Did You Know? - Ticonderoga Part 2: “Pulling the Fires” and other work onboard

The VT Folklife Archive is full of amazing first-person accounts of everyday life in Vermont and New England–past and present. In this feature, we share these stories with you.

A postcard of the Vermont III and the Ticonderoga at the Champlain Transportation Company steamboat wharf in the early twentieth century. The photographer was facing north along the Burlington waterfront. (Courtesy of Special Collections, Bailey/Howe Library, University of Vermont)

This month, we continue our focus on the steamship Ticonderoga, currently in retirement at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT, where it portrays life onboard as it was a century ago, in 1923. Vermont Folklife is proud to have a collection of interviews of many of the people who lived and worked on the Ticonderoga during its 47-year life on the lake between 1906 and 1953. Running a large steamship required finely-tuned systems, and many of the interviewees talk about these systems, which they used to operate the ship. This month we feature the voices of Jerry Aske, Dick Derry, and Dick Adams, recorded in interviews with VT Folklife founder Jane Beck in the late 1990s.

Dick Derry spent many summers living and working on the Ti as a young man. Here, he shares his description of the communication system that existed between the pilot house and the engine room:

Dick Derry: The communication system was crude by today standards, but actually they used a speaking tube from the pilot house to the engine room. And when you were coming into port, they could communicate, the engineer and the pilot or the captain, could communicate through this tube. The first thing you did was blow into it. And when you did, there was a whistle sound that occurred so you knew somebody wanted you on the tube. The engine control was done by a system of bells. And two bells meant, you know, stop the engine. Three bells meant reverse, one bell meant forward. Six bells meant forward, half speed. I don't remember what the heck the bells were. But, there was a method where these bells were rung from the pilot house or from either of the catwalks that extended out from the pilot house. And normally when the boat was coming into the dock, the captain was out on the catwalk on the side that you were coming up to the dock. And he could ring the engine room from that position as well as from the pilot house. So that was the communication method.

Dick Adams grew up watching his father working on the boat as a fireman, and later was hired himself as a deckhand, then later as a fireman. Here, he continues the description of the bell system of communication, and the interplay between the pilot and the engineer:

Dick Adams: Well, fortunately there was a, on the wall of the bulkhead, I'll start using ship terms here. On the bulkhead in the engine room, there's a list of things to do for like a, one bell indicates stop, and two full- speed or, you know. So you had to, we had a list there to look at, and I, you had the bell, the gong they called it and the jingler, and a combination of the two would tell you whether it was half-speed ahead, half-speed a stern or whatever. I wouldn't know now unless I looked at that chart again. I couldn't give you the answer to that. But, at that time we, or I knew what, you know what they all meant. Coming into the dock was a tricky situation for the pilot and the engineer because the pilot couldn't see the dock from the pilot house. He had to go out on the bridge, right out on the end of the bridge, where he could look down and see the dock. He'd point towards the dock wherever it might be, and he usually rang for a stop. And then he'd walk out on the bridge and control the boat from out there, using the engine to slow it down and back it up whatever.

Jerry describes the artful handling of the boat by engineer Stanley Value to Jane Beck:

Jerry Aske: I wish I had been around to see that operation. But, it was wonderful to watch Stanley Value operate that engine. I mean he'd get a signal from the bridge, when we were docking for instance. And he knew just when to push down on that lever or raise it and watching the crank indicator to know which side of the, whether the piston was up or down. Because if it ended up down, there was no way that you could get it off the bottom dead center without going, actually out into the paddle boxes, and taking rope falls, and pulling that paddle around to get the crank off of bottom dead center. I mean it was, it would take a long time. So, the engineer had to know exactly where that piston was at all times, and yet be able to respond to an order from the bridge which was just bells. So, he had to know the signal system, too. And it was a delight to watch them. I would always try to go down there when he was coming into port. As long as I could, of course then I had to go handle the lines but just to watch him getting ready and so forth.

