It happens to the best of us, right? You go into a store aiming to fetch a few groceries, and you leave with a few bags of kitchen staples and some brain fodder about ships. Right. Glad I'm not alone on that one. And I'm glad I had my ears open because otherwise I wouldn't have known about Blackbeard the pirate and Tom Sukanen. Blackbeard is a familiar name to most, but most are missing out on the compelling story of Tom Sukanen and his Great Depression prairie ship. Let me explain... It was an ordinary Saturday in the grocery store, albeit slightly busier as it was a Saturday after an all day snow shower. I found myself in front of the bananas attempting to select the right bunch when my ears detected something of interest. "...I think he was from Scotland, and he tore down the whole barn and house, built a ship, and left the country on it...". I momentarily forgot whether I wanted five bananas or six. The other person present in the conversation countered with their own tidbits of information, also ship related. "...the houses in New England built with stones from ships... they used to put the stones in the ships for weight, then they would offload them...used the stones to build houses." A comment was rattled off by one of their parties regarding the budding generation's lack of interest in history and knowledge. Being pressed for time with a few more errands to attend to, it took all my will power to refrain from entering this wildly attractive conversation. I tossed six bananas in the cart and moved on... but my brain was glued to the concept of turning your house into a ship and then back into a house again.
This burning curiosity quickly led to Queen Anne's Revenge. Back at the base station of internet access AKA home, a quick search for information on 'stones used to weight ships' pointed first and foremost to a website dedicated to a ship called Queen Anne's Revenge. Specifically this ship, of all the ships that sail the world wide web. Now, I know nothing of ships, other than that Hedgie's ancestors sailed to America aboard The Mayflower. And in another peculiar tie to Hedgie, I did a double-take when reading the ship's name. It's a well known fact to those who know that if there were to someday be a monster truck built in part or entirely by funding from Hedgie's book sales that it would be called "Hedgie's Revenge". It is really not as sinister as it sounds, with the name being only a jab at the non-believers who scoff at the improbability of unlikely glorious ideas becoming reality. That said, I didn't even tap the brakes and clicked right into the unknown world of Queen Anne's Revenge. Once the iconic flagship of Blackbeard the pirate, Queen Anne's Revenge now exists as a shipwreck off the southern North Carolina coast. It met its demise on a sandbar over 300 years ago and its captain, the infamous Blackbeard, followed not long after. These things I did not know when I woke up on this ordinary Saturday morning. If you are even the least bit interested in the ship or its pirate captain, I highly suggest visiting the Queen Anne's Revenge Project. The web page has compiled boatloads (yes, indeed) of information about the ship and its travels, plus what all has been discovered and retrieved from the ships watery grave. It even noted what sort of ballast stones were found in the ship. And since ship cargo constantly changed from port to port, it made sense that some of these ballast stones would need to be unloaded to balance the weight of the ship. This must be where the grocery store comment stemmed from, so I went from pirate tales to historical myth busting. My further searching landed me on Mary Miley Theobald's History Myth's Debunked site, where she lays out the evidence (or rather, lack thereof) that seemingly shoots down the idea of houses and roads being built with ship ballast stones. Although some structures do exist or are at least partially constructed with such materials, there appears to be no great influx of ballast built houses or roads. Her article found here makes a pretty fair case for ballast not being a widely used building block in early American communities. But what about later American communities, such as California's west coast? Could there be more truth to the multi-function of ballast? Not entirely satisfied with this one account of historical nay-saying, I switched oceans and explored my grocery store gossip on the other side of the country. Thanks to a book called Flint that I am currently engrossed in, which I picked up at the end of someone's driveway freebie dive a few years back, I straight away focused the sights of my next interweb search on San Francisco ballast block uses. I'd struck gold. Gold was, in fact, what led this quest for truth further inland, to Sacramento. They say that seeing is believing, and here was a sight to see, online or in person should you so desire. A photograph of a cobblestone ballast marker with an accompanying description placard, displayed in front of the American Merchant Marines Monument in Old Sacramento. In a brief summary of the marker's description, it explains that ballast was essential to ships that unloaded cargo in Sacramento, needing the additional weight to steady their ships for the return journey down the Sacramento River and finally to the San Francisco bay, where the ballast could be unloaded and used to help pave streets and work areas around the bay. The ballast used in this case was cobblestone quarried at Folsom and delivered by the railroad, and was appropriately nicknamed "Folsom Potatoes". Satisfied that there was indeed credibility to the produce department comment after all, I ended my search efforts for the first half of my ship query. Now that I had validated that streets had been built with Folsom Potatoes, I was onto the next and more outlandish grocery store declaration: The Scottish man who turned his house into a boat. Trying to search something that sounds like a headline in a sensationalist magazine turns up records that are, well, just that. Sensationalist stories and the lot. Until I found "Dreams in the Dust". This article written by Rick Book was buried about 6 pages into my search feed. As was I combing through headlines about millionaire couples building their dream boathouse, tiny houses on boats, and other such stories that while perhaps worth a read over coffee, were not bearing any resemblance to a Scottish man building a boat out of his house, something caught my eye. A boat being built in the prairies of Saskatchewan. This was also clearly not a contender for my specific search query, but sounded so interesting that I paused my scrolling and gave it a closer look. I clicked on the link. The picture of this "house boat" that went with the article further solidified my suspicions that this was not at all the grocery store yarn that was uttered over various strains of apples, as the picture was far too recent for the ship sailing era in which their fabled story seemed to have been born. But the yearning to know more about this Canadian field ship was too great to resist, and I began reading. In just a few sentences, I was hooked. Here was a tale of a man from Finland who was determined to not just build a ship - in the vast prairies of Saskatchewan, of all places - but to haul the ship to water and pilot it to the ocean with the intent to sail back to his homeland of Finland. In the middle of the Great Depression. It was the embodiment of the phrase, "You can't make this stuff up." The further I read, the more obvious it became that this story, which completely captivating, was not the scenario which I was looking for, which involved not someone just building a boat, but someone tearing down their house and barn to build said boat. This man was spending good money on steel and bolts and nails to craft his vessel. I began to retire the idea of someone building a boat out of their house to hearsay or a simple miscommunication of stories, when suddenly a particular sentence made me pause. I re-read it. "After he tore apart his barn, his granaries, and then his house for lumber, he moved into the hull of his ship." After he tore apart his barn, his granaries, and then his house for lumber. This was it. This was the story. It was real. The man wasn't from Scotland. He was from Finland. His name was Tom Sukanen. I finished reading the story, superbly narrated by someone whose family had grown up witnessing this marvel of determination in all its glory and gloom. It ends with a fitting quote from Chrystene Ells, director of Sisu (a film about Tom Sukanen): Defeat is not failure; it’s when you don’t follow your heart. Tom's ship now has a loving home at the Pioneer Village and Museum just south of Moosejaw. Share stories. Spread knowledge. Talk to strangers in the grocery store. You just might learn something. You can read Dreams in the Dust here. *********************************************************************************************** Note: Dreams in the Dust lives in all its greatness at the web home of Canada's History, a non-profit society dedicated to preserving and sharing the country's diverse and compelling stories of years past. If you're hankering for a museum trip but want to skip the travel and costs, pop over to Canada's History for a browse that could last you the entire day, without any tired feet or crowds.
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Tales of Douglas Furr (and his friends)narrated by Crissy Clossin Archives
February 2024
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