Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1546270
DULUTHPORT.COM | 13 PHOTOS / Paul Scinocca PHOTO / Paul Scinocca The William A. Irvin ore boat and Victory Chimes schooner both had aims on Minnesota Slip in Duluth. The Irvin proved to be the lasting feature. She still serves as a museum ship, drawing visitors to Canal Park for tours of the vessel each year. William A. Irvin had just taken up residence as a floating tourist attraction, a homecoming the Port Authority magazine covered in the same 1986 issue. Jubie told the Minneapolis Star and Tribune he hoped the ship would become "as synonymous with Duluth as the Aerial Lift Bridge and Glensheen Mansion." The two vessels' fortunes sharply diverged. The Irvin remains in that slip today, a stately museum operated by the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center. She draws visitors in Canal Park each year, from summer walk-throughs to the popular Haunted Ship event in October. Her engine room even doubles as an education station each May during St. Louis River Quest, the decades-running field trip for sixth-graders sponsored in part by the Port Authority. Victory Chimes was not so lucky. After her arrival in Duluth, a bank foreclosed on her mortgage in less than a year, and by 1987 she became property of Domino's Pizza, which took her to Drummond Island, in Lake Huron off Michigan's Upper Peninsula, before returning her to the northeastern U.S. But her image endured at the Head of the Lakes. Adopted for Duluth's official city logo in 1986, the stylized tall ship represented the community for 21 years and still adorns Duluth Transit Authority buses. Victory Chimes sailed for years off the coast of Maine, eventually earning National Historic Landmark status and modeling for the 2003 Maine state quarter before a 2023 auction sale and a planned restaurant conversion that never came. Now 40 years after her dalliance in Duluth, the vessel has become a memory of a lost age, quietly at rest in another harbor. "Victory Chimes sailed for years off the coast of Maine, eventually earning National Historic Landmark status and modeling for the 2003 Maine state quarter before a 2023 auction sale and a planned restaurant conversion that never came."

