Self-unloading Ships of The Company
Michigan Limestone and Chemical Company built three ships between 1912 and 1917. They were named SS Calcite, SS W.F. White and SS Carl D. Bradley (in 1927, this ship would be renamed John G. Munson, and a new SS Carl D. Bradley would be built). These ships were revolutionary in their own right. They represented the latest technology in "self-unloading" ships, then simply called "unloading ships".
In 1912, the company built its first steamship, SS Calcite. It was considerably larger than the first modern self-unloader ever built on the Great Lakes. That ship was the SS Wyandotte and was built in 1908 for the Michigan Alkali Company of Wyandotte, Michigan, better known as Wyandotte Chemical Co. The ship was used to haul limestone from the company's quarry at Alpena, Michigan, to their manufacturing plant on the Detroit River south of Detroit. The steamships W.F. White and Carl D. Bradley followed over the next few years. All the steamships' hulls were painted grey to minimize the appearance of the limestone dust that accumulated during loading and unloading.
The design of these early self-unloaders was pretty much the same as today. The idea is that the "cargo hold" is built with its sides sloping toward the center of the ship along the keel. Where the two sides come together, a series of steel gates can be opened. This allows the material to drop onto a conveyor belt running the length of the ship beneath the "cargo hold." The conveyor belt carries the material up to an exchanger, where it is transferred to a second belt which runs up to the main deck, then through a long boom on deck. The unloading swing boom hangs over the ship's side to discharge the material load onto the waiting customer's dock. The advantage of self-unloaders is that they can deliver the limestone material directly to a customer's dock without requiring expensive shoreside unloading rigs.
As business grew over the years, the company built several more of these self-unloaders. These ships were operate under the name Bradley Transportation Company after 1920 and were known as the Bradley boats or the Bradley fleet. There are self-unloaders today that carry limestone from the Calcite plant through the Port of Calcite to industrial ports all around the Great Lakes.
The SS Carl D. Bradley was lost in a storm in November 1958 while returning from delivering a load of limestone. 33 of the 35 crewmembers died, most of whom lived in or around the small town of Rogers City. No larger loss of lives has occurred in the lake freighter fleet since the Bradley's sinking.
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