NORTH BEND — Robert Banks investigated shipwrecks.

It’s a fact about Banks that few people may know. He was a marine surveyor along the Oregon Coast many decades ago with the San Francisco Board of Marine Surveyors. But that’s not where the story of Robert Banks begins.

It begins when two master shipbuilders became partners at the turn of the 20th century. It begins on the North Bend waterfront in the first years of the 1900s. And the best person to tell the story is Mary Granger, the shipbuilder’s daughter.

Robert Banks

Her dad was from Prince Edward Island off Canada’s eastern shore. He was born in this Canadian maritime province in 1870. He moved west with a wave of shipbuilders in the late 1800s.



“These people were artisans,” Granger said.

Banks went to the edge of the continent, to Seattle in 1900, to Alaska one summer and to San Francisco. There, he met Knute V. Kruse.

The Denmark native was educated in architecture in Germany. He left Europe and eventually settled into business in North Bend. He built three ships for Asa M. Simpson, before Simpson retired as his tall ships were replaced by steam schooners. Kruse built his own shipyard in 1902. It was located on what’s now vacant land next to the turn in U.S. Highway 101 on the change from North Bend into Coos Bay.

When Kruse met Banks in San Francisco, he invited him to become his shipbuilding partner in North Bend. It was 1905 and the steam schooner industry was picking up speed.

The shipyard

“The first year that my dad was here, it was a very bad winter. And, of course, all of the building is outside,” Granger said.

She resembles her dad. One photo she shared showed Robert Banks as an elderly man, but the family resemblance is quite clear. Boney shoulders. Their faces are angular, hers and his. There is the squarish jaw, strong nose and wide-set eyes.

Fortunately, Banks wrote his life’s memories, and it’s his daughter, 44 years after his death, who is sharing that story. She’s matching photos to his written words, compiling the family’s shipbuilding history for her children and great-grandchildren.

“I think of these people now. The special tie-in with all of this was the craftsmanship that went into this. These people were artisans. ... They brought all this expertise with them,” Granger said.

The first two ships built were the Wash-Cal-Ore, a two-masted gas schooner; and then the steam schooner Casco.

But one year into the partnership, the San Francisco earthquake hit.

“They couldn’t get any machinery or any supplies, and here they were with all these orders for ships to build. It was a traumatic beginning for them,” Granger said.

This, at a time when we were getting started was discouraging and results in a loss of the contracts. — Robert Banks

The builders

They survived.

The work was hard — under hot sun, in pouring rain and swirling winds.

In 1907, the Kruse & Banks Shipbuilding Co. moved onto the North Bend waterfront to the land where the casino is now.

When people think of life around Coos Bay back then, they tend to think of lumbering. Sawmills. Industrial bustle. Most people don’t think about the shipyards — not the five decades in the 1800s the Simpsons built the tall ships and the four decades in the 1900s Kruse & Banks built the wooden steam schooners, tugs and minesweepers.

“My husband described building ships ... like building an old barrel, because everything was a compound curve,” Granger recalled.

The lumber was air dried for up to a year. The planks were steamed when it came time to fit them to the curvature of the ship.

The hulls were made of Douglas-fir and white cedar planks.

They went into the woods to find trees with trunks in just the right crook. Those became the ships’ knees, that strengthened and stiffed the sides. They were anchored to the hull with decking laid on top. The sides were several thicknesses of timber, held together by wood pegs of locust, split and shaved by hand, and later metal pins.

Once the cracks between planks were caulked, each ship was painted.

These craftsmen, Granger said, also built homes on the hills around town.

In 1915, Mary Banks (Granger) was born to Robert and Margaret Fisher Banks, the year the Banks had a home built on Union Street above the North Bend waterfront.

But it was the craftsmen handwork in the huge steam schooners that made them proudest.

“I can still remember the smell,” Granger said.

The pitch.

Sweet sawdust.

“And then the hammering. When the ships were being built, there was always a lot of hammering, the whistles for the changes in the different shifts,” she said.

And the ashes would swirl up from the sawdust in the wigwam burners and settle down in the Banks’ garden.

World at war

Many of the West Coast’s ships sailed to Europe, with the onset of World War I.

“We had to replace them with ships that would be used in this country,” Granger said. “And so the orders came out for these very large ships, and at the time, they were also building five steam schooners at the shipyard.”

While the all-wood vessels were built in North Bend, once christened and launched, they went to San Francisco.

