Few Americans did more in the field of maritime than Frank E. Kirby, and of the hundreds of steamers that plied the Great Lakes, he designed more than 150 of them. A man of international renown, a friend of two sitting U.S. presidents, Kirby is considered one of the world’s greatest marine architects to ever live.
Kirby’s father was a naval architect himself, Capt. Stephen Russell Kirby. The elder Kirby moved west from upstate New York in 1836 to sail on Lake Erie at the age of 12. By his mid-20s, he was sailing propeller steamers that he had built.
Frank Eugene Kirby was born in Cleveland on July 1, 1849. He went to school in Saginaw, Mich., and played about his father’s mills and ships in Saginaw Bay. At 15, he moved to New York City, where he studied marine engineering during evening classes at the Cooper Union Institute from 1863 to 1867. During the day, he drafted engine plans. During the Civil War, Kirby became a member of the engineering staff of the Allaire Boat Works in New York, which designed marine engines for war vessels. Following the Civil War, the Kirby family moved to Detroit, with Stephen Kirby being tapped to manage the Campbell & Owen shipyard. In 1872, the captain helped to incorporate that shipyard as the Detroit Dry Dock Co., a legendary institution that produced a number of legendary vessels. After the Civil War, the young Frank Kirby went to study ship building in Glasgow, Scotland, and learning a thing or two about iron-hulled construction. In 1870, he would follow the rest of the Kirby clan to Detroit, and embark on a remarkable career.
Back to Detroit
With an education under his belt and money in his pocket thanks to benefactor Capt. Eber Brock Ward, Kirby and his brother Fitz Albert “Jo” Kirby set out to open the first shipyard on the Great Lakes dedicated to building iron- and steel-hulled ships. It would be located at Wyandotte, Mich., downriver from Detroit. Nearly every vessel plying the Great Lakes at the time had hulls of wood. Indeed, the first iron-hulled commercial steamer, the Merchant, had been built only eight years earlier.
The Kirby brothers completed their first iron-hulled passenger steamer in July 1872, the Queen of the Lakes, and quickly followed her up that winter with the iron tugboat the E.B. Ward Jr. Things were just starting to take off when the Panic of 1873, bringing their fledgling upstart business to a halt.
They would find a savior and patron in John Owen, who was associated with their father at Detroit Dry Dock. Owen is key to Kirby’s story because he was president of the Detroit & Cleveland Steam Navigation Co. (D&C), an overnight passenger service that operated what were called “night boats.” These vessels would pick up passengers in the evening, they would wine and dine and dance the night away before retiring to their cabins, and then wake up the following morning at their destination. In an era before freeways or airplanes, these night boats were the main way to get around the Midwest, Ohio and upstate New York. Notably, sailing across Lake Erie was faster than riding the rails.
As fate would continue to have it, D&C’s flagship steamer, the R.N. Rice, was destroyed by fire at Detroit on June 11, 1877. The steamship line was in need for a replacement, and Kirby was eager to prove his skills at the drafting table. The plan was to come up with a new hull – albeit of composite, not iron - and wooden superstructure but reuse the Rice’s old engine, as it had managed to survive the blaze unscathed. The new vessel would be named the City of Detroit, the first of three steamers Kirby would design to bear the name. And more importantly, from then on, Kirby would design every passenger steamer D&C commissioned over a 46-year period.
But Kirby remained a devout believer in metal hulls, and in 1880, D&C commissioned Kirby to design its first, for the D&C night boat the City of Cleveland. This City of Cleveland was the second of three D&C vessels to bear the name. She would initially be chartered by other companies for service to Lake Superior, but in 1882, the City of Cleveland (II) opened up a new route for D&C from Detroit to the Straits of Mackinac.
As their relationship with D&C began to flourish, the Kirby brothers’ yard at Wyandotte became part of Detroit Dry Dock. The hulls would be made downriver and then towed to Detroit, where they would be finished off at Detroit Dry Dock’s yard at the foot of Orleans Street. Jo Kirby became the superintendent of the shipyard at Wyandotte; Frank E. Kirby became its in-house naval architect.
Meanwhile, amid the hustle and bustle at Detroit Dry Dock, Kirby came upon a young employee and admonished him to “keep digging your toes in, and you’ll get to the top.” That young worker was none other than Henry Ford, who wrote that he took Kirby’s advice to heart and would never forget the man who had encouraged him.
