By car or by boat there is no better vacation than a trip around Lake Erie. With Lake Erie Ports and Boats in Vintage Postcards, you can take that trip without ever leaving home, or use this postcard history as companion guide while experiencing the wonders or this Great Lake. From Buffalo to Port Colborne, and visiting ports in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and the Province of Ontario, author Sally Sue Witten takes the reader on a visual journey around Lake Erie. Early 20th-century history of the region is told using over 200 vintage postcards from the author's collection. Through the pages the reader will visit grand old steamers with overnight accommodations and smaller excursion boats that took vacationers to many lake resorts. Dock scenes showcase technological changes in loading and unloading equipment that enabled freighters to grow in size and capacity. Port scenes also include lighthouses and U.S. Life Saving Stations.

Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakestraces the evolution of the Great Lakes shipping industry over the last three centuries. The Great Lakes shipping industry can trace its lineage to 1679 with the launching on Lake Erie of the Griffon, a sixty-foot galley weighing nearly fifty tons. Built by LaSalle, a French explorer who had been commissioned to search for a passage through North America to China, it was the first sailing ship to operate on the upper lakes, signaling the dawn of the Great Lakes shipping industry as we know it today. Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakes is the most thorough and factual study of the Great Lakes shipping industry written this century. Author Mark L. Thompson tells the fascinating story of the world's most efficient bulk transportation system, describing the Great Lakes freighters, the cargoes of the great ships ,and the men and women who have served as crew. He documents the dramatic changes that have taken places in the industry and looks at the critical role that Great Lakes shipping plays in the economic well-being of the U.S. and Canada, despite the fact tat the size of the fleet and the amount of cargo carried have declined dramatically in recent years. Spanning more than three centuries, from LaSalle's voyage in 1679, through 1975 with the mysterious sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, to life aboard today's thousand-foot behemoths, this important volume documents the evolution of the industry through its "Golden Age" at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, with a downsized U.S. fleet that numbers fewer than seventy vessels.

A detailed and richly illustrated history. To create this unprecedented collection of photographs and essays, the authors spent years visiting museums and archives, and interviewed Lake Erie experts, from professional historians to longtime residents. The result is Lake Erie a remarkable portrait of daily life, industry and commerce on this dynamic Great Lake. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes and unleashed the financial potential of the American interior. The industrialists who located factories with ready access to raw materials soon became legends: Rockefeller, Henry Wells and William Fargo, Sherwin and Williams, Charles Brush and Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, B.F. Goodrich, Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse and Mellon. The book is divided into chapters covering: The lake's prehistory Early settlement Role in the American Revolution Economic boom from 1815 to 1880 High Industrial period from 1880 to 1945 History of dramatic storms, shipwrecks Role in the Underground Railroad and Prohibition Wealth of flora and fauna