Graven In Stone

Then picture above is the result of looking around as I walk: a random building near our office was apparently the home of the Kerr Steamship Company. (Look closely at below the water-table for the lettering.) I’ve never heard of Kerr, but I’m really not familiar with the history of ship lines except for the most famous ones. As it turns out, Kerr was founded in 1916 but get a big boost the following year.

A lot of ships belonging to companies based in the Central Powers of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire went to neutral ports at the beginning of World War I. At that time, the US was neutral, and a bunch of ships from those nations sat in US ports, safe from the British navy. When the US entered the war in 1917, German ships in US ports were seized and Austro-Hungarian ships purchased. (It’s not clear to me whether the latter were purchased in a normal manner or forcibly purchased, i.e., seized with payment.) Kerr purchased a number of those ships, which were in private use for a brief period of time before being directed by the US armed forces. In other words, Kerr acquired a number for freighters cheap because of the war and then was compensated for their chartered use by the army or navy. A number of sources say that Kerr was the largest shipping company in the world in the 1920s, which is plausible given the destruction of European ships but that statement is not sourced and so is suspect as a fact. The company disappeared into a merger in 1994.

Unlike the famous lines I know a bit about, like Cunard or the Hamburg-America Line, Kerr wasn’t running large ships on the North Atlantic trade. It was mostly running smallish freighters to Africa and Asia. Here’s a dramatic painting of the SS Kermoor in 1919. Kermoor was an Austrian ship, built in England and acquired by Kerr in 1917, used by the US army and navy in 1918 and 1919, and then returned to Kerr’s control.

Kerkkoor was 378 feet long and 4800 gross tons, which means little to most people. To give a sense of scale, the boats currently used for the Staten Island ferry service are 310 feet long and 2800 gross tons; the Aquitania, the largest Cunard ship in the 1910s, was 900 feet long and 45,600 gross tons . The thought of going to sea in something roughly the size of a harbor ferry makes me seasick, although obviously people had no other choice until the late 1800s and still do so regularly today.