“Reuniting with Grandfather’s
100-year-old ‘Good Ship Tobermory II’”
URBANNA — I guess one might say it was like making a pilgrimage to Canterbury or Jerusalem. Or waking up as a child on Christmas morning and first seeing the array of gifts Santa had brought underneath the glittering tree. Or being first setting eyes on my newborn baby. Such things could never be forgotten.
I was invited last September to travel to Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., to see my grandfather’s iconic yacht, the “Tobermory II,” which was now owned by Denny and Tunee Dougherty who were celebrating its 100th birthday.
Standing at the helm of Grandfather’s good ship at its 100th year, a boat I had never seen but heard so much about all my life, was one of the biggest moments of life because it unleashed so many deep-down emotions, never known but suspected and it brought me close again to my own father, George Wakefield, and his family that had once stood at the same helm with their eyes peeled on the horizon on the Great Lakes since 1924.
Boats do something special to people. We love them so. Either that or I guess I’m over emotional because at the very first sight of the inside cabin of old “Tob” where I saw the same wheel of yesteryear and could even smell varnish that still emanated from the woodwork, I wept helplessly in front of the owner and crew, while Tunee handed me one tissue after another. “Your father did the same thing in 1983 when he first stood once again reunited with the Tob at his father’s helm after the family sold the good ship in 1933.
It’s taken me 3 months to write this story because every time I sit down at my computer and start typing, the tears start up all over again and at age 83 I have to stop and rest. So today I will try once again to tell the story of the three lives of Grandfather’s good ship Tobermory.
F.W. Wakefield, my grandfather, was an industrialist who had moved his family to Vermilion, Ohio, in the early 1900s to build his home and a factory that would manufacture brass lighting fixtures. He had a large family, in all six sons and two daughters, and as a fervent yachtsman that liked to explore the Great Lakes and even served one term as Commodore of the Great Lakes Yachting Association, in 1924 he had built a 50-foot iron hulled ship that would accommodate his big family on cruises and that would “last a lifetime.”
It was built by Edward Crossely in Erie, Pa., and a picture of her (below) at christening and launch shows my grandfather and grandmother standing with the boat builder, she, Mary Wakefield, in a white dress holding a bouquet of red roses standing between the two smiling men. Another photo is of the boat making a big splash just as it hit the water surrounded by the men at the boatyard that had built her. Grandfather had designed every inch of his dream ship.
It was a newsworthy event and had much publicity as it was said to be the first galvanized iron-hulled pleasure yacht ever built.
Grandfather named her “Tobermory” after his favorite port of call in Georgian Bay, Canada, and it was his second yacht with that name.
One thing Grandfather was right about. The good ship would indeed “last a lifetime,” at least make it to its 100th year birthday which came about this year, 2024. But Grandfather didn’t fare so well. He died in 1933 at only 63 years of age after many years of cruising throughout the Great Lakes and even down the Intracoastal Waterway to Florida in 1926 when the land along the way south was mostly wild and undeveloped.
After his death the Tobermory was sold to the Pittsburgh Coal Company.
It was named “Champion” and captained for many years by Gerald D. Neville, the grandfather of its present owner.
The pleasure boat became a hard working ferry-tugboat that spent many years shuttling Lime Island workers and families from this upper Michigan island, in the St. Marys River, to the mainland dock almost three miles away. It also serviced the lake freighter refueling dock by performing various tug duties — towing a barge, hauling materials, breaking spring ice, etc. It was later sold to a contractor in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., where it was eventually abandoned for almost two decades.
Over the passing years the Wakefield family in Vermilion lost complete track of what had happened to the old Tob that had delivered so much happiness to my grandparents’ and father’s generations. She may have been lost… but never forgotten.
(To be continued…)
