriding principle. Norton’s paintings are in fact scale drawings, taken from the exact measurements of the ships in question.
Norton’s art is distinctive due to its use of tempera and watercolor, and his signature “whisk broom” bow wave that his ships made when cutting through the water. A young man with modest means when he was pursuing art, many of Norton’s pieces suffer badly from fading due to low quality materials. However, many were fortunately reproduced by his sometimes employers, the Calvert Company of Detroit, MI, as lithographic prints for advertising.
Norton portrayed numerous ships throughout his artistic career, preserving many early sailing and steam vessels that would otherwise be only names of shipping registers. However, his work as an agent for shipowners gradually supplanted his artistic ambitions. He died in 1901, just as the century turned and the days of elegant steamboats and wooden hulled schooners ended on the lakes.
Previous academic authors have characterized Norton’s works as Primitive, and later painters works as “an advancement in the art beyond the first steps completed by Norton”. It must be conceded that Norton’s works are by technical definition primitive pieces, but asserting that later works were advancements upon them assumes too linear an evolution of Great Lakes art, and places too much value on simple differences of style. The shift from simple depictions of vessels from a side views to more dynamic scenes in such art is more a reflection of changing customer tastes than any advancement of art, and in any case artistic merit cannot be judged solely upon either technical fidelity or composition and complexity. As historical documents, however, Norton’s works are superior thanks to their attention to technical detail over all else.
Life, no matter how beautiful, is ultimately impermanent. So, to a degree, are artifacts. Yet even one of the more delicate artifacts can preserve a past that would otherwise be long forgotten.
Dunham Tavern Museum’s collection speaks to more than just the history of the Dunham family, or indeed the house itself. It represents what was both common and important to past generations of Clevelanders, and in so doing helps to remind us of aspects of the city’s history which might otherwise be forgotten. From simple tools used in the day to day tasks of running a tavern, to objects like maps and ship paintings which speak to the people of Cleveland’s connection to the greater world and their role in the national economy, artifacts help to keep the past alive for future generations. As Dunham Tavern celebrates its Bicentennial, it continues to work to discover and share the stories of the many pieces of its collection with the visiting public.
Sources:
https://www.straitspreserve.com/shipwrecks/m-stalker/
https://greatlakeships.org/2904946/data
https://greatlakeships.org/2906078/data
https://greatlakeships.org/2898955/data
https://greatlakes.bgsu.edu/item/439892
https://nmgl.org/architectural-accuracy-and-the-artists-summer-1974/