The Captain of Everything: Eber Brock Ward

The Captain of Everything

by Michael Daisy

It seems unlikely now, but once upon a time in the not so distant past, Detroit was a place that made the blood of fickle, Wall Street brokers race all the way to the bank. It really was the place where dreams were made. Detroit WAS the Motor City, THE automotive capital of the world. More cars were produced here than anywhere else. 

Most people have heard of, and can tell you something about men like Henry Ford, John and Horace Dodge, and other notable Motor City names. But what about Detroiters like Dexter M. Ferry, William Bushnell Stout, or Frank Kirby? The answers are seeds, aircraft, and shipping.

In the years before the auto industry transformed it into a one-industry town, Detroit was home to a diverse group of companies and a world leader, or top performer in 30 or more non-automotive industries. A small sampling of which: Aircraft, Paints and Varnishes, Maritime Excursion Cruises, Shipping and Shipbuilding, Pharmaceuticals, Landscape Postcards, Cigars, Cooking Stoves, Beer, Railroad Cars, and even Seeds, the kind you plant in the ground.

Speaking of beer and alcohol, Detroiter Hiram Walker established a distillery across the river in Windsor, Ontario, Canada where they still make Canadian Club Whiskey and other popular brands. And if you're talking about liquor from Canada, you can't forget about the Purple Gang, who made Detroit into the top importer of illegal spirits during the allegedly dry Prohibition years of the 1920s. But then, we are getting off the track.

Before all of this came to be, mostly beginning near the end of the 19th century, the one common thread tying them all together was the subject of our story: Captain Eber Brock Ward. And no, "Captain" was not an honorary title like the one so beloved by Harlan Sanders of KFC fame. Ward came by his captaincy the old fashioned way, he earned it.

According to the Detroit Free Press, "The late Captain Eber Ward was a type of pioneer American frontier man, self-willed, enterprising, arrogant, rich, rough, ready and wholly contemptuous of public opinion." More than any other single person, EB Ward was responsible for making over Detroit and the Midwest from a struggling, agrarian region into an industrial factory belt.  In the words of my fellow Detroit blogger Amy Elliott Bragg, Ward was "the captain of pretty much every pre-automotive industry in Detroit and the Midwest."

The Captain was a leader of his time in shipping and shipbuilding, renowned as the "Steamship King of the Great Lakes". He was also known as the "Iron master of the west" for being the first to successfully use the Bessemer process to produce steel in the United States. He fed his blast furnaces from the rich iron ore deposits on lands he owned in Northern Michigan and elsewhere that he, naturally, transported on his own vessels and railroad cars.

EB was one of the biggest lumber barons in the United States. To move his product to market, Ward got involved in railroads, getting himself elected president of the Pere Marquette Railroad in the process. He was an owner of a silver mine on a 14 acre island just off Thunder Bay in Canadian waters in Lake Superior. The mine contained a 70-foot vein of high quality silver-rich ore and rivaled the production of Nevada's famed Comstock Lode mine. He grew corn on 5,000 acres of Iowa farmland. The salt mine Ward owned and operated in Michigan's Saginaw Valley became one of the cornerstones on which the Morton Salt Company was founded. Ward's American Plate Glass Company – later absorbed by PPG, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company – near Crystal City, Missouri was the first company to produce plate glass in America.

Among other things, EB Ward was a fervent abolitionist. He lavishly funded John Brown's "Free-Kansas" movement and was known to purchase the freedom of escaped slaves when bounty hunters came calling. Consistent with his high profile, industrialist image, he had influential friends in high places. Two of the biggest were the "Radical" Republican Senators Zachariah Chandler of Detroit, and Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio.

Ward was co-owner with Chandler of the Detroit Post and Tribune, an unabashedly pro-Republican Party publication later acquired by Detroit News founder James E. Scripps. As Republican National Committee Chairman, "Zack" Chandler brokered the deal that made it possible for Rutherford B. Hayes to gain the presidency despite receiving less than a majority of the popular vote in the election of 1876. Ward's second wife, Catherine Lyon was Senator Wade's niece. The Senator himself was the Senate's President pro tempore -- the senior most senator in the majority party and third in the presidential line of succession -- during impeachment proceedings against Andrew Johnson in 1868, a process the President survived by only a single vote. And though historians believe that Wade's Senate colleagues' concerns about his extreme radicalism was the reason Johnson was not convicted and removed from office, the mind boggles at the possibilities.

