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Paul L. Hayden
Soo Locks
One of the best things about the Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, is that you can get up close and very personal to the boats as they lock through.
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Bill Howe
Soo Locks
Once, there were only fierce rapids and a 21-foot drop at the St. Marys River where the Soo Locks stand today. For the Ojibway people who lived there and enjoyed the abundance of whitefish to be found at the rapids, the water obstacle posed no overwhelming problem for their trade and movement.
French explorers and voyageurs first came to the area in the 1620s. To French, and later English, fur traders in loaded canoes upbound toward Lake Superior or downbound to the other lakes, the rapids and falls were a major obstacle that made getting from there to here all but impossible. And the point of the European arrival to this area – except for those men of the religious cloth – was to acquire and to move what the north woods could provide for profitable business.
Portaging canoes filled with goods around the rapids – unloading canoes, carrying cargo on land and reloading the canoes above the rapids – was cumbersome, but necessary to ensure safe passage. Many a canoe had been dashed along that stretch. What could be done?
In 1797, North West Fur Company decided to construct a lock and canal at Sault Ste. Marie in Canada. The lock, with a 9-foot lift, was just large enough for the 26- to 33-foot Montreal canoes used in fur-trading. But the lock was not long-lived. American soldiers destroyed it during the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain.
Twenty-five years passed before the next attempt to build a lock, this time on the U.S. side of the rapids. In 1837, the Michigan Legislature approved a canal and lock at Sault Ste. Marie.
Engineer John Almy drew plans for a canal and three locks, each with a 6-foot lift. The project was contracted, and a workforce arrived at the Sault in May 1839. Expectations were high – organizers expected to complete the project by September.
But they hadn’t counted on armed soldiers. The state-planned canal crossed U.S. government property, and soldiers at Fort Brady drove workers off with muskets and bayonets.
Eventually this showdown between the federal government and the state of Michigan was resolved, but it killed that incarnation of the canal project. Over the next dozen years, canal backers lobbied Congress for funding without success. Traversing the rapids still required tough portaging.
The country’s hunger for the copper found in the Keweenaw created pressure on cargo hauling at Sault Ste. Marie. One observer at the Sault in August 1845 noted the “astonishing number of people” heading for Copper Country along with 1,500 barrels of supplies for the Lake Superior Mining Company.
To deal with phenomenal business, additional vessels were hauled overland from below the rapids and refloated in Lake Superior. The additional dozen or so ships in the Lake Superior fleet did help. Meanwhile, portaging goods around the rapids became more efficient with the construction of a “strap-railway,” wooden tracks capped with iron straps for durability on which horse-drawn carts transferred freight. Still, by 1851 it was clear that a canal and locks were sorely needed.
Canal-booster efforts in Washington, D.C., finally paid off on August 26, 1852, when a bill was signed into law that granted the state of Michigan 750,000 acres of federal land to finance construction of a canal and the use of government land for the canal route.
The Michigan Legislature then met in January 1853 and approved a canal bill, specifying two tandem locks, each 70 feet wide by 350 feet long with 9-foot lifts, according to plans drawn by Captain Augustus Canfield. The law required that the work be completed in just two years.
Courtesy Chippewa County Historical Society
Soo Locks
The State Locks are shown here in about 1865. Native American houses and fishing sheds populate the space between the locks and the rapids. The inset photo is of Charles T. Harvey, who convinced his bosses to bid on construction of the first U.S. lock and then oversaw the project.
Charles T. Harvey, a salesman from Vermont, happened to be in Sault Ste. Marie when word came about the legislation. Recuperating from typhoid fever, Harvey instead caught “canal fever.”
He sold his employers – the Fairbanks brothers of E & T Fairbanks Company – on the project and convinced them to bid on it. Incorporated as the “St. Marys Falls Ship Canal Company,” the group was awarded the contract, signed by Governor Andrew Parsons on May 19, 1853. The race against the two-year deadline had begun.
Harvey, as general agent, was in charge of construction. He arrived with men and supplies, breaking ground on June 4, 1853. Shanties and a hospital were built for the 300 to 400 workers. The crew worked 11 1/2-hour days, but it soon became apparent that more men were needed. The shortage of manpower, coupled with severe winter weather and the sheer magnitude of construction, raised serious doubts that the deadline could be met.
Harvey remained optimistic, but others in the Canal Company were not. Worried company directors sent John Brooks, a trained engineer and superintendent of the Michigan Central Railroad, to the Sault as acting superintendent for the summer of 1854.
