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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center in Duluth is open free to the public.
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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
A mini-mariner tests the wheel in the pilothouse display.
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Photos by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Phil Bencomo
The Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center opened in 1973 in a Canal Park that hardly resembled the Duluth tourist hub it is today.
Nestled beside the Aerial Lift Bridge, the visitor center was then neighbored by Jeno Paulucci’s Chun King factory, a junkyard and a bevy of construction-related businesses, says Patrick Labadie, the center’s first director. “There was virtually nothing that would attract tourists at all.”
Within a few years, the center was averaging more than 400,000 visitors annually, buoyed by boatwatchers who finally had a hangout. As the center celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, it’s one of the most-visited attractions in the Lake Superior basin and is an anchor of a hopping Canal Park. In recent years, annual visitation has even topped half a million.
Free to the public, the Maritime Visitor Center was “a new venture” for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, says Pat, who retired in 2000. It melds a visitor resource, a museum and the living history of a working port.
Just steps from Duluth’s ship canal, the 10,710-square-foot structure houses meticulously detailed model ships, interactive displays and maritime artifacts, such as the 5th Order Fresnel lens that once illuminated the Inner Range Light on the canal’s south pier.
A replica pilothouse, engine room and cabins with life-sized mannequins harken to life inside the vessels – past and present – that glide by in the canal.
The facility also features a lecture hall and a film screening area. The center hosts school groups on field trips, as well as a series of evening programs for adults.
Today the center has a staff of five, all considered park rangers – Beth Duncan, Kevin Gange, Mary George, Denise Wolvin and Thom Holden, the current director (and who will retire this winter). They help to prepare exhibits, maintain the vessel schedule for boatwatching visitors, act as tourism ambassadors at the reception area and “keep the facility fresh,” says Denise, “so that people who come regularly don’t see the same things over and over.”
A friends-of group, the Lake Superior Marine Museum Association, supports the center with fundraising events like Gales of November, an annual two-day celebration of the Lake’s maritime heritage (including a gala sponsored by Lake Superior Magazine). LSMMA also operates the gift shop and works closely with the staff to acquire and preserve maritime artifacts.
In fact, the collection of records, logs, images and paper documents grew so large that, even with the space afforded by a 1979 expansion, the center handed off those archival resources in August 2000 to the Jim Dan Hill Library at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. There, the Lake Superior Maritime Collection now has its own archivist and special storage and access spaces.
The center’s interactive displays also hold up to handling. Among the first exhibits, a favorite of Pat’s was one that shows how much cargo a freighter ship can carry, not just measured in plain-old tons, but illustrated by real-life goods to which kids could relate, such as loaves of bread. “It was fun,” says Pat.
A more recent weather exhibit lets visitors find out real-time conditions and maritime activity. One of the newest exhibits is about the wrecked freighter Thomas Wilson, still submerged near the ship canal.
“The visitor center plays a vital role not only in preserving maritime heritage but also in sustaining interest and enthusiasm in the port and shipping for generations to come,” says Adele Yorde, public relations manager at the Duluth Seaway Port Authority.
Launched last year, a self-guided cellphone tour offers up, at the dial of a number, information about Canal Park maritime landmarks, from the lighthouses to the retired tug Bayfield that rests just outside the museum’s front doors. Thom hopes the phone tour will connect with a younger audience, and plans to expand that tour and other electronic exhibits.
Gene Shaw, director of public relations at Visit Duluth and former LSMMA board member, says, “It’s a great place for visitors to see the history of the industry, to see what Canal Park was like before it was today’s Canal Park.”
Pat ran the visitor center for 27 years, during which time Canal Park was transformed from what Thom calls “a metals recycling/industrial area” to a booming tourist destination. The visitor center has been a major contributor to that change.
Before the center opened, Pat says, the park “didn’t have the attractions or the parking to draw visitors. … People would watch the ships, but it didn’t cater to tourists at all.”
He likes to joke that the center was, more than anything else, built for its restrooms. But truly, he says, “they were much utilized. There wasn’t anything to accommodate the visiting public.” (Or the visiting famous, like the late Sen. Paul Wellstone. “I met him one day standing next to me at the urinal,” says Pat.)
In its early years, the visitor center’s location next to the canal and indoor, public facilities drew more than just tourists, says Pat.
“A lot of the girls spent lots of time at the museum waiting for the ships to come in, or waving and throwing kisses as ships went out,” Pat says.
He remembers watching one lovebird wave forlornly to her fiancé, leaving on a ship that wouldn’t return for weeks. The departing vessel motored away, passing a ship approaching the harbor. As the incoming ship neared the canal, the woman ripped off her wig, waved excitedly and said to Pat, “Here comes my other fiancé.”
That seamy side of Canal Park was wiped clean years ago. It’s a family vacation spot today, the heart of tourism in Duluth. The revitalization of Canal Park, Thom says, “was happening when I came in 1977. [The center] started getting about 400,000 people a year. And that was something that businesses could take to the bank.”
Grandma’s Restaurant boomed after opening in 1976, new shops and restaurants moved into the neighborhood, the visitor center finished an addition that more than doubled its size, and “it all blossomed in the mid-‘80s,” Thom says. “We’ve all worked together to change the appearance and the feeling about Canal Park, to making it a destination,” one that tens of millions have visited over the last 40 years.
The Maritime Visitor Center was there through it all. “It’s a special place to work,” Thom says, “and this harbor is really special, too.”