1932 Quarantine Tug, etc.

Many thanks to Steve Seely of New Brunswick, Canada, for sending these photos and this story. Never heard of a “quarantine tug?”  Well, neither had I.  But here it is, launched at Bath Iron works in October 1932 as a tug for the US Public Health Service, christening with ginger ale–since it happened to be Prohibition era.  If you have 50 minutes, here’s a 1936 film from the US National Library of Medicine at NIH on the work of these vessels;  good references in the movie to Hoffman Island and Ellis Island.  I’d forward to about five minutes in for historical background;  quarantine tug activity, including clips of vessels like the one below, starts at about the six-minute mark.

Here’s some specs on the vessel: T. B. McClintic is “built of riveted Norwegian Steel (Charcoal Iron)… 60 feet, 10 inches in length overall with a 16.5 foot breadth and a 9.2 foot draft. At launching, [she] displaced 65 tons.  This single screw vessel with its engine–direct reversible Standard Motor Construction Company diesel engine with 100 horsepower … four-cylinder, eight-and-one-half- inch bore by 12-inch stroke weighing 13,475 pounds–turning a 50-inch diameter, 36-inch pitch bronze propeller at 350 RPM, cruised at an average of 10 knots.”

During her life as a quarantine tug, she operated out of Boston, Norfolk, and finally Baltimore, where she also performed some light ice breaking work.  The photo below shows her in Baltimore in the early 1960s.

In the early 1960s, she was sold at government auction and purchased by “City of Wilmington, North Carolina, to become the city’s new fireboat, she was completely rehabilitated by the Wilmington Iron Works in order to perform her new function. This included adding a full array of fire-fighting equipment, replacing her original 100 HP engine with a new Gray Marine 671 Diesel which increased her HP to 185, and installing a new Twin-Disc 4.5 to 1 reduction transmission. In addition, due to dangerous rust-pitting on each side of the bow, the forward steel plating was replaced. The conversion cost the city approximately $18,000. … Renamed Atlantic IV, she “was distinguished as the only ship that could sink the battleship USS North Carolina in one of her first services after conversion to a fireboat, when her hoses were used to fill the great ship’s bilge with water in order to settle her into her permanent berth in the Cape Fear River.”

From 1987 until the present, she’s been owned privately.  The photo below, taken by current owner Steve Seely, was taken in Baltimore in 2012. Here I quote Steve:  “I bought [her] in Baltimore in 2011 and brought it to New Brunswick, Canada in 2012.  I happened to pass through NY Harbor to take advantage of the lack of swells in Long Island Sound.”

He continues:  “The photo underway show it moving as fast as it’s Detroit Diesel will push it, just shy of 11 Kts.  It’s an official antique by your standards but that doesn’t mean it can’t work. I salvaged a sunken barge in St Andrews harbor this summer.”

And what identification does she sport on her stern?

Her original name and Bath,  Maine.  The tug’s namesake was ” a University of Virginia Medical School graduate and twelve-year veteran PHS officer, Thomas B. McClintic. In 1911, at the age of thirty-eight, McClintic was detailed to Montana to perform research on Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. In August of 1912, McClintic contracted the disease and died.”

The tug has its own website here.  The info quoted above not by Mr Seely comes from the application for her admission to the National Register of Historic Places, which makes for fun reading if you wish.

Because of the dimensions and certain missions of T. B. McClintic–boarding ships for quarantine purposes and ice breaking–this vessel is a forerunner of the WYTLs that will soon start to work the Hudson River ice chokepoints.  Click here for an unpublished magazine article I posted less than a year ago on the “extended cabin” sixth-boro WYTLs.

Steve, thanks much for writing.

I supposed you’ve read about the latest Bath Iron Works(BIW) vessel, but if not, check out the Zumwalt here.  Click here for previous mentions of BIW vessels on this blog.