Launch of the E. C. Roberts
By the middle of the nineteenth century, iron ore from the upper Great Lakes was feeding a growing American steel industry. Schooners hauled the ore from ports like Escanaba, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, down through the lakes to Cleveland, where the furnaces waited. It was hard, unglamorous work. The ships were working vessels, not clippers, and the men who crewed them loaded and unloaded cargo by hand, shoveling ore until their fingers bled, then racing the fleet back for the next load.
The E.C. Roberts was one of these ore haulers: a two-masted, 273-ton schooner built by Lafrinier and Stevens at Cleveland in 1856. She served over fifty years on the lakes, eventually rebuilt as a tow barge in 1880, before being abandoned at Port Huron in 1908. No known photograph of her survives.
What does survive is Red Iron Ore, which records a specific September 17 voyage aboard her. The song names real tugs, the Escanaba and the Kate Williams, real ships like the Minch and the Exile, and a real captain in Harvey Shannon. “In the month of September, the seventeenth day / Two dollars and a quarter was all they would pay.” It is one of the great songs of the freshwater trade, and the final verse raises a glass to the Roberts herself, “staunch, strong, and true,” and to “the bold boys that make up her crew.”
