Shotline Diving – Great Lakes • Builders Directory
Shipbuilders of the Great Lakes
The Great Lakes weren’t just a shipping corridor — they were a shipbuilding engine. From Kingston yard traditions and Oswego schooner work, to Cleveland steel, Collingwood lake boats, Detroit powerplants, and Port Huron tugs, builders shaped the vessels we dive today.
This page is Shotline’s “yellow pages of the lakes”: a working directory of shipyards and builders, wired into the wreck archive so you can move from builder → vessel → wreck without losing the thread.
System Snapshot
Directory: Builder profiles • Great Lakes focus • Cross-links to wreck records as the archive grows.
How Builders Connect to Wreck Research
Every yard had fingerprints: frame spacing, fastening styles, rig standards, powerplant choices, plating patterns, even how a hull “reads” underwater. When a wreck is unnamed, damaged, or missing registry context, builder clues often do the heavy lifting.
Shotline uses builder pages to keep that context close to the dive record — so the archive isn’t just “where a wreck is,” but what it was and how it was made.
- Identity support: construction cues help confirm or narrow vessel IDs.
- Industrial context: ties wrecks to timber, ore, grain, coal, canal, and passenger eras.
- Interpretation: explains “why this looks different” when hull details don’t match expectations.
- Time & tech: tracks progression from wood and iron strapping to riveted steel and welded seams.
A good way to think about it: builders are regional dialects. The more you learn them, the more a wreck tells you where it “grew up.”
Yellow Pages Playbook
- Pick a builder you see often in the wreck list.
- Open the profile for yard history + common vessel types.
- Jump to wreck pages and compare construction cues across losses.
- Use references to validate build data when sources disagree.
Research Note
Builder names can be messy: mergers, yard renames, subcontracted hulls, and “built at / completed at” disputes. Shotline aims to capture the cleanest attribution with references — and note uncertainty when needed.
Great Lakes Builder Directory (A–Z)
A-Z directory of shipyards and builders in the Shotline archive. Use the jump bar to move quickly, or click a letter to filter down to only that section.
Jump A–Z (click a letter to filter)
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Builder
Calvin & Breck?
Builder: Calvin & Breck / Calvin Shipyard, Garden Island (Ontario) Builder at a Glance History & Operations The Calvin & Breck partnership sits in the middle of a much larger story centred on Garden Island, just off Kingston, Ontario. Timber merchant Delino Dexter Calvin began working out of the Kingston area in the 1830s and…
Next Step
Use Builders to Track Patterns Across Wrecks
Start with a builder you recognize, then open a few wreck pages and compare construction cues. When we finish wiring relationships, builder pages will also show “built by this yard” wreck lists automatically.
Shortcut
Jump to the Master Wreck Index.