The Great Lakes.The Vessels That Plough Them. Curwood James Oliver

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СКАЧАТЬ have long been mysteries to him are being unravelled by the Great Lakes of the vast country in which he lives.

      “Because of the ships of our Inland Seas,” James A. Calbick, late President of the Lumber Carriers’ Association, said to me, “the people of the United States, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, and as far south as Kentucky and Tennessee, have been able to build the cheapest homes in the world – and the best,” and this assertion, which can be proved in several different ways, brings us at once to the lumber traffic as it exists on the Lakes to-day.

      Going through almost any one of the Eastern and Central States one will find thousands of old sheds and barns, travelling the road to ruin through age alone, though built of the best of pine and oak – materials of a quality which cannot be found in the best of modern homes in this year of 1909. For ten years past the price of lumber has been steadily climbing, and since 1900 the increase in the cost of building construction has brought lumber to a par with brick. While the commerce of the Lakes is increasing by tremendous bounds in other ways, people are now, perhaps unknowingly, witnessing the rapid extinction of one of their oldest and most romantic branches of traffic – the lumber industry; and each year, as this industry comes nearer and nearer to its end, the price of lumber climbs higher and higher, home-owners become fewer in comparison with other years, and fleets and lumber companies go out of existence or direct their energies into other channels.

      To Lake people it is pathetic, this death of the lumber fleets of the Inland Seas. An old soldier who had sailed on a lumber hooker since the days of the Civil War once said to me, “They’re the Grand Army of the Lakes – are those old barges and schooners, and they’re passing away as fast as we old fellows of the days of ’61.” To-day no vessels are built along the Lakes for the carrying of lumber. Scores of ancient “hookers” and picturesque schooners of the romantic days of old are rotting at their moorings, and when a great steel leviathan of ten thousand tons passes one of these veterans the eyes of her crew will follow it until only her canvas remains above the horizon.

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