Following the captains: Wisconsin trip adds to Ludington maritime research

August 25, 2026

This Great Lakes History Log is presented by Filer Credit Union, the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum and Sable Points Media.

By Rob Alway, Editor-in-Chief

Over the weekend, I traveled across Lake Michigan aboard the SS Badger to Wisconsin to continue research for my Masters of the PM Steamers project — an effort to document and pay tribute to the captains who commanded Ludington’s cross-lake railroad fleet.

The scope extends well beyond the railroad carferries that began operating from Ludington in 1897. It also includes the captains of the break-bulk steamers that preceded them, beginning with the Flint & Pere Marquette Railway’s cross-lake freight service in 1875. To date, I have accumulated the names of more than 70 captains who were part of that history.

The project has three components. My ultimate goal is to publish a book in which each captain’s story will be a separate chapter. As I complete the research and writing, abridged versions of those chapters are being published on Mason County Press as part of the Masters of the PM Steamers series. When the project is completed, the research will also form the basis of an interactive digital exhibit at the Mason County Historical Society’s Port of Ludington Maritime Museum and the research material will be preserved in the Society’s Rose Hawley Archives.

The museum will be observing its 10th anniversary in 2027 and contains the most comprehensive Lake Michigan car ferry history exhibits of any Great Lakes maritime museums.

Captains of the Goodrich Transportation Co. Many of them were also Pere Marquette captains.

Researching the captains

I took the Badger’s Friday morning crossing from Ludington to Manitowoc, Wis. From there, I drove to Milwaukee, where I had an appointment at the Milwaukee Public Library to conduct research in its Great Lakes Marine Collection, operated in partnership with the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society.

I had made arrangements in advance and provided library staff with a list of captains I wanted to research. The staff was extremely helpful, cross-referencing the names with the vessels on which the men had served. I came away with valuable information and some excellent photographs that will help tell their stories.

Libraries, archives, newspapers and government records provide the foundation for historical research. But, for me, there is another part of the process that is equally important. I like to visit the places connected to the people I am researching. Whenever possible, that includes their graves.

There is something about standing at the final resting place of a person whose life I have spent hours reconstructing that makes the research more personal. Cemeteries can also provide information. Nearby graves can identify wives, children, parents and other relatives, sometimes opening an entirely new avenue of research.

My first cemetery stop Friday was Forest Home Cemetery & Arboretum in Milwaukee, where I was looking for Capt. Charles Moody (1850-1944).

My timing wasn’t particularly good. A downpour had passed through Milwaukee less than an hour earlier and the cemetery’s grass was rather long. I always bring a backup pair of shoes on these trips, so I was prepared for the inevitable wet feet.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t as prepared for finding Moody.

The cemetery staff had not responded to my email asking for an exact location. Through Find a Grave, I was able to determine the block where Moody was buried. The problem was that the block seemed larger than many entire cemeteries in Mason County.

I can often use an existing photograph of a gravestone to identify landmarks and locate it. Moody’s marker, however, was rather unremarkable and looked like hundreds of others around it. After about 30 minutes of searching, I decided to cut my losses and move on.

Grave marker of Capt. Edward G. Crosby, his wife, Catherine Crosby, and their daughter, Harriette R. Crosby.

Unfinished business at Calvary

My next stop was Calvary Cemetery in Milwaukee, where I had some unfinished business from a research trip I made there in June.

Calvary is a large Catholic cemetery with numerous notable burials. Among them are victims of the Lady Elgin disaster. The passenger steamer sank in Lake Michigan in 1860 after colliding with the schooner Augusta, with estimates of the death toll generally ranging from about 300 to 380 people. It remains the deadliest shipwreck on Lake Michigan and one of the deadliest disasters in Great Lakes history.

The deadliest Great Lakes maritime disaster was the SS Eastland tragedy of July 24, 1915. The passenger steamer rolled onto its side while still tied to its dock in the Chicago River, killing 844 people.

One of the men I have been trying to locate at Calvary is Capt. John Joseph Doyle (1862-1917).

Doyle was an important figure in the Ludington fleet. He commanded several of the Flint & Pere Marquette Railway’s break-bulk steamers, including F&PM Nos. 1, 4, 5 and 2, before becoming the first master of the Pere Marquette 19 car ferry. In February 1904, the nearly new carferry went aground at Fox Point, Wis., while approaching Milwaukee in fog.

Doyle married Dora E. Duffy (1871-1907) in Milwaukee in 1893. They had one daughter, Virginia. Dora died when Virginia was only 8 years old, and accounts of Doyle’s life indicate he was devoted to raising his daughter while continuing his career on the lakes.