An internationally recognized visionary
During the Spanish-American War in 1898, the U.S. government called upon Kirby to supervise the selection of ships for transport duty. During World War I, another president he called a friend drafted him into service of his country. President Woodrow Wilson made Kirby a government consulting engineer, where he supervised the construction at Ford Motor Co. of the fighting vessels known as Eagles.
Though the D&C line would keep him busy, he did not work exclusively on the company’s so-called "floating palaces." For instance, the legendary Detroit passenger steamer Tashmoo also came off his drawing board. He also designed excursion steamers for the Dustin & Ashley, Cleveland & Buffalo, White Star, and Detroit-Windsor Ferry lines, and car ferries for the New York Central, Pennsylvania, Pere Marquette and Ann Arbor railroads, as well as vessels for service on the Hudson and St. Lawrence rivers.
On June 15, 1904, the passenger steamer General Slocum caught fire and sank in the East River in New York City. Of the nearly 1,400 people – almost all women and children - aboard, it was estimated that 1,000 died, making it the worst maritime disaster of the 20th century at the time. (The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 would surpass it.) Even today, it remains the second deadliest maritime disaster on U.S. waterways. A number of safety issues were discovered, from inadequate fire-suppression equipment to lifeboats that were inaccessible to defective life preservers that caused children to sink in the water and drown.
President Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of Kirby’s, appointed him to revise the federal marine safety code, making him what was essentially a one-man commission. With few changes, Kirby’s recommendations were adopted and became federal law. In an era when shipping was done entirely by railroads and by boat, winters posed a major problem. With the waterways frozen in ice, commerce was largely frozen, too. Kirby came up with a bow design that served as the basis for modern ice-breaking technology.
“It was about 1900 that his design for the car ferries still operating between detroit and Windsor brought him into the international spotlight,” The Detroit News wrote Aug. 27, 1929. “The ice in the Detroit River had caused great delays in the transporting of trains, and it was believed the problem could not be solved, when Mr. Kirby produced his plans for, and built the ice-crushing ferries that rise onto the ice floes and rip their way through by force of sheer weight.”
These ice-breakers were also used on the Straits of Mackinac to keep goods flowing between the Great Lakes and importantly the mines in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that supplied Detroit’s booming factories with ore. The Russian government took notice of his work, and summoned him to Petrograd to design vessels that could keep the harbor at Archangel open year-round. He later would go to China, where he surveyed the Chinese navigation system for its government.
He also invented what became known as the Kirby lifeboat, said to be unsinkable and built in such a way that they could not be overloaded.
It’s little wonder that even Henry Ford called Kirby the greatest marine architect to ever live.
Death of a genius
Kirby left Detroit for New York around 1917, and spent his later years as a consulting architect of the Submarine Boat Corp. of New York. But that didn’t stop the D&C line from tapping him in1922 to design the two largest passenger paddlewheel steamers in the world. The sizeable sisters the Greater Detroit and Greater Buffalo entered service in 1924. They measured 536 feet in length and nearly 100 feet across and could carry more than 2,000 passengers comfortably.
The pair would ensure Kirby went out on top. He fell ill in 1924 and was kept in solitary confinement at a hospital in New York. With the end near, he returned to his home in Bronxeville, N.Y., where he died on Aug. 25, 1929, at age 80. News of his passing was front page news in the Detroit Free Press.
Kirby was interred at the family plot in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y. His tombstone features depictions of nine of his steamers: the Myrtle of 1874, the City of Detroit of 1877, the St. Ignace of 1888, the Stephen R. Kirby of 1890 (named after his father), the Promise of 1892, the fire tug James Battle of 1901, the Tionesta of 1903, the Washington Irving of 1925 and the Greater Detroit of 1924. The slab also salutes him for making “outstanding contributions to shipbuilding, both as a science and as an art.”
In the wake of his death, The Detroit News wrote Aug. 29, 1929, that "the man was a genius, and his work has been of immense importance, not in these waters only, but all over the world."
The Detroit Free Press eulogized him the same day in an editorial, writing: "Mr. Kirby was one of the builders of the modern City of the Straits. A man of genius, with a special bent for designing ships, he made possible the construction of vessels which were the admiration and envy of the world, and gave Detroit a prominence and opportunity for marine and industrial development which was a most important asset at a period when it was beginning to approach its destiny as a great metropolitan center. … He should be remembered while Detroit is a city."