Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Spring Hill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

This is WQLN.

Water is central to where and how we build our cities.

Rivers, lakes, and oceans draw people in for trade and commerce, habitation and recreation.

In our region, it's Lake Erie and Presque Isle Bay that sit at the forefront.

Erie's natural harbor has changed in appearance over the generations, but from the earliest days of the city until now, the bay front continues to be a driving force for our economy.

[Music] Erie County's economic core moved north to the lakeshore.

That safe, naturally protected harbor was the perfect place for a growing nation to start as inland navy.

But at that time, if you wanted to build a boat, you needed one important ingredient.

Timber.

(dramatic music) - The main problem with timber transportation to Erie was in the fact that in the colonial period and up to pre-industrial revolution, a lot of timber transport was done using water.

The popular idiom at the time was that a squirrel could climb a tree in Philadelphia and make it all the way to Lake Erie and not have to touch the groun, which squirrels don't migrate that far.

(laughs) You get the picture.

There was a lot of forest in Pennsylvania.

So when those folks got off the boat and started to settle around Philadelphia, they probably looked out in the forest and were like, "Man, we can cut trees down forever "and we're never gonna run out "because they're just everywhere as far as you can go."

- So it was estimated that at the time of William Penn's arrival, that Pennsylvania's forest comprised about 90% of the state.

timber, Pennsylvania and lumber, have been intertwined at the beginning.

In our state's name, Pennsylvania means Penn's Woods.

It was named after our forest.

- As forested as our state was, not all trees are made alike.

Commonly called hardwoods and softwoods, different trees have, literally, different strengths and weaknesses.

- So Pennsylvania has about six or seven different forest zones, as they call them, where you have different species of trees growing in regular composition.

The forests along the lake are actually in the mesophytic zone of Pennsylvania.

So those are forests that don't require a whole lot of water to grow.

That's what mesophytic means.

And those forests around the coastal plain on the lake are very much predominantly maple and beech forests.

So those are probably the two most common species of tree in those forests, both hardwoods.

Hardwoods, we typically associate with deciduous trees or angiosperm trees.

Those are trees that flower and produce fruit.

They're more slow growing trees.

It's more durable.

So hardwoods make great flooring or things that are put up to a lot of abuse.

But the downside is because they are hard and dense, they are also heavier.

Softwoods are typically the coniferous species.

So trees that have needles instead of leaves, trees that have cones instead o, trees that are typically evergreens that are green all year round.

And they are also, because of the way they grow, have an added flexibility.

Whereas hardwoods are very durable, softwoods are known for being flexible.

- The Pennsylvania lumber industry early on in the colonial and post-revolutionary period, very focused on white pine as the main type of tree that was a desirable timber tree.

forests, they grew in old growth all dense and together in a single stand, they were all competing for sunlight.

So they grew very tall and very straight without a whole lot of branches on the lower portion of the trunk.

- White pine would have been instrumental.

It would have been one of the things that would have been fought over.

And because that white pine in those days, unlike a lot of the pine that we have now, was massive, these were a lot of the timbers that would have been used for masts and the masts were the engines.

So if you control that white pine, then you control movement on th.

- The important piece we've talked about relative to softwoods and using white pine for masts is that flexibility piece.

So when the sails are attached to the mast, they're under a tremendous amount of pressure from the wind.

It's basically powering the whole ship, allowing it to move across the water.

The white pine lends that flexibility to the mast so that when the winds are really rough and you're putting a lot of stress and tensile strength up against the sails, the mast is more likely to bend and less likely to snap and break.

But most of the masts for the larger ships also had oak boards that girded the bottom of the mast.

- The hulls themselves were generally made out of a lot of oak, specifically white oak.

White oak is a far more ideal lumber than say red oak.

When the brig was built, as I understand it, it was built with a lot of what's called black oak, which is a subspecies of red oak.

Here on the frontier, I think they would have used whatever they had close at hand.

What they were concerned with was splintering when a ship got hit with a cannon.

It wasn't necessarily the cannonballs that would kill the people.

It was the giant splinters that would blast away.

So I've not been shot at with a cannon, but I'm guessing a hardwood would splinter less than a softwood.

So this is my assumption.

Yeah, but generally hardwoods would have been more desired than softwoods.

- The white pine with the comine industrial revolution that really helped the industry take off in Pennsylvania.

First concentrated around our waterways with logs being sent down through rafts, mills would set up, operations would set up in certain areas.

Towns would be set up around them.

But to get to mills, you would use tributaries.

And oftentimes they would build dams to hold back the water.

And once it reached a level and they were ready to send the logs down, release the water so that they could flood the stream and give it enough water to send the logs down.

- Pennsylvania's forest composition changed after lumber industry came through.

So post-civil war up until abou0 is when we just see the massive explosion in demand for Pennsylvania's lumber.

