The Swain Wrecking Company

The Swain Wrecking Company operates the wrecking tug Favorite, which carries five steam pumps and twelve hydraulic jacks, capable of lifting from one to two hundred tons each, together with other wrecking implements and paraphernalia usually carried on such boats.

The company has done some remarkable work during the time it has been in existence, one of the most extensive jobs being on the Neosho, wrecked off Spectacle Reef in the fall of 1894. The vessel was badly damaged, and it cost some $12,000 to release her, the repairs to the boat afterward costing over $50,000.

The Alva, which sunk during a collision on the river Sault Ste. Marie, was raised after holes were drilled in her side by means of electric drills, and patches put on by a diver, and she was pumped out.

The Choctaw, a boat which was sunk in the same river in May, 1896, in a collision with the L.C. Waldo, was treated in the same way and raised.

During 1897 the company released the Henry Chisholm, one of the boats sunk in a collision off Grosse Pointe, and run aground near the twenty-foot channel.

The officers of the company for 1898 were L.C. Waldo, president; John S. Quinn, vice-president; A.A. Parker, secretary and general manager; J.W. Millen, treasurer. A general wrecking business is carried on, and during the season the Favorite and her well-drilled crew are generally employed.

The steel steamer Alva, light, bound for the Straits, and running full speed, ran on South Manitou island in a fog, and had to be raised with jacks eighty-four times to release her, costing about $10,000.

Return to Home Port

Volume I

This version of Volume II is based, with permission, on the work of the great volunteers at the Marine Captains Biographies site. To them goes the credit for reorganizing the content into some coherent order. The biographies in the original volume are in essentially random order.

Some of the transcription work was also done by Brendon Baillod, who maintains an excellent guide to Great Lakes Shipwreck Research.