I posted this photo of a steamboat two years ago. I had been told by Grandpa that it was probably on the Kalamazoo River.
Steamboat on the Kalamazoo River
In the glass negatives that belonged to Joseph DeKorn, there are more ship and water photos. I started to think that the glass negative photos look like something bigger than the Kalamazoo River.
St. Joe Line Chicago Steamer
City of South Haven steamboat
Notice the Coca-Cola ad to the left of the photo above (hubby collects vintage and antique Coke signs, so he would love this). Because these scenes appear to be major water transportation, I looked up the Great Lakes passenger steamers on my old friend Wikipedia. I learned that the “history of commercial passenger shipping on the Great Lakes is long but uneven. It reached its zenith between the mid-19th century and the 1950s.” These photos are probably from the very early 1900s.
Here are some other photos I found online:
Steamer City of Chicago postcard available for $8.95 click through
This ship is the City of Chicago steamer, operated by the St. Joe Line (see Uncle Joe’s photo above).
What I would love to find out is the route these passenger ships took–and what the ride was like! Did they serve food and beverage? Was it fine dining or picnic lunch? How long did the trip take?
The Family Kalamazoo 
I think the smaller boat is on Gull Lake not Kalamazoo River.
Also some very big boats used to come into Saugatauk on Lake Kalamazoo which is the end of the Kalamazoo River. Most of them mostly just took tourists for rides but some went to Chicago from various ports along Michigan shore.
That’s an interesting idea–Gull Lake. I didn’t know about Lake Kalamazoo! That’s cool. I wonder if the boats in these pictures came into Saugatauk on Lake Kalamazoo?!
What a groovy post! Some thoughts. One: a woman in my senior-center writing class worked on one of those cruise boats plying the Great Lakes. The girls lived in crowded quarters and served meals to the passengers. The boats traveled from port city to port city — I can’t recall which. Two: such huge boats require channels to be dredged to accommodate them. Big city ports on the Great Lakes still accommodate large vessels, but many smaller ports no longer do. The Grand Haven channel still accommodates large Coast Guard vessels. Luddington accommodates the Badger, a large car ferry. Three: it takes a lot of money to keep lake channels dredged, especially when water levels are low.
Four: the vessels in your article look SO BIG. Five: vessels on the Great Lakes are traditionally referred to as boats, not ships, which is funny because ocean-going freighters ply the Great Lakes. Are those vessels ships in the ocean and boats in the lakes?
Oh, good to know about them being called boats. I thought anything as large as these had to be ships! But I guess they are STEAMBOATS as the title says ;). Wonderful wonderful info you share here from your student. I hope she’s writing about her experiences!! My goodness. If you get a chance, ask her if she would like to write a little piece for me to publish on this blog! We would love to hear about her experiences. Are the men working on the boats referred to as sailors or something else? Were their romances between the girls who served the meals and the guys working on the boats? What were the meals like? Thanks for your great comments, WJ.
My gr gr grandmother was a cook on a paddle wheel steamer that ran on Lake Champlain. They had a fine dinning room, and the family has a few dishes from the ship.
Oh, that is such a neat story–and that your family still has dishes! I’m intrigued, too, that a woman was a cook on the boat. I would have thought that they would have generally hired men for a job like that.
Luanne, The Kalamazoo River is pretty wide in some areas, and back in those days even more so, They use to have larger boats than this little the Kalamazoo River, and I think your Granpa is pretty good source, and I believe this picture you have from a couple of years ago, is the Kalamzoo, just like Granpa said..
Paula, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge of the area! I had no idea they had boats even larger than this one on the Kalamazoo River. Why is it smaller now than it was then, I wonder.
It’s amazing how much shipping took place on the Great Lakes in years gone by. I visited Ashland Wisconsin a while back–and was surprised to learn that it once had been a major port.