Eber Brock Ward was born on Christmas Day 1811 in Applegaths Mills – named for the inventor of a vertical printing press – near Toronto in British controlled Canada. He was the third of four children born to Eber Ward and his wife, Sally Totten Ward: Emily, Sallie, EB, and Abbie. The family had moved to Canada to escape the incursions that were common along border regions conducted by both British and American partisans in the months leading up to the War of 1812.

After the war, the family returned briefly to their old homestead in Vermont, near the New York border, before deciding to relocate to Kentucky. Unfortunately, Sally became ill en route and died in Waterford Pennsylvania near the Ohio border. Eber Sr. attempted to complete the journey to Kentucky, making it another 30 miles west before deciding to give it up in Conneaut, Ohio, on the shores of Lake Erie.

Now known as "Ohio's sharpest corner," and once home of Mildred Gillars, aka "Axis Sally", Conneaut would prove to be of coincidental significance to the young EB. His uncle, Samuel Ward had arrived in Conneaut in 1816, staying a short time before relocating permanently to Marine City, Michigan, on the St. Clair River, north of Detroit. Before heading off to the Michigan Territory, Captain Sam built a tiny schooner he named the Salem Packet on the shores of Conneaut Creek. It was the Salem Packet that would serve as the foundation on which the Ward family’s maritime empire was established.

Conneaut would also be the future home of Catherine Lyon, EB's second wife.

For Eber Ward and his family, the stay in Conneaut was brief. They relocated to Detroit, arriving in the tiny frontier town in 1821 when EB was 10-years-old.

Detroit was a pretty bleak place at the time. Only 16 years since it had burned to the ground in the "Great Fire of 1805," most buildings were built of logs with cedar bark roofs, with only a solitary frame house to be found in the town. The Walk-In-The Water, the only passenger steamboat plying the waters of the Lakes had entered service only three years earlier, and would meet its end in a violent gale near Buffalo in October of the year of EB’s arrival. There were but three or four other ships, mostly British, carrying freight on the lakes.

EB was an industrious young man, trapping muskrats as a way to earn pocket money. At the age of 12 or 13, he went with his father to Marine City where he began his maritime career as a cabin boy aboard a small schooner, owned by his uncle, bound for Mackinaw City and back.

In 1826, Captain Sam set off for New York City by way of Buffalo and the newly completed Erie Canal aboard the 30-ton St. Clair. In Buffalo, he lowered the little schooner’s masts in order to clear the bridges, and continued his way along the canal with his cargo of fur, potash, and black walnut for gun stocks. In so doing, Sam's St. Clair became the first vessel originating in the Great Lakes to appear on the Hudson River. Suddenly, the cost of shipping goods to the East Coast from the formerly isolated Michigan Territory dropped from about $120 per ton to $4.

EB went to work for his Uncle Sam as a clerk when he turned 21 in 1833. Meanwhile, Sam’s reputation having already been established, a succession of increasingly larger sail-driven, then steam powered vessels slid down the ways of his shipyard in Marine City, as the Wards came to dominate shipping on the Lakes: the Marshal Ney, Huron, General Harrison, Champion, Detroit, Franklin Moore, Samuel Ward and others. Of these, the Huron (the ship in which EB earned his Captain’s title) was one of the first steel hulled boats on the Lakes. The General Harrison was the first vessel in which EB was personally invested. The Samuel Ward was the first steamboat to touch the waters of Lake Superior after being carried across the St. Mary’s River portage on rollers prior to the opening of the Sault Locks in 1855.

807 Fort Street - One of the first mansions in Detroit 

At his uncle’s shipyard, the young Ward established himself as having a keen head for business and quickly rose through the ranks to become a partner. In 1837, he solidified his claim to his uncle’s fortune by marrying Sam’s niece Mary Margaret McQueen. The couple’s home at 807 Fort Street – near the current site of Wayne County Community College’s Downtown campus and Fort Street Presbyterian Church – was one of the first mansions in Detroit, and a showcase for Ward’s immense wealth. Its amenities included such things as a conservatory large enough to contain several fruit trees.