All the vessels built south of the Columbia River were towed to San Francisco for installation of machinery, and to finish up the hull and cabin work when the machinery was installed. — Robert Banks

The shipyard crews worked on vessels by day and expanding the shipyard by night. They built three massive sheds so shipbuilders could work out of the rain. Kruse & Banks’ yard crew went from 250 men to about 650 by 1916. There were threats in World War I, fears that ships would be burned. U.S. soldiers patrolled the yard day and night. In those days, another company opened a shipyard in Coos Bay.

“There was a contest going across the country for the building of these ships because they needed them very quickly,” Granger said.

But at war’s end there was a shortage of machinery. Everything was used up. There weren’t engines available.

The last schooners

Orders came in for two schooners to sail with the wind. Kruse & Banks went into the archives from the Simpson days and redesigned the ships, said West Coast maritime historian Steve Priske.

“Lo and behold, the two ships they built ended up being the last of the tall ships built on the West Coast,” he said.

They launched the five-masted K.V. Kruse in 1919 and the four-masted schooner North Bend II in 1921 (There were actually two others christened North Bend — one built by Simpson in 1877, and another by Kruse & Banks in 1917.)

These were to be the largest tall ships ever built on the West Coast, Priske said.

“The whole town usually came to the christening and it was a big occasion,” Granger said.

On April 17, 1920, it was a 5-year-old Granger who christened the steam schooner Ryder Hanify.

“They had a bottle of champagne that hung from the very top of the bow down. (It was) all tied crisscross with ribbon,” Granger said. “It was quite an art wrapping these. My aunt did a lot of it.”

The big steam schooners typically were launched from the stern, which was unusual. The crowd was always tense. Granger said one had to strike the champagne bottle quite hard to break it.

“If you missed it, it was bad luck,” she said.

A ship would rest on an angle on the ways, which were greased to make them slippery.

“There’d be a creak of the ship starting to move,” she said.

Great blocks of wood held it in place. As a ship was launched, the shipbuilders removed the blocks.

People came by the hundreds, if not thousands to the christenings. There were speeches and music, maybe the high school band.

Through the 1920s business slowed, Kruse & Banks built tugs, barges and fisheries patrol boats. Banks kept busy working as a marine surveyor. In 1936, K.V. Kruse died. One of his sons, Fred Kruse, stepped into the business, Granger said. Soon, the nation was blasted into World War II.

Orders flowed in. Through the war, Kruse & Banks would construct eight minesweepers and five steam tugs for the U.S. Navy, earning a certificate for exceptional accomplishment on behalf of the country.

But by the end of World War II, no more orders came in. The demand was for steel-hulled vessels. The wood shipbuilding industry came to an end. In 1946, Kruse & Banks sold the waterfront property to Weyerhaeuser.

Moving on

Robert Banks continued working as a marine surveyor. In 1948, his daughter, Mary, returned with her husband, Jack Granger, to North Bend, where Jack Granger worked as Banks’ understudy.

Granger remembers her father as one who valued family.

“He was really a very easygoing, friendly person,” she said.

There were times he took his only daughter to work with him. Once, when she was in high school, she recalled, they traveled together onto the North Spit to check on a shipwreck.

“In those days, you had to go by boat across to the Coast Guard station and then walk across the sand to the beach,” she said.

While he was an organizer and manager in business, he played at home. He loved canasta and bridge. And there was a parrot.

“This parrot that we got off of a Spanish ship took a great liking to my dad,” she said.

It talked and sang and picked up English quickly. Her dad liked to garden and apparently his parrot did, too.

“My dad would take him and put him on a lawnmower while he was mowing the grass,” she said. (It was a push lawnmower, and the parrot rode on the handle.)

Granger has shared her family’s photos and shipbuilding records with the Coos Historical & Maritime Museum. The North Bend museum already has a small exhibit on shipbuilding. The museum’s staff and board of trustees are raising money and working toward building a new museum on the Coos Bay waterfront. While the process isn’t far enough along to say what type of shipbuilding displays might be included, President Jennifer Groth said the museum will have more gallery space devoted to the industry.

Priske believes Coos Bay, Empire and North Bend’s shipbuilding recognition must come. The maritime historian said the area produced more tall ships in the 1800s than any other location in the United States.

We’ve “watched Florence and Bandon grow and attract people because they are on the ocean,” Granger said.

She feels Coos Bay and North Bend haven’t really accepted that there is something to stop people here. But with the rediscovery of the shipwrecked steam schooner George L. Olson on Coos Bay’s North Spit this winter, people here and from afar are clamoring to learn more about the local shipbuilding industry.  

“I think we’re gradually discovering ourselves again,” Granger said. “I think people are discovering what talent it took to do all this.”