Blake Ellis/The Independent

“The area between Detroit and Sarnia, I will tell you that was very busy,” says Author and Diver Cris Kohl.

He was talking about the rum-running scene along the St. Clair River. Kohl gave a presentation on Sept. 17, Rum Running on the Great Lakes, as part of the Bluewaterland Speaker Series at Lambton Heritage Museum. Kohl has written several books with his wife, Joan Forsberg, who is also a fellow diver.

Kohl called the period between 1920 and 1933 when prohibition was in place in the United States, the Rum War.

“It was easy peasy for rum runners to cross the river,” said Kohl, up to 1925. The United States Coast Guard started to mount machine guns on its ships in 1926, but of course the rum runners did the same, he said, making it much more dangerous.

“Sarnia was another place where there were a lot of ferry boats and a lot of people smuggling booze by the bottle into the United States,” said Kohl. This was especially the case after 1927 when the Liquor Control Board of Ontario was established. There were a lot of resorts along the St. Clair River in Michigan which wanted alcohol.

Up until 1925, the individual rum runners were making decent money along the St. Clair River, he says, until the small operation were pushed out by the gangs and organized crime.

Among some of the stories Kohl told was that of 29-year-old Rum Runner Sylvester Brown. Two law officers in Algonac, Michigan, surprised him and his partner one night. Brown shot 34-year-old Earl Roberts and was later tracked down to a barn in Port Lambton where he was arrested. He sentenced to 20 years in jail.

The Maude, a tug boat from Wallaceburg, was also active in rum running. It sank in 1922 at the St. Clair Flatts with 500 cases of beer aboard.

Regular sailors also got in on the action. Captain Robert Thompson saved his crew when his ship The Sport sank in Lake Huron. Thompson bought another tug, renaming it the Victory. By the late 1920s, he had turned it into a rum runner and it was seized on the St. Clair River.

Kohl said researching rum running is extremely difficult. Unless a rum runner is caught, very little is known about these activities. Historians rely on newspaper accounts or police reports.

Many bottles have been found at the bottom of the St. Clair River however if a diver finds a shipwreck is illegal to disturb it.