CLEVELAND — For 80 years, they stood large over Lake Erie — massive machines stretching 100-feet into the sky and weighing 800 tons each. They are the metal monsters known as the Hulett Ore Unloaders.
The machines were the invention of a Clevelander, George Hulett, in 1898. They revolutionized shipping and steel production, reducing the time needed to unload a Great Lakes freighter from seven days to just a half day. Their massive buckets were capable of scooping 17 tons at a time off the ships.
At one time, there were 77 of them across the Ports of the Great Lakes, including 14 in Cleveland. But by the early 1990s, there was a new revolution — the self-unloading freighter, which essentially rendered the Huletts obsolete.
That's when their owner at the time, Conrail, who acquired the Huletts from the Pennsylvania Railroad, made the decision to shut these last four down in 1992.
There were immediate efforts to save the Huletts with a compromise reached in 1999 to dismantle them, scrap two and store two on Whiskey Island for possible future reassembly and display. Over the last 25 years, there have been court challenges and floated options for the pieces that still sit in their Whiskey Island resting place, but location and cost were obstacles that were never overcome.
The Port of Cleveland decided that the time had now come to move on.
"They've been sitting on our bulk terminal for 25 years, and the decision is that we can't wait any longer to move them off," said Port of Cleveland President and CEO Will Friedman. "We need to open that space up for business development for more cargo handling at the Port. And so we're moving in that direction and taking the steps necessary to get to that point."
For preservationists like Ray Saikus, "it is extremely disappointing," he said.
Saikus has worked for the last three decades to save the Huletts. The failure to restore them he said, marks both a loss to Cleveland's past and a tie to its present.
"The industrial leaders here, like Cleveland Cliffs, Sherwin-Williams, they really wouldn't be here without the Huletts," he said. "The Mather was designed specifically to be unloaded by the Hulett," he said of the Cleveland Cliffs freighter turned floating museum behind the Great Lakes Science Center. "Truthfully, the Great Lakes region prospered because of what the Huletts allowed into the steel mill. That's why all the steel mills were near them."
As for past court challenges, Friedman said the port has fulfilled those obligations.
"There was an agreement, that agreement has effectively expired," Friedman said. "There was a kind of time frame where we had committed to waiting, holding onto them while fundraising occurred. That ended back in 2021, and we were requested to continue holding on to them so they could keep trying to raise funds, and we did so since '21.
"So almost three years now we've essentially just sat on them and allowed for attempts at more fundraising."
The pieces will be scrapped, but a 60-foot arm and bucket will be saved though for a potential future display.
