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Port Huron, Michigan, circa 1910. "Huron Street and ferry landing." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size.
It appears to be an exceptionally clear day. One can see for about three blocks before the haze begins to obscure the view.
I see it also in the building behind the piano-shop. If I look closer the window is open - so the room is used. And above the triangle with the skull (flag?/sign) are sort of "motorcycle club" letters above the skull in the triangle. Can't read them -- something like: WHER.
[Or maybe SPIRITUALIST. - Dave]
My great-grandfather, Michael A. Donahue, was a practicing Port Huron dentist at this time. His office is probably somewhere in this photo.
I finally found that window and also see the sign over the sidewalk reading "Temple." Must be the hangout and meeting place for the Masons.
The domed building in the background is the Maccabee Temple, built in 1892 at Huron and Bard. It became the Algonquin Hotel in 1906 and was destroyed in a fire in 2000.
built the Grace Dormer at Buffalo in 1868 for the firm Dormer & Allen. The vessel carried excursion parties from Buffalo to Fort Erie and back on behalf of the Great Western Railway. The following year found her carrying passengers between Sarnia and Goderich, Ontario,on Lake Huron, for Port Edward, Ontario, interests. In 1871 she began her service between Port Hiuron and Sarnia, but the next year she was chartered to supply provisions and carry fish for a fishing camp established at Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan; the Grace Dormer burned there on July 3, 1872, taking the life of her wheelsman. Returned to Port Huron the next year, the Dormer was rebuilt and resumed her service between Port Huron and Sarnia until the 1920s when she was brought back to Buffalo with the intention of putting her on the Buffalo-Grand Island route. The old hull proved too far gone for this, and the Dormer was burned off and abandoned at Grand Island in early spring 1925.
The "central drug store" is still visible on the side of the building in the modern Google image!
Shorpy is the next best thing to a real time machine! I have to stop by every day.
Boatnerd.com, an amazing resource, with photos and more covering most every laker to have sailed the inland seas, is headquartered just a few yards east of the 1910 photographer's vantage.
Our Inland Seas: Their Shipping & Commerce for Three Centuries, 1910.The River Ferries from Hand to Steam.
Other Ferries At Port Huron and Mackinac.
At the foot of Lake Huron, where the flow of the broad lake narrows to the St. Clair River, there is a ferry between the city of Port Huron and Sarnia, a town on the Canadian side. Since 1868, the little steamer Grace Dormer has maintained a ferry service, to which was added, in 1873, the ferry-boat James Beard; and in 1882 the new steamer Omar D. Conger was built for the passage of the swift current at this point.
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