Long a welcome sight to mariners experiencing trouble on Lake Michigan, the recently retired U.S. Coast Guard cutter Acacia should soon be familiar to strollers and tourists along the banks of the Chicago River.
The decommissioned 180-foot icebreaker and buoy tender was donated to the state of Illinois, which is working with Chicago and the non-profit, locally based American Academy of Industry to make it into a riverfront museum dedicated to the city’s rich maritime history.
Moored temporarily at Burns Harbor in Indiana, the 62-year-old Acacia is still outfitted with almost all its working gear–minus machine guns and ammunition.
“The Coast Guard sailed it in here, tied off and left it with us with the engine still running and food in the fridge,” academy president Dan Hecker said as he showed off the vessel on a recent Sunday afternoon after the deal was announced.
The boat is to be shifted soon to a Chicago location for the winter. Both the city and the academy would like to have the ship open as a museum by next summer, Hecker said.
Hecker, 46, said he and his brother, Marty, 40, founded the academy in 1995 with the goal of turning a vessel into a maritime museum. Initially, the group boasted more than 200 members. But after years of failed attempts to find a ship, the active number dwindled to “maybe a dozen,” he said.
“I was beginning to give the idea up when I got a call last April from a state official asking me if we would be interested in the Acacia,” Dan Hecker said.
Plans to sell the ship to an African nation apparently had fallen through, and Coast Guard officials, reviewing their options, pulled a letter from the academy from their files. By law, the Coast Guard could not convey ownership to the academy but arranged to do it through state officials.
City sees benefits
City officials see the Acacia as an asset in their efforts to spruce up the Chicago River’s image and are looking at several mooring spots, said Brian Steele, spokesman for the Transportation Department.
Ideally, he said, the ship would go along the river’s main branch, perhaps between Clark and Dearborn.
“The concept of the ship becoming a maritime museum is a very appealing one,” Steele said. “There are myriad issues that have to be settled in choosing a site for it, including easy public accessibility, making sure the ship does not disturb normal river navigation and incorporating it with city plans for a river walk.”
Plans are for much of the ship to be maintained as a time capsule, showing how it worked up to the time of its retirement.
“The initial primary artifact for the museum is the Acacia itself,” said Marty Hecker, a Coast Guard naval architect in Maryland. “It is an exceptional ship.”
Long tour of duty
The Acacia was one of the last of 39 oceangoing “180” tenders, known by their length, designed for the Coast Guard during World War II. Built in Duluth, Minn., the Acacia was commissioned Sept. 1, 1944, and named after the only Coast Guard tender ever destroyed by enemy action, sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by German torpedoes in 1942.
Manned by a crew of 50 sailors and officers, it spent most of its 62-year career based in Great Lakes ports. Before being retired in June from its last home port in Charlevoix, Mich., its main duties were breaking up winter ice for commercial shipping channels and maintaining more than 210 buoys, lighthouses and other navigational aids.
Its giant hoisting boom was used to pluck the big navigational buoys, weighing many tons, from the lake for repairs and then placing them back.
The Acacia sometimes was called into rescue work, going to the aid of disabled merchant ships and pleasure boats that were foundering or run aground in stormy weather.
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Some spaces in the ship–probably some of the crew bunk quarters–will be converted to areas for displaying historical artifacts, including permanent displays from the academy’s small maritime collection and items on loan from other museums.
“One of the nice things about the ship is that it is an excellent platform to focus on local, regional and national history,” Marty Hecker said. The museum will be organized to talk about lake transportation in relation to Chicago industries and will honor civilian and military maritime veterans, he said.
Beyond displays, Dan Hecker said, he wants the Acacia to be used by youth groups for overnights, letting kids learn in detail how ships work and what life is like aboard one.
He said he plans to develop a cadre of trained volunteers to keep the ship operational and seaworthy, particularly since he would like the Acacia to occasionally set sail on the lake.
“With a ship like this I think we will get more volunteers than if it were a museum with just static exhibits,” he said. “This is something like the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, where volunteers will get hands-on experience learning how to restore, maintain and operate the machinery of the ship.”
Nautical upbringing
Like his younger brother, Dan Hecker has a good deal of professional knowledge of seagoing vessels. A mechanical engineer, he said he spent more than 10 years at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington state overhauling Navy vessels from small ships to submarines, battleships and aircraft carriers.
The Heckers’ father was a World War II veteran and submarine crewman. As teenage volunteers, they helped to restore and maintain the USS Silversides, a World War II submarine moored at various Chicago docks from 1947 until the city lost it in 1987 in a political tug of war with Muskegon, Mich.
Dan Hecker said many of the Silversides volunteers were determined to get another historic ship for Chicago as a museum and helped found the academy in 1995 for that purpose.
“Normally, it can take two years or longer for a surplus ship to be conveyed to public use like this,” he said, “often after the ship has been stripped of much of its gear and put in storage for 5 or 10 years. We were lucky to get the Acacia in the condition it is in.”
Scott Boivin, 50, a parts manager for a Chicago manufacturer who said he served on the Acacia from 1976 to 1979 when it home-ported at Sturgeon Bay, Wis., volunteered to work with the ship when he read it was coming to Chicago.
“It becomes part of your blood after you spend 2 1/2 years on a ship like this,” he said. “Now I want to be a part of it and see if I can help it get going as a museum.”
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