Early Charlevoix–Beaver Island mail and passenger route retrospective, 1973

Event

Dates

circa 1890 – circa 1920

Kind

Publication

Where

Beaver Island

Eras

Modern era

Concepts

maritimeshippingheritagehistoriographycommunication

Within

Beaver Island

Summary

Between February 1973 and June 1975, the Beaver Beacon’s “Beaver Tales” column ran an intermittent, reader-assisted retrospective on the Charlevoix– Beaver Island mail and passenger route. It traced the run from sailboat mail contracts held by Andy Gallagher and Dan Green, through the 1890s steamers Nellie and Erie L. Hackley, the competing Joe, the Beaver and City of Boyne, the Columbia’s 1917 loss by fire at Charlevoix, and the Bruce and Greene, which carried the route through 1920. The column drew on its own research, reader letters, and old newspaper clippings, and repeatedly acknowledged gaps in what it could establish — vessel identities, dimensions, and exact dates recur across installments with unresolved discrepancies, several of which the individual vessel and person articles linked below carry forward.

Before steam: sailboat mail contracts

The Beacon’s “Beaver Tales” column opened its February 1973 installment by admitting that “facts and pertinent information” about the early boats to Beaver Island were “hard to come by,” and asked readers for help filling in what it did not know.¹ Before the 1890s, it says, mail and passengers reached the island by fishing boat and lumber hooker. During King Strang’s era, 1847–56, the island had already become a fueling stop for lake steamers, with cordwood piled along the harbor docks to supply wood-burning boilers — a business the column says predated any formal mail service.¹

Regular service began once the federal government began contracting for mail delivery. The earliest known contract holder, per the column, was Andy Gallagher, “probably in the mid-1800’s,” carrying mail from Cross Village by sailboat; in the same era Dan Green held the contract and likewise sailed from Cross Village. No description of either man’s boat survives, but the column says the common type was the Mackinaw boat — a double-ended, main-and-jib rig seldom over 36 feet, “especially sea-worthy” but capable of giving passengers “a ride they couldn’t soon forget.”¹

Nellie and the Erie L. Hackley, 1890s–1907

Not until the 1890s did the first steam vessel take the run: the Nellie, owned and captained by Peter Campbell. No description of her survives in this account either, but growing freight and passenger demand soon made her too small, and Campbell replaced her with the Erie L. Hackley (the column spells it “Eric”). The March 1973 continuation adds that Campbell bought the Hackley in Muskegon in 1897 and sailed her to Charlevoix; at 100 feet and powered by a small steam engine, she was “quite a ship” next to her predecessors, though her earlier working life had been spent towing logs to Lake Michigan sawmills. Information on her decade of Beaver Island service was, the column says, “very limited,” but Campbell held the mail contract aboard her until 1906 or 1907, competing all the while against the steamer Joe, owned by “Big Neil” Gallagher and sailed first by Captain Leonard and later by James Gallagher. The column notes a sketch of the Hackley by Bill Gillespie ran with the March installment and that extra copies would be available that summer at the Beaver Island Museum.²

Joe, the Beaver, and the City of Boyne, 1900–1916

The March 1975 continuation, credited to “letters from interested readers and some old newspaper articles,” adds detail from a letter by John A. Gallagher: the Joe, purchased by “Big” Neil Gallagher, ran on Beaver Island in 1900, while its owner also kept a store, a fish business, and a tug named Gertie on the island. The Joe also served points in Little Traverse Bay and Cross Village, at a time when the column recalls area roads as “rutty strips of mud or choking dust.” After two seasons the Joe was replaced by a steamer called Beaver, and that vessel in turn gave way to the City of Boyne. The column gives the City of Boyne’s particulars in detail: 87.8 feet overall, 19.7-foot beam, 7.8-foot draft, 121 gross and 82 net tons, a crew of five, a 45-horsepower steam plant, wood construction, built at Grand Haven in 1883 as the May Blossom, official number 140644. Grand Haven–based until 1900, she was then bought by Oscar E. Wilbur of Charlevoix for twice-daily Charlevoix–Boyne City runs — service that continued until 1914, when a vessel the column calls the Beaver was destroyed by fire. With the Beaver gone, brothers Jim and Charlie Roe of Harbor Springs put the City of Boyne on the Beaver Island run, where she served until 1916; the column reports finding only an old newspaper photograph of her, no surviving Bill Gillespie sketch. It adds that new information kept surfacing as the series ran, forcing the column to revisit earlier installments, and that the Beacon hoped eventually to collect the whole series into a booklet.³

The loss of the Columbia, 1917

The April 1975 installment describes several short-lived vessels on the Beaver Island run in the “mid-1900’s,” among them the Columbia, which replaced the City of Boyne, resembled her closely, and was skippered by Charlie Roe of Harbor Springs with Pat O’Donnell of Beaver Island as engineer. Her run lasted through most of the 1917 season, into early October. As a steam vessel she had to be kept fired overnight at her Round Lake dock in Charlevoix; the column’s account, drawn from O’Donnell’s own retelling, says a red-hot clinker apparently fell into an oil-soaked bilge after he banked the fire for the night. Woken by smoke and flames that had already sealed off the gangway, O’Donnell reached the foredeck in his underclothes and, unable to swim, slid down the bowline to the dock; a bystander lent him an overcoat against the October chill. Bucket brigades and hand pumpers could not save the ship, and the fire spread to the dock and coal sheds of the Charlevoix Coal and Wood Company before the Columbia’s hulk slid under the water.⁴

Bruce and Greene, 1917–1920

The May–June 1975 installment says Captain Harry L. Oldham answered the Columbia‘s loss by putting the steamer Bruce on the run. The column calls the information on her “scanty” but gives vessel number 77049, built in Chicago in 1892, 66 gross and 44 net tons, 225 horsepower, 78.7 feet long with a 19.9-foot beam and 8.5-foot draft. She had carried two earlier names: launched as a Grand Haven passenger boat called the A. J. Yattaw, then renamed Ogontz, before Oldham brought her to Charlevoix and renamed her a third time. Between 1917 and 1920 a smaller, slower competitor called the Greene appeared, offering “certainly…not many creature comforts,” and soon faded, leaving the Bruce to carry the route through the 1920 season. The column adds that many islanders remembered Oldham separately as the builder of the old Tower Hotel and Casino overlooking the entrance to the Charlevoix channel, and closes by suggesting that the early boats’ short service spans, and their mostly off-island crews, explain why so little record of them survived.⁵

Evidence and limits

This is a retrospective newspaper column, not a surviving mail-contract register or vessel registry. The column itself calls its early information scarce and says it had to revise earlier installments as later evidence arrived; it also states a hope, apparently unrealized in the sources held here, of eventually collecting the series into a booklet. The graph therefore preserves the route episode and its named vessels and people without asserting exact contract dates, complete identities for the named operators, an exact date for the Columbia loss, or a complete registry history for the Bruce and Greene. Some details in this account — notably the Erie L. Hackley’s build year, dimensions, and acquisition date — conflict with other held sources reconstructed in more depth; see Erie L. Hackley for that fuller, contested chronology, which this article does not attempt to resolve.

Added 1 August 2026 · revised 5 August 2026. Recent changes