Brooks set to work finding more help. Men were hired from Detroit and other eastern cities, and newly arrived immigrants were met at the docks. The workforce peaked at more than 1,700 men in an all-out effort to meet the impending deadline.
Problems still plagued the operation. Supply ships grounded in the river, workers went on strike and troubles arose with construction of the upper cofferdam – a temporary dam to prevent flooding during canal excavation. On top of all this, cholera struck hard in the work camp because of crowded and unsanitary conditions.
By late summer 1854, as many as 10 percent of the laborers had died; many more were too weak to work.
Despite these troubles, so much progress had been made that only about 100 men remained working at the end of the navigation season of 1854. Several of the Canal Company directors had visited the Sault in the fall and had gone away feeling confident that the project would be completed on schedule.
But the problems weren’t over. That winter the crew discovered that a sandbar to be dredged at the upper end of the canal was, in fact, a ledge of rock.
Proving yet again that necessity is the mother of invention, the skeleton crew designed an iron punch fashioned from a ship’s propeller. Placed on a scow, the steam-powered punch was attached to a 30-foot wooden shaft and dropped into the water to pulverize the underlying rock.
With this last crisis averted, the Canal Company was victorious. The two-year deadline was met – with 1 1/2 months to spare! The first ship through the new State Locks, as they were called, was the steamer Illinois, upbound on June 18, 1855, with Captain Jack Wilson.
The water traffic barrier to Lake Superior had been breached.
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Courtesy Chippewa County Historical Society
Soo Locks
A barrage balloon raises near the Soo Locks, probably in April 1942. For about 18 months, some 50 hydrogen-filled balloons were often floating above the locks area, to thwart a possible attack from torpedo bombers during World War II.
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Courtesy National Archives of Canada
Soo Locks
The Tomlinson Fleet ship Cuyler Adams heads for Lake Superior with new automobiles around 1936. This type of cargo was most frequent from 1946 until 1960, when it ended abruptly.
Freight through the locks in 1855 totaled 14,503 tons. Completion of the project enabled enormous growth in the output of mines in the western Upper Peninsula. By 1867, total freight had risen to 325,357 tons – an amazing growth of about 30 percent annually for 12 years.
The federal government’s investment in the canal system had another payoff, unforeseen in 1853. Lake Superior iron ore would make Union cannons during the Civil War. The importance of the canal and locks was clearly national in scope.
By the mid-1860s, shippers and others voiced a need for larger locks to handle ever-expanding traffic. Newer vessels with greater capacities required more than the 12-foot depth of the State Locks to pass fully loaded.
The principal Great Lakes cities joined the call by 1869 for the federal government to operate the canal. The Michigan Legislature authorized transfer, and Congress appropriated $150,000 for improvement of the St. Marys Falls Canal in 1870.
General Orlando Poe, who engineered the burning of Atlanta during the Civil War and who was now in charge of Great Lakes improvements, recommended construction of a new lock at the Soo. Work began on a lock with a single lift – 515 feet long, 60 feet wide and 17 feet deep.
Freight haulers earned additional benefit. On June 9, 1881, when the U.S. government assumed responsibility for the canal, tolls were dropped. To this day, passage for vessels through the U.S. locks remains toll-free.
In September 1881, the lock opened. Business was booming. In 1883, the old State Locks and the new lock handled about 4,000 vessels; in 1893, traffic exceeded 12,000.
On July 17, 1895, an incredible 119 vessels passed through the new lock, having been queued up an average of five hours awaiting their turn. Fortunately, a Canadian Lock, under construction since 1888, opened later that season. Measuring 900 feet by 60 feet with a depth of 22 feet, it could handle even larger ships than the new lock, thus relieving the strain on the U.S. side.
In 1896, the U.S. lock was named the Weitzel Lock after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers district engineer Godfrey Weitzel.
With the new U.S. lock in place, use of the shallower State Locks declined. The burgeoning industrial growth that the State Locks helped to create eventually would be the end of them as the needs outstripped their ability to move newer vessels.
In 1886, only five years after the Weitzel lock opened, work had began on yet another U.S. lock. The new lock would be built along the line of the State Locks, which would have to be destroyed. For 27 navigation seasons those hand-operated locks had been the sole and vital link between mines on Lake Superior and the factories on the lower lakes.
