The Manistique Marquette Northern 1
This MCP Maritime History Blog is presented by Filer Credit Union and Mason County Historical Society’s Port of Ludington Maritime Museum.
By Rob Alway, Editor-in-Chief
The Pere Marquette Railway car ferries, later the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad ferries, traveled to three Wisconsin ports, Manitowoc, Milwaukee, and Kewaunee, throughout most of their existence. However, there was a short time when rail ferry service from Ludington travelled to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as well.
The story begins in August 1897 when the Manistique Marquette & Northern Railroad opened its route from Manistique in Schoolcraft County to the resort community of Steuben, about 27 miles north. The railroad was created by the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad, a part of the Pennsylvania Railroad system.
In 1902, the MM&N was chartered to purchase the Manistique & Northwestern Railway, a short line in northern Michigan, which had been completed between Manistique and a connection with the Duluth South Shore & Atlantic at Shingleton in the UP’s Alger County on Jan. 2, 1899.
The Manistique
The Manistique & Northwestern was unsuccessful mostly due to the sparse population of the area. The MM&N purchased the railroad on May 1, 1902 with principal organizers of the new company being D.W. Kaufman of Marquette and R.R. Metheany of Grand Rapids. Metheany was secretary of the Grand Rapids & Indiana. He simultaneously organized another new railroad company, the Traverse City Leelanau & Manistique Railroad, to be built from Traverse City up the Leelanau Peninsula along the west shore of Grand Traverse Bay to Northport.
In 1902, the MM&N ordered a car ferry to run between Northport on the northern tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, and Manistique.
Historian George Hilton in his 1962 book, “The Great Lakes Ferries,” speculated why the GR&I had wanted to develop another ferry route since it owned a third of the Mackinac Transportation Co., which operated ships crossing the Straits of Mackinac between Mackinaw City and St. Ignace.
“At minimum, the new route gave the GR&I direct access to the port of Manistique, from which lumber and iron ore moved in some volume over the Ann Arbor Railroad Ferries,” Hilton said.
The new ferry was designed by naval architect Robert Logan, who had designed the first steel car ferry, the Pere Marquette (later Pere Marquette 15) for the Flint & Pere Marquette Railway, which began ferry service out of Ludington in 1897. He also designed five additional ships including four for the Pere Marquette Railway, which had formed as a result of a 1900 merger that included the F&PM, Chicago & West Michigan, and Detroit, Grand Rapids and Western (Detroit, Lansing & Northern) railroads. Those four PM ships were the Pere Marquettes 17, 18, 19, and 20. The other ship was the Marquette and Bessemer No. 2 for Lake Erie service.
Pere Marquette 18 was a sister ship to the Manistique
The six ships were mostly identical, each 338 feet long, 56 feet wide with a depth of 19.5 feet. They each had four tracks and could carry up to 30 rail cars. Their engines varied. The first to enter service was the PM 17 in 1901 followed by PM 18 (I) in 1902, the PM 19 and 20 in 1903, the Manistique Marquette and Northern 1 (known as the Manistique or MM&N 1) in 1903, and the Marquette and Bessemer No. 2 in 1905.
The Manistique was equipped with two triple expansion engines operated by six cylindrical return tubular boilers that could operate up to 3,000 hp. It had a green hull, white cabins, and red stacks, each with a black top and a white band decorated with stars. At the time of its launching, the railroad reported that it had intended to order a second ferry, but only the MM&N 1 was ever put into service.
The crossing between Northport, at the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, and Manistique was 75 miles and scheduled to take up to seven hours.
“The ferry did far less for the traffic of the railroad than the promoters had hoped, and on November 1, 1903, less than a year and a half after the Manistique Marquette & Northern took over the rail line, the company defaulted an interest payment and went bankrupt,” Hilton wrote.
The bankrupt company came under the control of the Pere Marquette Railway resulting in the Manistique Marquette and Northern 1 being diverted from Northport to Ludington in June 1904.
