Great Lakes Engineering Works

The Great Lakes Engineering Works (GLEW) was a leading shipbuilding company with a shipyard in Ecorse, Michigan, that operated between 1902 and 1960.

[1][2][3] The GLEW again expanded in 1905 when it acquired the Columbia Iron Works in St. Clair, Michigan, and in 1912 when operations began at their Ashtabula shipyard in Ohio.

[5] Within three years of GLEW's formation, Detroit built fifty percent of the tonnage of all ships in the Great Lakes.

[6] The Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company of Milwaukee contracted the GLEW to build the first ‘super freighter’ thus putting them on the map.

Hugh McElroy, general superintendent of the GLEW stated that these contracts presented 1,300 new jobs and thereby tripling the company’s workforce.

[7] William Penn Snyder, president of Shenango Furnace Company of Sharpsville, Pennsylvania felt that the incorporation of GLEW ships would clearly change his smaller (by comparison) iron and steel industry into a leading competitor.

[9] The year 1925 marked a new technical era when GLEW built the 604 ft (184 m) SS William C. Atwater at the River Rouge site at the request of Wilson Transit.

4 (Hull #162,Ecorse) commissioned by the French government for the Paris, Lyon and Mediterranean Railway in 1916 was torpedoed and sunk in English Channel on December 27, 1917.

The Navy department appropriations bill for 1941 awarded Great Lakes shipyards government contracts worth almost ninety million dollars.

The shipbuilders met the increased demand by expanding and creating new ways to heighten production levels that resulted in the larger, deeper vessels.

The supply and demands were met but when peace came, the over-abundance of shipbuilding orders decreased and so too did the local economies of the once booming, small Great Lakes ports.

Foreign firms started producing cost-cheap ships therefore, the America steamship companies began dealing abroad.

On April 30, 1961, GLEW stockholders agreed to dissolve the shipbuilding giant and sell it to the Great Lakes Steel Corporation.