In the 1830s, Henry Schoolcraft – a man responsible for identifying a great many of the mineral-rich lands in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and elsewhere in the old Northwest Territory – was transported to the UP aboard a Ward-owned vessel with Captain Sam in charge. So, knowing what is known about EB, it’s hardly surprising to know that he was shortly thereafter followed in Schoolcraft’s wake, acquiring lands containing rich deposits of iron ore. After all, Ward was a good businessman, and reducing your costs of raw materials is good business.

Samuel and EB continued to tighten their control over Great Lakes shipping throughout the 1840s, and began diversifying in a big way in the ‘50s. EB was a major financial backer behind the Sault Locks, which, in 1855, opened up Lake Superior (and the vast riches of the upper northwest) to shipping from the lower lakes. Unfortunately for Sam, he died in 1855 and wouldn’t witness the sea change wrought by his nephew.

For EB, the death of his Uncle Sam marked his coming out as an industrialist. He reportedly posted armed guards at Sam’s house, denying entry to any other family members, while he consolidated both his and Sam’s fortunes, making EB the richest man in the Midwest, and a force to be reckoned with. One of his first acts as a sole proprietor was to relocate his base from Marine City to Detroit.

Prior to Samuel’s death, EB and a group of investors for $44,000 purchased the 2,200 acre farm of John Biddle – an Army officer during the War of 1812 and a former Detroit mayor – where, on December 12, 1854, he established both the Village of Wyandotte and the Eureka Iron Works.

Within the next decade Ward began producing the first steel in the United States using the Bessemer process at the Eureka Works. In 1865, he established a second rolling mill in Chicago, and then a third in Milwaukee in 1868. Among his many American firsts, Ward was the first to produce steel rails for railroads.

During this period as well, EB began acting on his plans in a big way to supplant the industrialized East by making over the Midwest into the industrial heartland of America. He began logging operations, first in Lake County on Michigan’s west coast, and branching out into other areas. He used the sawdust from his mill in the Saginaw Valley near Lake Huron to produce the steam needed to pump salt from the mine he owned nearby up the 2,000-foot shaft to the surface where it could be processed. Production from this mine would amount to 823,000 barrels in 1873.

By 1870, the former cabin boy was producing silver from a mine in Lake Superior and the first plate glass produced in the United States from his American Plate Glass Company in Missouri. Of course, to get all of his products to market there was the Pere Marquette, a struggling railroad he rescued from bankruptcy, and for which he was made its president in 1860.

During EB’s seafaring days, he developed a keen interest in weather patterns and things meteorological in order to deal with the very real threat of severe storms on the Lakes. On February 9, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a joint resolution of Congress that authorized the Secretary of War to establish a national weather service at Chicago. The resolution specifically called for “taking meteorological observations at military stations in the interior of the continent and at other points in the States and Territories…and for giving notice…of the approach of force of storms.” That service, which evolved into the National Weather Service within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is a direct descendent of the system employed by Ward.

But even for Eber Brock Ward, the man with a real Midas touch, not everything was golden.

The Captain experienced a rare setback during the Civil War when he attempted to jumpstart the sugar industry in Michigan, but failed to convince farmers to embrace the sugar beet as a cash crop. Ironically, it would be the need to find new uses for Michigan’s thousands of acres of forest lands, clear-cut by Ward and others, that would provide the incentive to establish Michigan as the sugar beet capital of the world.

On the morning of Saturday, January 2, 1875 it all came to an end.

EB had just completed an article he planned to publish and distribute when he was called to leave his office. The article, “History Repeating Itself,” addressed “the currency question.” Detroit and the rest of the United States, after all, were caught in the devastating grip of the financial Panic of 1873. Later that morning, at around 10:45, according to his own Detroit Tribune, “Capt. Eber B. Ward suffered an attack of apoplexy while walking on the west side of Griswold street, between Larned and Jefferson avenue, and in front of the banking office of E.K. Roberts. He was carried into Mr. Roberts’ office by Mr. R.W. Fing, who was behind him and Drs. D.O. Farrand, J.A. Brown and H.E. Smith were soon in attendance. It was found, however, that he was beyond resuscitation, and the indications all were that death followed the loss of consciousness almost instantaneously.”