The ferry left Ludington at 6 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and left Manistique on the return trip the following days at 8 a.m. The trip was about 138 miles, longer than any car ferry line on the Great Lakes. It was scheduled for over 11 hours.
The Manistique after it was renamed Milwaukee
The fare for passengers was $3.50 one way and $6 round-trip.
The MM&N 1 operated out of Ludington for just over two years.
In 1905, the PMRR went bankrupt and as a consequence lost its control of the MM&N in 1906. Accordingly, in July 1906, the Manistique Marquette and Northern 1 reverted to its original route to Northport. It was scheduled to leave Northport Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 10 a.m. and to return from Manistique the same evenings, departing at 9 p.m. Fares to Northport were $2.50 one-way and $4.50 round trip, plus a berth at 75 cents and meals at 50 cents.
During the summers of 1907 and 1908, the Manistique was chartered twice each summer to bring an excursion and convention parties into Charlevoix. The first three times the groups boarded in Manistique. The last group boarded in Traverse City. On July 26, 1908, the ship carried 600 members of the Norden Society, plus a uniformed band, from the UP.
The Northport to Manistique service ended in 1908 after only five years. The MM&N was succeeded by the Manistique & Northern Railroad, which was affiliated with the Ann Arbor Railroad. The Ann Arbor had been operating car ferries out of Betsie Bay in Frankfort/Elberta to Manistique since 1898, therefore an additional ferry route from northern Michigan was redundant.
The Manistique on an excursion to Charlevoix.
The Northport slip was sold to the Ann Arbor, dismantled and re-erected as the west slip on Betsie Bay.
The ferry was sold to the Grand Trunk Milwaukee Car Ferry Company based in Grand Haven and renamed the Milwaukee. The Milwaukee foundered on Oct. 22, 1929 with all hands, estimated 43 to 56, were lost. It was the worst Great Lakes car ferry disaster in history and the last one. Ironically, the other two car ferry shipwrecks, the Marquette and Bessemer No. 2, on Lake Erie in 1909, and the Pere Marquette 18 on Lake Michigan in 1910, were all built by the same design at the same shipyard (see above).
The Manistique & Northern Railroad was reorganized as the Manistique & Lake Superior Railroad in 1909, under the control of the ann Arbor Railroad. In July 1911, its track was extended from Shingleton to Doty to a connection with the Munising Marquette & Southeastern Railway, predecessor of the Lake Superior & Ishpeming Railroad.
The Traverse city Leelanau & Manistique Railroad faced constant financial issues. In 1906, the Union Trust Company of Detroit foreclosed the road’s $300,000 mortgage and then, in April 1907, purchased the railroad on behalf of its bondholders. It was reorganized as the Traverse City Leelanau and Manistique Railway and was operated by the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railway, continuing to be unprofitable. The GR&I abandoned the operation in March 1914.
It then operated independently under the presidency of Henry Russel of Traverse City until August 1918. The U.S. government operated the railroad that fall to assure that the harvest moved out of the area for the war effort (the U.S. had entered World War I in 1917).
On May 15, 1919, a group of local people organized the Leelanau Transit Co, purchasing the railroad for $65,000. Two small depots were built along the route. The tracks were then leased to the Manistee & Northeastern Railroad. Eventually, the M&N came under the control of the Pere Marquette Railway then the C&O.
Filer Credit Union features offices in Manistee, Ludington and Bear Lake, 800-595-6630, www.filercu.com
The Mason County Historical Society is a non-profit charitable organization that was founded in 1937 that does not receive any governmental funding. It owns and operates the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum in Ludington, Historic White Pine Village in Pere Marquette Township, and The Rose Hawley Archives and the Mason County Emporium and Sweet Shop in downtown Ludington.
The Port of Ludington Maritime Museum, located at 217 S. Lakeshore Dr., Ludington, is currently open Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. until Tuesday, May 27 when it will be open Tuesday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Wednesdays through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
For more information about donating to and/or joining the Mason County Historical Society, visit masoncountymihistory.org.
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