Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan: The History of the Ann Arbor Car Ferries by Grant Brown, Jr. (review)

112 MichiganHistorical 'Review the footnotes may prove useful to some future scholar or graduate student of immense patience and gende temperament. This book should probably be in some libraryand archival special collections, but it is largely unusable tomost scholars ofMichigan political history and would prove painful and confusing to a more general reader seeking to know more about the role of Polish Americans in the state's political history. John Radzilowski University ofAlaska Southeast Grant Brown, Jr. Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan: The History of the Ann Arbor Car Ferries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. 286. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Paper, $24.95. InNinety Years CrossingLake Michigan: The History of the Ann Arbor Car Ferries, Grant Brown, Jr., presents a case study of a transportation company that today would be called "intermodal." One element consisted of a conventional railroad that began at Toledo, Ohio, and ran northwest across Michigan. At the shore of Lake Michigan, the job became more complicated: fully loaded freight rail cars were transferred to specially designed ferry boats that had tracks at deck level. These "car ferries" then crossed to either northern Wisconsin or the Upper Peninsula. Their design and operation are the center of Brown's detailed account. After briefly sketching the company's somewhat shaky beginnings in 1892, Brown devotes the majority of the book to the numerous challenges the Toledo, Ann Arbor, and North Michigan Railway Company faced in running its ferries. Ships had to be designed both to transport rail cars bearing full loads and to survive severe weather. Because the company's founders pursued a year-round schedule at a time when most Great Lakes shipping stopped for thewinter, the car ferries also had to withstand punishing ice build-ups on the lake. Throughout his book, Brown focuses on the risks navigators faced because of this insistence on operating year round and from their general working conditions. Over the ninety years chronicled here, the author recounts numerous incidents ranging from fires, to capsized boats, to rail cars that broke loose from their moorings during particularly violent storms. Brown ends his story in the early 1980s, when a combination of insufficient capital for improvements, changes BookReviews113 in government regulation, and more efficient competition led to the company's demise. Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan contains potentially fascinating information about a litde-known regional transportation carrier in the United States, and Brown's enthusiasm for the subject is apparent throughout the work. Unfortunately, the book does not draw connections to larger contexts or debates in the history of transportation, business, or labor, even though thematerials here offer many opportunities to do so. Nevertheless, there is still a great need in the history of transportation for empirical studies on topics like this that would most likely otherwise remain overlooked. In this regard,Ninety Years CrossingLake Michigan makes a useful contribution to the growing body of such literature. Brown bases his account on extensive local history sources, government documents, and interviews. He also includes evocative contemporary photographs, many from private collections, which show the evolution of ship design and give a strong sense of the hazards faced by those who worked on these ships. Such materials are often difficult to access, and Brown is to be commended formaking them available. Although itwould benefit from amore analytical framework,Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan suggests many directions for further research about an important though understudied area in the history of transportation in the United States. It will particularly appeal to those interested in theGreat Lakes region and the role of transportation in its development during the twentieth century. Robert Buerglener, PhD Department ofHistory DePaul University, Chicago Brian Leigh Dunnigan. A PicturesqueSituation:Mackinac before Photography, 1615-1860. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Pp. 408. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth, $75.00. Although A PicturesqueSituation is a prominent part of thisbook's tide, thiswork is farmore than a picturesque volume. It is one of themost beautifully produced books that Brian Leigh Dunnigan has created and deserves the same type of recognition, prominence, and prizes that came this author's way with his previous volume, FrontierMetropolis, which focused on Detroit. Dunnigan's narrative, coupled...