H. Lee White Marine Museum, Oswego, NY

When I arrived, it was still rather early in the morning and the museum was not yet open.  A few days earlier it would have been, but they had now shifted to their Fall hours of operation so I wasn’t able to see inside the main museum building and couldn’t take the on-deck tours of the various boats and schooners tied up alongside the pier. I was tight for time, so it was probably a good thing that they weren’t open yet :-).

As you arrive through the gates, the first marine vessel on display is the 70 foot long NYS Derrick Boat #8. First floated in 1925, it was used without serious incident to dredge the canal and lift heavy boats with its on-board derrick. After about  60 years of service, it was donated to the museum and then it sank. The rest is a bit of the museum history.  I couldn’t go in to hear the rest of the story! Too early in the day to visit a living shipwreck :-).

The next boat along the pier side was the National Historic Landmark Tug LT-5 (a.k.a. Major Elisha K. Henson or the John F. Nash). The tug is 116 feet long and was used in WWII to provide protection along the eastern seaboard and provide troop support during the Normandy invasion. For war service, its deck was equipped with two 50 caliber machine guns.

Moving further along the pier, the next berth was occupied by a visiting schooner, the Lois McClure from the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum of Historic Basin Harbor, Vermont. The Lois McClure is an 88 foot replica of an 1862 class sailing canal boat built in Burlington, Vermont as a replica of two wrecks found in the waters of that area.  The Canal Schooners were a special class of boat designed to operate under sail while out in the open waters of the lakes and when they arrived at the canal systems to move inland they would drop sail, raise their keel and then be towed along the canal by a tugboat or towline. When the canal boats were being designed, constraints to their length and width (beam), were placed on the designers based on the capacity of the locks and canals through which they would be traveling. A similar situation occurred in more modern time when the canal and locks of the St. Lawrence Seaway lead to the development of Great Lakes freighters with precise specifications to maximize their usefulness moving freight through the seaway and Great Lakes systems from Montreal to Thunderbay.

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About Ron

Ron has long had an interest in photography and traveling and, in recent years, has had more time to devote to both activities. Long a Pentax user, Ron switched to Nikon gear when he went digital. The advent of the digital SLR camera, and the ease of the internet blogging process, has provided a venue for sharing his photography and travel experience at the local, national and international level. More about Ron
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