At the time of his death, Eber Brock Ward was a multimillionaire, the richest man in Detroit, and the Midwest. His estate was estimated to be worth $7 to $22 Million, the current equivalent of about $146 to $460 Million. Of this total were included $2 Million in real estate; $2 Million in his steel mills in Wyandotte, Chicago, and Milwaukee; and somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000 in his shipping fleet. So diverse and vast were his business interests – spread out over several states between Lake Superior and the Gulf of Mexico – it was said that his death profoundly effected virtually every city of any size in the Great Lakes region.

As you might expect, the will was challenged. EB’s children from his first marriage charged that his “brain had been weakened by a paralytic stroke” in 1869, and that “he was a thorough and credulous believer in spiritualism, and that the making of the will had been procured by undue influence, exerted…by his second wife, through mediums…she had hired to impose upon her husband by supposed spiritual communications…” Catherine, the second Mrs. Ward, countered that “Capt. Ward was in full mental vigor…” and according to The New York Times “that Capt. Ward’s researches into spiritualism were made in a spirit of investigation, and that he was profoundly interested and did seek to apply all kinds of practical tests to revelations of the mediums, but that he did not follow mediumistic advice in business matters unless corroborated from material sources…”

The jury was reportedly split eight-to-four in favor of the children from his first marriage, but were unable to reach a unanimous verdict about the Captain’s mental health. When all the smoke and dust had cleared, however, the estate yielded a less than expected amount of about $10 Million (currently worth about $210 Million). 

It probably comes as no great revelation to learn that the ruthlessly trailblazing, successful businessman that was Eber Brock Ward was a lousy family man. EB’s womanizing (he has been described by some as a serial adulterer) is the reason given for the dissolution of his marriage to Captain Sam’s niece, Mary, in 1869. His marriage to Catherine Lyon – a woman young enough to be his daughter – took place only two months after the end of his divorce from Mary.

Overall, his children displayed a disquieting tendency toward bizarre, even irrational, and eccentric behavior. At least two of his sons were found legally insane and institutionalized. Eber Jr., his son from his marriage to Catherine, left his first wife for her maid. “Ah yes,” the spurned wife reportedly said, “she was the best maid I ever had.

EB’s only child to achieve any kind of success on her own was his youngest daughter, Clara, also by Catherine. Clara became a genuine princess, but then exhibited behavior considered outrageously eccentric and shocking Victorian and Edwardian times in which ladies were expected to maintain a certain decorum.

The S.S. Eber Ward, 1888-1909

Currently, EB’s namesake ship, the Eber Ward is one of the most popular destinations for shipwreck divers in the Great Lakes. A steam barge constructed at the Bay City facilities of the F.W. Wheeler Shipbuilding Company in 1888, the Eber Ward settled on the bottom in 140 feet of water after plowing into pack ice in Lake Michigan in 1909 not far from the present site of the Mackinac Bridge.

Sources:

Ward, George K., Andrew Warde and His Descendants 1597-1910 – Ahrens, Ronald; "Captain of Industry; DBusiness; January-February 2012 – Bragg, Amy Elliott, Hidden History of Detroit; The History Press, Charleston SC; 2011 – Bragg, Amy Elliott; “The Night Train: The princess, the gypsy and the cake; September 2, 2011 – Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library – Detroit Historical Society – Detroit Free Press; "Death of Captain E.B. Ward"; January 3, 1875 – Detroit News; "Capt. Eber Ward's portrait recalls rich saga of early industry;" June 29, 1952 – Detroit Tribune; "He falls dead in the street…"; January 4, 1875 – Eber Ward, 1888-1909, Great Lakes Underwater – Elmwood Historic Cemetery.org – Gadbois, Robert S.; The Seabird: The Ward Empire – Henley, Ronald L., “Sweet Success…The Story of Michigan’s Beet Sugar Industry, 1898-1974;” Michigan Department of Natural Resources – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service – PPG Industries – GreatLakesUnderWater.com – Passante, Anna, "Eber Brock Ward, Midwest captain of industry;" Bay View Compass; July 1, 2010 – “The Ward Will Case;” The Michigan Lawyer; 1875 – “The Ward Will Case,” The New York Times; November 11, 1875 – Warnes, Kathy; Definitely Downriver: Wandering Wyamdotte with Eber and Samuel Ward – Warnes, Kathy; Maritime Moments: Eber and Samuel Ward -- Captains of the Great Lakes Shipping Industry; December 15, 2011 –  Wikipedia – Wyandotte.org – Zoom Info.com