Several sources place Doyle at Calvary Cemetery, and Find a Grave even provides a block and row, but there is no photograph of his marker. The cemetery blocks are identified by signs; the rows are not.

During this visit, I tried a different approach. I walked to random graves, looked those people up on Find a Grave and used their listed row numbers to establish the layout of the section. Through that process, I was able to pinpoint the row where Doyle is supposedly buried.

There is no marker.

There are several other Doyle graves within about 50 feet. Following my first visit, three of Capt. Doyle’s great-grandsons (Dora’s grandsons) also searched for the grave and were unsuccessful.

I still didn’t find him this time, but I now have a much better idea where he is buried. It appears increasingly likely that his grave simply does not have a marker. I am continuing to seek information from the cemetery office.

Capt. Joseph Russell

My luck improved with Capt. Joseph Russell.

Russell was one of the more significant captains in the history of Ludington’s railroad fleet. His career included sailing aboard the celebrated schooner Clipper City and serving as first mate of the Goodrich Line’s SS Michigan. He later became the inaugural captain of the Pere Marquette, which entered service in 1897 as Ludington’s first railroad carferry and the first steel carferry on the Great Lakes. He also commanded Pere Marquette 17 when it went to the aid of the sinking Pere Marquette 18 in September 1910 and was the first captain of the replacement Pere Marquette 18.

Russell married Mary Ann LaFleur (1856-1932) in Milwaukee in 1876. They had four children. Mary also had a maritime connection through her brother, Capt. William Henry LaFleur, who later commanded the Pere Marquette 19.

Finding Russell’s grave also gave me an opportunity to begin something I had decided to do during an earlier research trip.

In July, I traveled to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, where I visited Riverside Cemetery and located the grave of Capt. John Wesley Duddleson (1846-1927). Duddleson was the first captain of the F&PM No. 2 and for a time was essentially the working head — or commodore — of the railroad’s Ludington steamship operation. His later career included command of the L.C. Waldo during the Great Storm of 1913, when the vessel was wrecked on Lake Superior but its crew survived.

I was bothered by the condition of Duddleson’s grave. Moss and other growth covered portions of the stone. I made a rather poor attempt at scraping some of it away and left thinking that, from then on, I wanted to come better prepared.

So Capt. Russell’s grave became the first captain’s grave I properly cleaned as part of this project.

Based on the advice of retired Mason County Central teacher Tom Richert, I purchased a container of D/2 Biological Solution, a biodegradable cleaner commonly used to remove mold, mildew, algae and other biological growth from historic stone. Arlington National Cemetery has used D/2 to clean marble headstones without the damaging effects associated with bleach, acids, pressure washing or abrasive tools. The process involves wetting the stone with clean water, applying D/2 and allowing it to remain on the surface for several minutes, then gently scrubbing the stone with a soft natural- or nylon-bristle brush. The stone is then thoroughly rinsed with clean water. Heavily stained areas may require additional applications.

There is something satisfying about it. These men spent their lives navigating Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes, often in conditions most of us would never want to experience. Cleaning a gravestone is a small gesture, but it seems like an appropriate extension of a project intended to make sure their stories aren’t forgotten.

Capt. John Gee

During my previous Milwaukee visit, I had not realized Capt. John Gee (1857-1905) was also buried at Calvary Cemetery.

I haven’t researched Gee in great detail yet, but I was able to locate his grave and clean it. His story will be another chapter in the project and I plan to publish an article about him on Mason County Press in the near future.

Cleaned gravesite of Capt. Frank and Maud Dority.

A family connection

On Saturday morning I returned to Graceland Cemetery in Milwaukee.

This was another return visit. In June, I successfully located the grave of Capt. Frank A. Dority (1862-1953). This time, I wanted to clean his marker.

Dority is particularly interesting to me because the connection is more than historical. While researching him, I discovered he was my second great-granduncle — my great-grandmother’s uncle. Dority’s wife, Maude E. Lee (1872-1928), was the sister of my great-great-grandmother, Mabel Lee Davis.

Dority had one of the most varied careers of any captain I have researched. He began sailing as a teenager and spent 56 years on the water, serving aboard 41 steamships and some schooners. He commanded several vessels associated with the Ludington fleet and was among the early captains of the Pere Marquette, Ludington’s first carferry. He also commanded Ann Arbor No. 2 and later the infamous Eastland, years before its 1915 disaster in Chicago.

Frank and Maude had one daughter, Beatrice Mary. Maude died in 1928, while Frank lived another 25 years, dying June 28, 1953 at age 91 — just three months after the SS Badger made its maiden voyage. Frank and Maude are buried together at Graceland.