A lot of our old growth hemlock and white pine forests were clear cut.

The forests that regenerated after those, you know, pine and hemlock forests were gone are hardwood forests today.

So most of Pennsylvania is in the zone called the Northern Hardwood Zone.

- Logging actually was a winter activity.

The winter would be the prime time to be out cutting down the trees.

Ice really helped move the logs to where you needed to go to transport them.

A lot of small farmers would go in the winter when after their harvest was on, they could work in the lumber camps for a little bit as well.

- As these seasonal job shifts occurred, the colder weather gave way to ice harvesting, which took place on several bodies of water throughout the region.

Lake Erie being the biggest body of freshwater, offered plenty of business along Erie's shoreline, though Conneaut Lake boasted better quality.

Bragging rights and cold hard profits were both at stake.

Bay.rds eye view of Presque Isle And this is where you gotta come to the top of the Bicentennial Tower.

And you can actually see a little bit of our history spread throughout our waterfront.

There was an ice house located right there.

There was another one located right there where the Cove's, restaurant's located.

There was another one located up on the top of the Second Chestnut Street.

And not just Erie, but anybody had like Lake Chautauqua had it, Conneaut Lake had ice houses.

People didn't have refrigerators.

I can remember even in the 1940s, my grandparents didn't have, when they had an ice box.

Taround,man we'd call, he'd come phouse was being a window of the atell meposition of plaque would we want 25 pounds, 50 pounds, 75 pounds or 100 pounds ice.

The guy would carry it into your house for you, a ton, dripping water all the way.

- Did you put the ice in the ic?

- Yeah.

- How'd you do it?

- It was easy.

Where are my golf clubs?

- In your golf bag.

- Then where's the golf bag?

- You just fell over it.

- Yeah, I won't say that.

- The ice industry, this new business that started the ice company, purchased that land around the perimeter of the lake.

And so they began the Conneaut Lake Ice Company.

The first year that they were in business, their first ice was shipped out in 1881. wagon.hipped it out by horse and They would bring the ice up and get it on those inclines.

And the inclines had chains on either side of them.

And those tall towers where you see the inclines going up, those towers had steam engines in them.

And the steam engines ran those chains in order to bring the blocks of ice up.

And then if you see how there's, as you go up that incline, there's various levels.

On this side in the larger ice house, there's four levels.

On the smaller ice house, there's three levels.

That way with putting down trap doors, they could decide at what level of the ice houses they wanted to store the ice.

room depending on where they had and where they were gonna be shipping it out.

And so they could decide where it would go.

And then you can see it going into those ice houses.

The word was that the ice from Conneaut Lake was very clean and very pure.

In fact, as the story goes, Andrew Carnegie, who was of course a big steel and railroad guy in Pittsburgh, he would only have Conneaut Lake when he rode on the train.

So it did have a very good reputation of being very clean.

And that was part of the reason why the ice company wanted to own the perimeter of the lake because then they felt that they could control the purity of the water.

When the railroad came in, that was a match made in heaven because the ice company needed the railway system in order to transport the ice.

And this was tremendous business for the new railroad that came into town.

So they had many years of a very successful business from the early 1880s until the mid late 1920s when electric refrigeration became a lot more prevalent.

- You know, we had no interstate 90, no interstate 79.

Most of the travel was by water, but then the railroads came.

They started showing up here and it gave the fishermen an opportunity to spread their fish throughout the markets.

So in order to get the railroad to come in here, the city fathers donated or gave them water lots so they could build their docks.

And they gave them that whole complex and the same thing was on the west side.

So we had two different railroads operating out here, one shipping to Philadelphia, one shipping to Pittsburgh.

Well, eventually in 1877, the Pennsylvania railroad bought them, released them, it took over the operation and combined it to one railroad.

And in 1895, there were about 250 fishermen.

By the end of 1919, there were up to 2,500 just working outta the city of Erie.

There was 120 boats spread out mostly where we are right now.

There was 86 million pounds of fish taking just out of Erie's harbo.

And that was worth about $8 million at the time.

I imagine in today's money it would be worth about $330 million.

Like any good trading port, it was the transportation that would make or break the success of Erie.

Trains took hold as the major overland hauler.

Local industrialists, like Charles M. Reed Jr., took advantage of this, forming companies to manufacturn railroads, including the Erie Northeast Railroad Company, Erie City Iron Works, Climax Manufacturing, and the Pittsburgh and Erie Railroad Company.

After some violent conflict ovek with standards in the Gauge wars, Erie was connected around the region by rail.

It was the speed of trains that proved most crucial to Erie's industry, because when you can move goods quickly, you can sell perishable goods to markets farther away.

For a city on the water, one product comes to mind, seafood.

In Erie, fish would become our economic core for decades to come.

It was a maritime town, and it was a materials transfer town.