In talking about removal of the old locks, General Poe waxed almost poetic:
“The construction of the locks especially bore evidence of a master’s hand in their design and execution.… I must confess to a feeling of great regret that it has become necessary to destroy these first locks.… The man who, knowing their history, can see them go, without compunction, is made of other stuff than I am.”
In 1896, after 10 years of construction, the Poe Lock opened, named after Orlando M. Poe. At 21 feet deep, 800 feet long and 100 feet wide, it was designed to handle two pairs of ships abreast, but vessel sizes increased so rapidly that when the lock opened, it could only handle two of the new boats.
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Carmen Paris / U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Soo Locks
It looks like a tall building, but the pilot house of this laker is merely passing through the Soo Locks.
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Steve Welch
Soo Locks
The best way to see the Soo Locks is to go through one on a boat. If you don’t have your own boat to float, you can hop on board a tour, like this one through Soo Locks Boat Tours.
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Carmen Paris / U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Soo Locks
At the Soo Locks, you could reach out and touch a self-unloading ore boat … although it’s not recommended.
The 50th anniversary of the Sault Locks was celebrated in 1905, with Charles Harvey – that salesman who sold his bosses on constructing the original U.S. locks – as an honored guest. He must have been duly impressed by the record 38 million tons of freight handled by the locks that year. Thirty-three steamboats were launched on the Great Lakes in 1905, and shipyards received orders for 40 more.
The year 1914 brought completion of another new lock. The Davis Lock, named after USACE engineer Charles E.L.B. Davis, with a length of 1,350 feet, was designed to handle two 600-foot freighters at once. Ground was broken for its physical twin, the Sabin Lock (named for L.C. Sabin), before the Davis Lock even opened!
Not surprisingly, iron ore has long accounted for the biggest share of tonnage through the locks. Though it varies from year to year, recently iron ore has accounted for 54 percent of the tonnage, with coal at 23 percent and grains at 13 percent. Other freight listed for the same period included stone and sand, cement, salt, gasoline and fuel oil.
Lake Superior-region iron ore was vital during World War II, so the locks were heavily defended. An incredible buildup of the military occurred after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In a matter of months, 7,500 soldiers were stationed in the Soo, increasing the town’s population by 50 percent. Many soldiers were temporarily billeted in school gymnasiums, churches and even private homes, until barracks could be built. The housing shortage was magnified by arrival of hundreds of workers hired to build the MacArthur Lock (named for WWII General Douglas MacArthur), a project that started in May 1942. Construction went on around the clock, even through the winter of 1942-43. The new lock opened July 11, 1943, completed in just 14 months.
By early 1944, most of the troops were pulled out of the Soo. Commenting on the situation, the Sault area’s Congressman Fred Bradley stated: “It’s no military secret that today you could fire a rifle down Ashmun Street without fear of hitting a soldier, whereas six months ago, you couldn’t spit without hitting at least six.”
By 1954, the MacArthur Lock was handling more than half of the freight through the locks. It was the deepest lock, but the longest ship it could accept was 730 feet. Plans were approved in 1962 for a new Poe Lock to be 1,200 feet long and 110 feet wide. It was built along the line of the existing Poe Lock, between the MacArthur and Davis Locks, both of which had to remain operational. The first ship passed through the new Poe Lock in the fall of 1968. Just a few months earlier, the 730-foot Edmund Fitzgerald had locked downbound through the MacArthur with 30,200 tons of taconite pellets, breaking an all-time tonnage record for a single ship through the locks.
The new Poe Lock, designed for the class of 1,000-foot supercarriers, was formally dedicated in June 1969. Only four years after Fitz’s record 30,200-ton passage, the first 1,000-footer, Stewart J. Cort, locked through the Poe carrying 51,000 tons of taconite and a new record. Since then, single loads in excess of 70,000 tons have been handled. Depth of water in the channels is critical – an additional inch of draft translates into an extra 270 tons of payload on supercarriers.
The Soo Locks attract more than maritime traffic. For much of their 150-year history, they’ve drawn tourists to view big boats up close. Until about 1910, visitors could combine sightseeing at the locks with shooting the rapids in a canoe piloted by a descendant of the Saulteurs, as the early French Jesuits called the Ojibway people who lived by the rapids. In recent years, traffic counts at Soo Locks Visitors Center show an average of about 430,000 visitors each season, with another 110,000 getting a personal look at the lock operation as passengers on local tour boats and other vessels.
