The Acacia: Sixty-Two Years on the Great Lakes

The buoy tender moored at Manistee is one of thirty-nine one-hundred-and-eighty-foot seagoing tenders built for the Coast Guard between nineteen forty-two and nineteen forty-four. The Acacia was launched on April seventh, nineteen forty-four, commissioned that September, and spent nearly her entire sixty-two-year career on the Great Lakes, servicing navigational buoys, breaking ice, and responding to maritime emergencies. She towed a disabled freighter blocking ship traffic in nineteen fifty-six and rescued sixteen people from a foundering vessel in nineteen seventy-one.

After decommissioning in two thousand six, she sailed under her own power to Manistee in two thousand nine and joined the museum fleet at the SS City of Milwaukee, herself a National Historic Landmark. Together the two vessels tell the story of a working inland sea that the rest of the country tends to forget is an ocean in everything but name.