The story of Detroit / by George B. Catlin.

498

THE STORY OF DETROIT

498 THE STORY OF DETROIT

Milwaukee. At Ludington he established great lumber mills.
He built another lumber mill at Toledo to manufacture the
hardwood timber of Ohio. He also invested in iron mines. It
was his vessel which brought the first cargo of ore from the Jackson mine down the lakes. Out of that first shipment of Lake
Superior iron he had the walking beam and main shaft of a new
steamer, the Ocean, manufactured. In 1864 he installed a
Bessemer converter at Wyandotte and turned out the first
Bessemer steel manufactured in America. At the mills he had
founded in Chicago in I865 was rolled the first Bessemer steel
rail produced in this country.
Capt. Ward was a whirlwind of energy. He insisted on doing
the work of two men and gave himself no rest. His physicians
warned him that no man could keep up such a pace of activities,
but he scoffed at their warnings. When the Pere Marquette
Railway became virtually bankrupt he took hold of its affairs
and by use of his money, credit and business ability put the
concern on its feet. He had the vision to see that wrought iron
produced by the old process must give way to mild steel produced by either the Bessemer or the Siemens-Martin open
hearth method and urged his associates to transform the Wyandotte plant.
It was a critical moment. The change would involve the
scrapping of costly installations and replacements which would
cost more than a million dollars. While they hesitated Capt.
Ward fumed and went about speeding up his various enterprises. He established a shipyard at Wyandotte in I872, was
interested in several newspapers and a promoter of higher
education. He lived to see many of his enterprises on the way
to great success; to see the little settlement at Yankee Point
changed to Belle River, then to Ward's Landing and finally to
Marine City. One day the high pressure under which he lived
and worked caused the rupture of a blood vessel in his brain
and on January 2, I875, he died suddenly of apoplexy while
walking on Griswold Street. The home he had built on Fort
Street later became the House of the Good Shepherd. At the
time of his death he was beyond question the most enterprising