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Pat Lapinski
Soo Locks
Whether waiting for water to bring them up or let them down, boats and ships that use the locks will pass under the International Bridge linking the two Sault Ste. Maries.
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Carmen Paris / U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Soo Locks
The effects of the Sault Locks on economic growth in northern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota can be seen in tonnage figures at the Sault. The year 1876 was the first to see 1 million tons pass through the locks; in 1892 the 10 million ton figure was surpassed, and more than 100 million tons went through the locks for the first time in 1941. The economic effects of the locks on the Sault itself have not been as dramatic as one might think. The Sault is not a port where freight is handled – when the State Locks opened in 1855, it made obsolete the jobs of all the portagers, men involved in unloading freight at one end of the rapids, carting it overland and reloading on a different ship at the other end. Some of those men undoubtedly found employment at the locks, and the construction jobs as new locks were built provided temporary boosts in employment.
But regular full-time employment (non-construction jobs) at the locks has dropped from more than 400 jobs in the early 1960s to about 125 at present, due in part to technology changes. It’s harder to quantify the effects of the locks and ships on the tourism industry, but from the visitor counts mentioned above, it is clearly significant.
Although it was not caused by the locks, the population of Sault Ste. Marie did grow dramatically in the last two decades of the 19th century, spurred in part by arrival of railroad service in 1888 and even more by construction of a waterpower canal.
Union Carbide built a manufacturing plant in the early 1900s to use the electric power. The plant had more than 600 employees at its peak and was a mainstay of industry at the Sault.
When the manufacturing plant closed in 1962, this economic blow came on top of the 1958 closure of the city’s other major manufacturer, Northwestern Leather Company, which employed more than 900 in its heyday and had operated since 1898.
Not surprisingly, the population of the Soo, which had continued growing slowly but steadily to a peak of about 19,000 in the late 1950s, fell to about 14,500 in 1980.
The census in 2000 gives a population of 14,511 for the city of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, showing no growth at all in the last two decades of the 20th century. However, this is a bit misleading, since Chippewa County’s population has increased steadily, with some of that growth occurring near the city. Today major employers in the area are more diverse: the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Lake Superior State University, War Memorial Hospital, the public school system and the Michigan Department of Corrections, which operates several correctional facilities 15 miles south of the Soo, on the former Kincheloe Air Force Base. The air base closed in 1977.
It has been more than 50 years since construction began on the second, most recent, Poe Lock. Since the lock system first opened, that’s the longest stretch during which no new lock has been started.
Construction might on the near horizon, however. Congress has approved, in concept, another lock – with the same physical dimensions as the current Poe Lock – capable of handling 1,000-foot carriers. No money for construction has yet been authorized. Whatever the outcome of that lock, it seems safe to predict that folks in the Sault in 2055 will be celebrating a bicentennial of the St. Marys Falls Shipping Canal.
Carl Materna
Francis Clergue’s hydroelectric plant
Francis Clergue’s hydroelectric plant opened in 1902, but the St. Marys rapids have supplied power since 1888.
One Man's Obstacle Is Another's Source of Power
Avoiding the power of the St. Marys River and falls was the goal of the original lock system. But even before 1850, harnessing that water power was the dream of more than one entrepreneur. By the 1880s, the vision of Lake Superior as “the largest millpond in the world” fueled a real estate boom in the city and the first attempt to dig a power canal, with mill-sites planned at its lower end. This project failed for lack of sufficient capital, but across the river in Canada, Francis Clergue led the development of a hydroelectric plant, completed in 1895. He then found backers to resuscitate the Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, project, which culminated with the opening of the Michigan Lake Superior Power Company facility in 1902 – a powerhouse a quarter-mile long, at the end of a 2-mile-long canal, which still operates today as a 30-megawatt facility owned by Edison Sault Electric Company. Together with a 45-megawatt plant in Sault, Ontario, and a 17-megawatt U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plant in the rapids on the Michigan side, clean hydropower here provides energy that would otherwise require the burning of about 300,000 tons of coal annually to produce. Only about 4 percent of the St. Marys River natural flow passes through the once mighty rapids now – 95 percent passes through the three power canals and the remaining 1 percent operates the locks.
Bernie Arbic, a retired professor of mathematics from Lake Superior State University, is author of two history books: City of the Rapids: Sault Ste. Marie's Heritage and Sugar Island Sampler. Nancy Steinhaus works for the Hiawathaland Library Cooperative and is president of the Chippewa County Historical Society.