As soon as people invented engines that go all the way from Buffalo to Detroit, what was going to be happening here except for fishing?

Because this is just a perfect place for fish.

Taree's two different lakes that joined in the middle, but you don't see that there's a joint by a marine that goes from the base of Long Point to the base of Presque Isle.

The western lake is shallow, which is good for some species, and the lake by us is deep, which is good for some other species.

Btwocisco and whitefish were the favorite fish, and the reason they were the favorite fish is you'd catc.

You'd slice them down the middle, leave their heads on, because people like to see the fish they were buying, take out the guts, fill them with ice, pack them in a mixture of ice and sawdust, and send them to market.

The whitefish were a little stronger than the cisco.

The cisco people like because they were milder and they were smaller.

So whitefish could be two feet long, cisco would be 18 inches long.

So there is a fellow at the other end of the lake by the name of Nash that invented the gill net, and the gill net is a super powerful fish catching system.

And if we're going to use fish nets, we have to figure out how to get out there and tend them.

As the city started to grow, weu know, just being a port, a couple of ships were built.

up.

Itally the technology caught was a man on an area called W. William Loomis, who built what was called an Erie boat.

The Erie boat and the Mackinac boat have a lot of similarities.

So they have really cool plank on frame construction.

So they would be steam bent frames rather than sawn frames.

Take something like white oak if ideal because it bends really easily.

You take the oak, you cut it into the dimensions of the frames.

You put it in a really long box and the rule of thumb is an hour for every inch of thickness.

So if you had a one inch thick frame, you leave it in there for about an hour and you take it back out and you would press it against the what's called a mold, bends it to the shape that it needs to be in.

And then you cay the planking over top of that.

The planking would have been a softwood, something that also would have steam bent well.

to 35 or can be anything from 25 40 feet long, always has two masts.

And each sail on the mast is the same as the other.

So you can use two sails to get out to where you want to go.

And they're the same size so that if if you're going to be a fisherman, you don't really care how shiny your sails look, but you want them to work.

So you have three, there's two on the boat and one at the sailmakers being repaired so you can keep going.

So you take the two sails and sail out to the net, drop one and then you can use the, the mizzenmast sail to move around from net to net and tend the nets.

Its sailing methods would allow for sharp movement compared to a square rig ship.

So it could tack and jibe easier and quicker.

It could point up into the wind much higher than a square rig ship.

So you could cut your lines and run with the wind till you got to a safe harbor.

So with a boat like that, it would be very maneuverable compared to a big square rig sailing ship, especially with people that live and work on the ship constantly.

As the fishing industry flourished, technology had to keep up with it.

The wooden sail-clad Loomis boats gave way to steam-powered steel-clad fis.

Running faster and stronger thar wind-powered ancestors, Erie's fishing industry was poised to accelerate through the turn of the 20th century.

And if you'd get to the bottom of why Erie might have been at one time called the steam and boiler-making capital of the world, it's because every one of the fish tugs that were here had a steam engine in it.

There's people making boilers from East Avenue to Powell Avenue in little places, and every person you know was figuring out how to put them into a boat.

And slowly but surely, the wooden boats got clad with metal, which made them a tad bit safer.

And then arguably either in Erie, Pennsylvania, or Port Dover, this is an argument you can have with old guys.

Somebody came up with the idea of, "Forget the wooden frame.

We're just going to continuously seam a metal.

We'le some schmuck to hold the flux because we don't care if he dies of cancer, and I'll run the bead welding."

And the best example of that is the Lady Kate.

That's a continuous seam-welded Nolan boat.

And again, they were open bow.

And these guys would go out there, and they'd pull ie nets by hand.

They literally have to... And they had a lot of fishing late in the season, December or early March, and they were miserable and hot and rough.

They were getting wet.

They'd have to pull these nets in by hand.

You lose a few overboard once in a while.

But then a man in Erie by the name of Crossley developed a netlifter, or it's a winch type of thing, that they were able th the nets in, or a gill net.

You winch the gill nets in, aas they could take the fish off were pulling in.

And that was the standard for the industry.

And then eventually they'd close the whole boat and just had openings in the side, very similar to the Jo-Ann M, which is right behind me.

My name is Rob Wilson.

I'm the executive director of At the Lake Ministries, and I also serve as clergy in the Western Pennsylvania Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.

My name is Dan Wilson.

I'm Rob's father, So them here because he lets me.

Joann M, the boat was built in 1979, was built by Harold Paash and Paash Shipbuilding ou.

It was a 200th hall that was built by Harold Paash.

Harold did not live to see its completion.

So this boat has been in Erie throughout the course of its existence.

It was originally commissioned by the Munch family to serve as a commercial fishing vessel and was powered with an 871 Detroit diesel with a two-to-one Allison transmission gear.

