Christopher Columbus Smith was responsible for Holland boating giant Chris-Craft.

Smith was born in St. Clair County, Michigan, in 1861. In 1868, his family moved to Algonac. There, Chris and his older brother Hank started a duck hunting business. In 1874, the brothers built a rowboat to complement their business.

More:Grand Craft Boats jumps ship, leaving Holland to expand in Wisconsin

In 1884, Chris married Anna Rattray and opened a commercial boat house. In 1899, he became the village postmaster and, in 1900, he became president of the Algonac Chamber of Commerce.

And yet, speed boats became Smith’s passion.

In 1910, Smith met J. “Baldy” Ryan, a gambling financier from St. Louis, Missouri. Together, they formed the Smith-Ryan Boat Company — but they had to dissolve the company in 1913 when Ryan went bankrupt.

Smith formed the CC Smith Boat and Engine Company. In 1915, he sold an idea for a racing boat, Miss Detroit, to a group of businessmen. That led to championships, which led to orders. Needing capital, Smith sold a controlling interest in his company to another racing enthusiast: Gar Wood.

Smith and Wood had a falling out over boat designs. So, in 1922, Smith established the Chris Smith and Sons Boat Company. In 1922, they made four boats. In 1925, they made 111 boats. In 1926, they implemented mass production techniques learned from Detroit’s automakers and, like them, started selling their mahogany boats through franchise dealers.

August Landwehr, co-founder of the Holland Furnace Company, was one of their customers.

In 1929, the Smiths built 946 boats and added a cruiser to their line, outfitting it with a boarding ladder, berths, galley, wash basin, table, mattresses and bedding, table linen, glassware and silverware.

During the Great Depression, the Smiths reorganized their company as Chris-Craft and took on an outside investor. Sales rebounded in 1936. In 1937, before a month-long strike at their Algonac plant in 1938, the Smiths began looking at expansion sites.

In 1939, Chris-Craft introduced 115 models and purchased 22 acres of land in Holland to construct a 600-foot by 110-foot building. There, Chris-Craft produced its first luxury model: a 49-foot Runabout.

Christopher Columbus Smith died in 1939. His grandson, George Smith, became Chris-Craft’s first boat design engineer in Holland.

In 1941, Chris-Craft opened a plant in Cadillac, Michigan. In 1942, the U.S. War Department gave Chris-Craft a contract for Eureka-style Landing Boats; of the 725 ordered, the Holland plant built 295.

After the war, the Holland plant began producing “the average man’s ideal small cruiser.” In 1946, Leon Slikkers joined the company in the joinery department to help build those small cruisers. By 1951, Chris-Craft was producing 139 models of boats, including do-it-yourself kits.

In 1952, the Holland plant employed 650 workers — but it became unionized and the union called a strike. That encouraged Leon Slikkers, then an assistant supervisor, to build boats in his garage.

In 1955, Chris-Craft entered the steel-hull boat business by purchasing David Linn’s Roamer Boat Company. It also entered the plywood and fiberglass boat businesses. The next year, Leon Slikkers formed his own company: S2 Yachts.

In 1957, Chris-Craft moved its corporate offices from Algonac to Pompano Beach, Florida, and built a manufacturing plant there. In Holland, Chris Smith II oversaw production of 74-foot Roamer Yachts. In this era, celebrities like Katherine Hepburn, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley were Chris-Craft customers.

Then, in 1960, a conglomerate — NAFI — purchased Chris-Craft and created a subsidiary called Chris-Craft Industries. By 1968, CCI also included television broadcasting and other concerns.

In 1970, CCI closed its production facility in Algonac and stopped wood boat production in Holland. So, in 1979, to fill a void, Chris Smith II and Steve Northuis founded Grand Craft Boats to make wooden Runabouts.

In 1981, a group of investors — among them attorney F. Lee Bailey — purchased CCI’s boat division. In 1988, Outboard Marine Corporation purchased the boat division and, in 1989, closed the Holland plant.

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In 2010, Jeff Cavanaugh purchased Grand-Craft Boats and, in 2021, sold the business to investors in Genoa City, Wisconsin. Today, Holland's boating giant is Leon Slikkers’ S2 Yachts, parent company of Tiara Yachts. We will tell his story over the next two Sundays.

Information for this article comes from Jeffrey Rodengen’s "The Legend of Chris-Craft," Larry McDonough’s “About the Chris Crafts,” The Holland Sentinel, Forbes Magazine, MiBiz, Michigan Blue, The Chicago Tribune and Wikipedia.

— Community Columnist Steve VanderVeen is a resident of Holland. Contact him through start-upacademeinc.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Holland History: The man responsible for Chris-Craft boats