Cleaning their marker felt a little different. I was tending to the grave of someone whose career I am documenting, but also to family. I have not found any evidence that their only daughter, Beatrice, ever had children, so I am likely one of the few descendants to have visited their gravesite in many years.

Marker honoring the Crosby family, near the site of their graves.

The Crosbys and the Titanic

While at Graceland, I also located the graves of Capt. Edward Gifford Crosby, his wife, Catherine, and their daughter Harriette.

Crosby (1842-1912) was a Civil War veteran who became one of the more prominent transportation figures on Lake Michigan. He established what became the Crosby Transportation Company and was involved in cross-lake shipping between Muskegon and Milwaukee. His company also participated in federal harbor projects, including construction work on the Muskegon channel and Milwaukee breakwater.

His life ended far from Lake Michigan.

In 1912, E.G. and Catherine Crosby were traveling in Europe with their adult daughter, Harriette. They changed their return plans and booked first-class passage aboard the RMS Titanic. When the ship sank in the North Atlantic, Catherine and Harriette survived. E.G. did not.

Their grave also reinforced one of my personal opinions about cemeteries: I am not a fan of flat markers installed flush with the ground.

The Crosby marker had settled so deeply that the earth and grass were beginning to swallow it. Here was the grave of a man who played an important role in Great Lakes transportation and died aboard the most famous shipwreck in history, alongside the names of his wife and daughter who survived it, and their memorial was disappearing into the ground.

I cleaned around the marker and exposed it again. Nearby, next to a tree, another marker also pays tribute to the Crosby family.

Grave of Capt. Edward Aschenbrenner

Two more captains

Before boarding the Badger Sunday for the return trip to Ludington, I had two more graves to visit in Manitowoc.

The first was Capt. Edward Aschenbrenner (1913-2004), who is buried the City of Manitowoc’s Evergreen Cemetery. Aschenbrenner was among the later generation of Ludington carferry captains and commanded the City of Midland 41, among other vessels.

I had located his grave during an earlier trip but returned Sunday specifically to clean it.

Grave of Capt. Henry Gates

My final stop was Knollwood Memorial Gardens and the grave of Capt. Henry Gates (1902-1972), another master of the City of Midland 41 and other vessels in the Ludington fleet.

I had searched unsuccessfully for Gates during my previous visit. This time, however, I had a source.

Tim Hinds, a Ludington native who now lives in Manitowoc, is the son of the late Capt. James Hinds, master of the Spartan. Earlier this summer, Tim located Gates’ grave for me.

On Sunday morning, Tim brought me there and helped clean the marker. I greatly appreciated the assistance from him and his wife, Jennie.

By Sunday afternoon, I was back aboard the Badger crossing Lake Michigan toward Ludington — itself a fitting way to begin and end a weekend devoted to the men who spent their careers making that same crossing.

Research trips like this are valuable for reasons that aren’t always apparent in a footnote or bibliography. The hours spent in a library provide names, dates, newspaper accounts, photographs and documents. Those are essential. But visiting the ports where these men sailed, walking through the cemeteries where they and their wives are buried, meeting their descendants and seeing the museums that preserve similar stories adds another dimension.

It provides context. Sometimes it provides new information. And often it provides inspiration.

More than 70 captains is a daunting amount of research, and I still have a long way to go. But every photograph uncovered in an archive, every descendant who shares a family story and even every gravestone found — or not found — brings another piece of Ludington’s maritime history into focus.

Ultimately, that is what Masters of the PM Steamers is about. The carferries are iconic symbols of Ludington, and their predecessors helped establish the city as a major Great Lakes transportation port. But those ships did not navigate Lake Michigan by themselves.

There were people in their pilothouses.

This project is about telling their stories.

Masters of the PM Steamers series to date:

In search of information

Editor’s Note: I am seeking historical artifacts and stories from people whose family members worked as ship captains or in Ludington’s maritime industry. While this project focuses on the Ludington carferry fleet, I am also interested in items related to anyone from Mason County who worked on the Great Lakes or oceans.

This series has three goals:

To share Ludington’s rich maritime history with readers of the Mason County Press.
To publish a biographical book about the Ludington fleet captains.
To create an interactive kiosk exhibit at the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum for historical research.

I am looking for artifacts such as photographs, written documents, or digitized materials. Items will be placed in the Mason County Historical Society archives, and donors will receive documentation of their contribution.

If you have items or stories to share, please email editor@mediagroup31.com or call/text 231-757-3202.

Note: I am also interested in collections related to the Mason County railroad industry.

If you would like to financially contribute to the book project, please click here for more information.

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