The busiest lock system in the world (by cargo tonnage) is featured on two stamps that are today’s #stampoftheday.
The locks in question aren’t part of Panama Canal but are instead the Soo Locks in Sault St. Marie on the border between Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the province of Ontario. They connect Lake Superior and Lake Huron and allow ships to bypass rapids on the St. Mary’s River which drops by 21 feet between the two lakes.
The locks are the focus today because the first ship to use locks to travel between the two lakes did so on June 18, 1855. The first stamp today is an 8-cent stamp issued in 1901 as part of a series of stamps produced for the 1901 Pan-American exposition in Buffalo. Like the expo, the stamps featured 19th century advances in transportation including shipping, rail, and the electric car. (The fair is also famous as the place where President William McKinley was assassinated, a death that made Theodore Roosevelt president). The second stamp to honor the locks is a 3-cent stamp issued in 1955 to mark the 100th anniversary of the first canal (including locks) that connected the two lights.
Construction of the locks was widely debated in the first part of the 19th century. Some opposed the idea, including one senator from the South who said, since the area was “beyond the remotest settlement of the United States,” building a canal there would be like placing the canal on the moon. In the mid-1840s, however, the tide began to turn. Copper and iron ore were discovered in the western Upper Peninsula. Transporting the minerals to Cleveland and Detroit was time-consuming and costly because they had to be removed from the boats and carried around the rapids.
The logjam was broken in 1852 when the federal government approved the canal and gave Michigan 750,000 acres of land for it. Work on the canal began in 1853. Over the course of two years, it would employ nearly 1,700 men working 12-hour days for $20 a month. The locks were completed in May 1855 and on June 18, the first boat passed through them. The process took less than an hour. The new system included two 350-foot locks connected to a one-mile canal. Boats passing through were required to pay a toll of 4 cents per ton. That first summer alone, nearly 1,500 tons of iron ore was transported through the locks. Five years later, that number increased to 120,000 tons.
By 1881, the passage had become so important to American and Canadian trade, it needed to be expanded. The locks were turned over to the US Government and have since been improved and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. The ships that have passed through the locks include the 730-foot long Edmund Fitzgerald which, when it passed through the locks in 1968 set a new record for locks by carrying 32,000 tons of taconite pellets, a form of iron ore. (The boat, of course, sank in 1975, an incident that is the subject of Gordon Lightfoot’s hit 1976 song).
Today there are four locks including a larger lock opened in 1968 a few months after the Fitzgerald’s record-setting trip that has made it possible for larger boats to break the Fitzgerald’s record. Today, it’s not unusual for 1,000 foot-long boats to carry more than 70,000 tons of iron ore through the locks. In total, the locks (which are closed for the winter when thel lakes freeze over) handle about 10,000 ships a year carrying about 80 million tons of cargo. Iron ore worth a total of about $500 billion comprises about half of that cargo. And more cargo may be coming because in May, the Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on a $1 billion project to build a fifth lock that will allow the locks to handle even more very large ships.
I’m sure the locks have a deeper meaning but I don’t really know what it is. For now, suffice to say that they show the ways that strategic public investments in infrastructure can help spur economic activity, a reminder amid all of the current drama and turmoil, that the public sector actually can (and has) played an important and positive role in our history.
Stay safe, be well, fight for justice and work for peace.