The Lakehead Transportation Museum Society is turning attention to their next project.
During an announcement Wednesday, President Charlie Brown said that they are hoping to move and preserve a piece of Thunder Bay history.
“We kind of actually looked backwards a little bit, we had some other transportation artifacts in the city that we wanted to look at and we’re going to look at the James Whalen Tug,” explains Brown. ” So we would like to be able to bring the James Whalen from its location on the Kam River, and bring it over to our site and incorporate it into the rest of the artifacts we have here. Fix her all up, made her look good again, and then we can carry on and make things better.”
When serving Thunder Bay the James Whalen was involved in transporting lighthouse keepers, salvaging shipwrecks, participated in ship rescues, and more.
Brown went on to mention what it would take for this project to happen.
“It’s something really simple, all we really need is support from the community, and we especially need support from city council on this,” says Brown. “We do have plans on how to go about this, but we need to move forward, so we basically need city council to basically say yes, we’re in line with what you guys are interested in doing. Then we can certainly work with the city and move forward with the expansion of the property, and moving the tug over here.”
It is still unsure what the cost would be to move the James Whalen to the north side, though Brown concludes this would not be an expensive project for the city.
“There will be some costs, but I assure you it will not be hundreds of thousands of dollars to accomplish this task,” Brown stresses. “That certainly was the case with the Alexander Henry, we moved it over 900 nautical miles all the way up through the great lake system, so that one was a little pricey. This is not so far, this is only a mile or two up the waterfront here. Certainly we have the knowhow and the manpower to know how to do this in an economic fashion.”
The James Whalen Tug served Thunder Bay for 50 years.
