HISTORIC SHIPS ON LEE SHORE
One of the last views of the tug Grouper before she was cut up in Lyons, New York, September 2023.
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SEA HISTORY 185 | WINTER 2023–24
WILL VAN DORP
A
n unlikely maritime icon was lost this past September in the sleepy Erie Canal town of Lyons, New York. Locally known as Grouper, the 111-yearold tugboat had been disintegrating there for the past two decades; she was dismantled by the relentless hydraulic jaws of a scrapping company’s machinery. The tugboat, not noticed by most but cherished by some, is now just a memory. Grouper was built as Hull No. 21 at Cleveland’s Great Lakes (GL) Towing Shipyard on the Cuyahoga River in 1912. The tugboat began life christened as Gary, memorializing the Indiana city named for a founder of US Steel. Her loss thins out the ranks of survivors of that era of G-tugs, iconic Great Lakes tugboats that seem to defy aging. An older boat (Hull No. 8) launched in 1909 is still working as GL Towing’s Arkansas, and a dozen or so other G-tugs nearing a century or older are still active along the US “third coast.” Meanwhile, since 2016 the shipyard has been in the process of building a series of ten innovative Damen Stan 1907 ICE tugboats, better designed for the current century. Tugboat Gary worked for GL Towing of Cleveland, Ohio, for 22 years before C. Reiss Coal Company of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, purchased her and renamed her Green Bay. Reiss operated the boat in Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan ports, primarily Green Bay, for the next 47 years, from 1934 until 1981. Photos, such as those of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc, show
by Will Van Dorp
WILL VAN DORP
Tug Green Bay, a.k.a. Grouper— an Ignominious End