And it weighs about 58,000 pounds and can hold 700 gallons of diesel fuel.

Erie had a lot of concentration of boats, more than Canada did.

And of course, as these guys were spreading their nets, I mentioned, you know, these nets could be a quarter mile long.

You take all the, they said, one thing I read, said, if you took all the nets from out of Erie Harbod stretched them end to end, it'd reach from here to Philadelphia.

Everyone wanted Lake Erie's fish.

No other Great Lake compares to the harvest Lake Erie produced.

Large fish merchants like Alfred Booth further increased the pressure to harvest, even it forgetting about that pesky Canadian border and raising the ire of the Canadian department of Marine and Fisheries.

Alfred Booth from Chicago, he was a grocer and a fishmonger.

And he would go to a place like Sandusky, Ohio.

He would make all the guys who were independently fishing be a part of him.

So he had a fleet in Erie, Pennsylvania at one time with several boats and people got mad at him.

They're, they unionized against him.

There were fish strikes.

It was his influence that created a system where Canadian fish could be imported to the United States duty free.

He was the guy that made that work.

Alfred Booth, what he would do is he would take the independent fishermen buy their catch.

Of course, using the railroads would ship it to Chicago, ship it all over the world.

And they would just sneao Canadian waters and set their nets.

Well, the Canadians got a little mad about it.

So they, they got and put together a patrol boat called the Petrel.

So the fish wars happened when a fellow by the name of Dunn, who worked for the Canadian government, declared that he was going to go to war on the American fish pirates.

And his first seizure was an American fishing party that was on the wrong side of the Detroit River fishing for whatever.

He took them and took their boat and, you know, made them pay bail to get out.

But then he moved the Petrel down to where the real action was happening.

That was gill, Pennsylvania, epicenter of netting.

And what, what those events did, the fishing wars, people were shot and killed.

Ane were a couple of collisions where people were killed.

The Canadian revenue boats were steel.

They'd ram you and sink you and you'd sink.

He was pretty aggressive and he used to confiscate nets and he would try to chase the boats and arrest them because they could confiscate the boats.

And they did a couple of cases, take over one of them.

They took over a Booth fishery boat out of Erie and took that out there.

They took another one and it was aer got it back.

In fact, steamboat.

It ended up operatinn Niagara River someplace.

Erie.

Heame a minor celebrity in would come over here in his boat and tie up and have press conferences and eat at the Club and run around and talk to everybody about these people that he was going to, he's doinr against the pirates who were all from Erie.

And he would get front page coverage.

Everybody loved it.

He was a sort of a kind of a charismatic guy.

But in addition to the Petrel, he got r boat called a Vigilant and it was pretty fast.

They, they opened up in one of the boats with a Gatling gun.

According to the stories, the, the firemen, they had to keep throwing wood and coal in a boiler to keep it going faster.

He passed off exhaustion when he got over the line.

And finally the two countries put their heads together and they created a new rule and thau couldn't catch a Canadian fish if you're an American.

By this time we had our own revenur and they sat down and worked it out.

And then there was, you know, the legislatures and all that, you know, politics get involved in.

The crackdown by captain Edward Dunn continued into the 19 teens, but by the last decade, the American poaching schemes had leveled off compared to the peak near the turn of the century.

The great war was on the horizos important as fishing had been, it didn't compare to the war in Europe.

At the same time, concerns were being raised that the fisheries were being overfished with catches in 1906 being only half of catching.

From 30 years previous, those fish tugs wouldn't all go to waste though.

The 18th amendment put them back in use by rumrunners looking to cross that border.

Once again, we never wanted to stop profiting off the lake.

It is the never certain question of ecology versus economy.

At what point does our environments need for survival outweigh the want of profit?

The fish are not eternal.

We saw that with the blue pike and the cisco.

The forest is not eternal.

The woods Pennsylvania was known for have been harvested over and over again and the white pine is gone.

Even the ice is not eternal.

When was the last time you saw the bay frozen over?

Erie's economy is moving further from its industrial past and tourism and service industries cover the bay front.

We have a lot of we have relied on our lake for centuries and she has always provided.

Will we be able to provide what she needs in return?

We can certainly hope.

We can certainl.

Chronicles is made possible by t from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Spring Hill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

We question and learn.

We here at Chronicles love bringing you in-depth stories about the Lake Erie region.

And while we originally planned on airing an we originally planned on airing an hour-long episode tonight, hour-long episode tonight, in true documentary form, in true documentary form, sometimes things change and sometimes things change and we go where the story takes us.

we go where the story takes us.

We hope you enjoyed this second part of We hope you enjoyed this second part of Trade on the Lake and Trade on the Lake and that you'll join us next week for our new episode, Lake Science.

for our new episode, Lake Science.

Thank you for your continued support.

Thank you for your continued support.

Please enjoy this Please enjoy this episode from season one now.