Max McKee
President, The Mart Dock — Muskegon’s Deep-Water Port
Muskegon, Michigan
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Running a deep-water cargo port on Muskegon Lake — and the two museum-piece vessels tied up alongside it.
Role
Max McKee is president of West Michigan Dock & Market Corp. — universally known in Muskegon as the Mart Dock — and an executive with Sand Products Corporation. The dock is a 40-acre commercial marine cargo facility at 560 Mart Street, on the shore of Muskegon Lake, a short walk from downtown.
The role is operational rather than ceremonial. A terminal of this kind runs on berth scheduling, cargo handling capacity, equipment maintenance, seasonal layup contracts and the long-cycle capital decisions that keep a nineteenth-century industrial site usable in the twenty-first.
The property
The site’s value comes from a combination that is hard to reproduce: depth, shelter and connection. Muskegon Lake reaches Lake Michigan through a dredged channel, so full-size Great Lakes vessels can come alongside loaded, in a natural harbour protected from the weather that closes exposed berths.
There has been a commercial dock on this ground since the late 1800s, when the property was held by the Goodrich Transportation Company. The West Michigan Dock and Market Corporation was organised during the Great Depression and became both a trading hub and an entertainment venue for the city. How the deep-water port operates today is a direct continuation of that.
Marine operations
Sand Products Corporation began in industrial sand mining and processing and moved into Great Lakes shipping and vessel ownership through subsidiaries and partnerships. By the early 1930s it was operating a large commercial dock in Muskegon handling a wide variety of cargoes. That operation has run continuously ever since.
Port City Marine Services keeps its main offices at the Mart Dock. Its current fleet is dedicated to dry-bulk cement products, with an operating history spanning Great Lakes freighters, tankers and towing vessels, and reach beyond the lakes to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Gulf of Mexico and the inland river system.
Heritage
Berth space is the scarce resource at any working terminal, which makes the Mart Dock’s two static vessels a deliberate cost. The USS LST 393 — one of only two Landing Ship Tanks left in original configuration — was bought by Sand Products in 1948, converted to the car ferry Highway 16, and then kept alongside for twenty-seven unprofitable years after her route closed in 1973.
When volunteers asked permission to restore her, they got it. The USS LST 393 Preservation Association opened her bow doors in 2007 for the first time since the 1940s. The story of preserving the USS LST 393 is largely a story about a commercial landlord declining to charge rent.
Passenger service
In 2018 the excursion boat that had operated from this dock for thirty years as the Port City Princess was for sale, with an out-of-town buyer ready. Sand Products matched the price and kept her local, refitted her, and rechristened her the Aquastar after the SS Aquarama.
She now runs public and private cruises on Muskegon Lake and Lake Michigan with a Coast Guard–inspected hull and Coast Guard–certified captains. The Aquastar’s return to Muskegon Lake also gives the public a legitimate reason to set foot on a working industrial waterfront, which is otherwise a place most residents never see.