Port of Oswego 1

Many thanks to Ken Deeley for sending along these photos of the port of Oswego in 1890.  I’ll take the panorama below and divide it into three parts, left to right.

Yachts shown gathered below in Oswego for an event of the Lake Yachts Racing Association are (l to r) Oriole, Bison, Lotus, Lolantha, Yama*, Merle, Maud B, (unknown identified launch), Vreda*,

Nadia*, Cinderella, Loona, Gen. Garfield, Aileen*, Samoa,

Nancy, Bennett, Erma, Berve II, Kelpie*, and Alert.

* (from Royal Hamilton Yacht Club)

Ken writes:  “In 1884 Canadian and American yacht clubs on Lake Ontario formed a yacht racing association that consisted of four Canadian and American clubs.

They held what was called cruise circuit regattas and in 1890 Oswego was their destination, where my photo comes from  some unknown photographer who  took the assembled fleet American and Canadian assembled in the outer harbour  of Oswego.  The photo is about 14 inches long 4.5 high from a glass plate. The amazing thing is across the top of the page was glued diagonally the name of every yacht with the exception of the stern of the tug in the lower left.  HA, HA, you tug enthusiasts [are out of ] luck again unless you could name it for me.

The list of yachts has enabled me to name a lot of sailing yachts from other photographic  collections around the Great Lakes.   The American clubs were Oswego, Rochester, Buffalo, Crescent, and Sodus Bay.  Some of these clubs were not members of the LYRA but their yachts  raced anyway. Canadian  clubs were Royal Canadian, Kingston, Royal Hamilton, Queen City, and Toronto Yacht Club.”

The tugboat whose stern is shown above is likely Charley Ferris, built 1884 at the Goble Shipyard in Oswego and (?) abandoned in Duluth in 1932.

For more photos from the same collection, click here.

And finally, there was once a lighthouse, dismantled in 1932,  in the inner harbor of Oswego.   This photo would have been taken from the high ground over near Fort Oswego looking southwest.

For previous tugster posts featuring Oswego, click here, here and here.  There are others also if you type Oswego into the search window on the left side of the blog.

For more 1890s history of LYRA clubs, click here.