Jerry goes on to talk about the father/son team of Captain Alanson Fisher ("Cap") and Marty Fisher, and their interaction with him as a young deckhand:

Jerry Aske: Usually, Marty was at the helm. And Cap would come down to, actually to my position on the quarter deck, and guide me in case I made a mistake, because I was handling this spring line. And usually that's the way it went, he'd kind of circulate around the boat, and glad hand and of course be there for docking and undocking. And Marty would be at the helm and sending the signals from the bridge to the engine room and so forth. But the thing I remember the most about them other than just that they were good friends, was how nonchalant they were about some pretty ticklish situations that we got into. I mean, leaving Westport one time in a, in an adverse wind. And they sprung out as far as they could, but we got underway, heading south, and we had to clear Split Rock Point, and we kept getting closer and closer, because the wind was pushing us in, we couldn't, we hadn't gotten up enough speed yet. It didn't seem to phase them, they, the two of them just kind of laid back and we got by the point, we sucked an awful lot of water off that beach, I'll tell you, because that's what happens, a displacement hull like that. And after we went by, we flooded the beach because the water that we had sucked off, all went back up the beach again. And going through the bridge up to St. Albans, going in, I mean very, very small passage going through there, we didn't hit anything, it was just, they were just as cool about it as if they were out for a Sunday drive. Yeah. Nice people.

Early twentieth century image of the Ticonderoga leaving the warf in Port Kent, NY.

Because the Ti was a coal-fired steamship, a big part of the daily work was managing the fires. One of the highlights for passengers on the Ti, or for those on shore watching her pass by at the end of the day, was when the crew "pulled the fires," sending a shower of red-hot coals off the ship, creating a nightly display not unlike fireworks. Here, Dick Derry explains to Jane Beck how this worked:

Dick Derry: At the termination of the day whether it's putting the boat away from ferry boating or whether it's coming back from an excursion, whatever the case is, the fires in the boilers had to be, the term was "pull the fires." That consisted of the firemen reaching into those great long boilers with long shovels, scooping up the hot coals and throwing them into a hopper that was mounted on the rear bulkhead where the pole bunkers were. And it was kind of a big hopper arrangement and they threw these hot coals in there. There was water flushing out this, so it would take these hot coals and it would eject them through a large pipe and throw them out of the ship with a great deal of force. And so you would have this stream of fire that would be exiting the ship, and at night, it was particularly startling to see this. And you know, of course that was another time you trimmed the boat because all the people run to that side of the boat to watch this fire come shooting out of it. And the process would last, it would probably take 15, 20 minutes to pull the fire. The chief engineer's job was to sit on the ladder which had been hauled up and locked into place, and he could look into this hopper and his job was to break up any clinkers or chunks of coal that weren't flushing out of the hopper. He had a long steel poker kind of thing. And 'cause otherwise the firemen would miss the hopper and now you got hot coals on the deck. It wasn't a question of a fire or anything because everything was metal in that area, but these guys were working down there and you're standing on hot coals. It's bad enough to reach in with these great long shovels. And how they did it, I don't know. And I can recall them down there stripped to the waist on a hot July night, pulling fires and it was an exciting process all and all.

Dick Adams goes on to explain more about the process, and also talks about the residual evidence of those processes that can be seen by divers in Lake Champlain:

Dick Adams: And then at night when you come in, you pulled the fires, what they call, what we call pulling the fires. We'd get to Appletree Point, and if everything was okay, the steam was up and the weather just right, the chief would let us pull the fires from Appletree Point to Rock Point. And like I mentioned before, he'd pull everything out and you'd throw it in the hopper behind you, and a jet of water would blow it out the side of the ship above the waterline. So, at night it made quite a spectacular show. People used to like to watch 'cause all these hot coals would go shooting out the side of the ship. And anyway I did that, probably 90% by myself, I shoveled well over 20 ton of coal that day. And I guess I was pretty exhausted, I didn't realize how tired I was. And my father heard about it, and he got upset because he had done that, for, you know, a business when he was younger, and he knew what it was to, you know to work like that. And he came down and he brought me home for two days to get rest. But anyhow, I didn't think it was that bad. And, but that was, that was a long, long day. I mentioned pulling fires every night, I've heard from divers in the lake, I wondered what all the ashes were. There's a row of them, two rows, between Rock Point and Appletree Point. That's where we used to, not just me but all three years that's where they got rid of their ashes. When they, when they came into Burlington if they had anything to do, that's where they did it. So there's two rows out there in the bottom of the lake. I don't know what effect it has on the ecology, probably not that much now but we didn't, nobody ever thought of it at the time. But that explains the two rows of ashes out there. Yup.

The work of running a large steamship was clearly demanding. However, it was not all-work-and-no-play; the crew found time to have some memorable fun together. Next month, we'll share some delightful hijinks and mischief aboard the Ti, as well as an unsolved mystery!