Enquirer (Armed Yacht)
1898
The Navy retained the name carried by this vessel at the time of her acquisition.
(Armed Yacht: displacement 140; length 133'7"; beam 17'6", draft 10'0"; armament 2 1-pounders)
The single-screw yacht Enquirer—built in 1896 at Buffalo, N.Y., by the Union Dry Dock Co., for newspaper publisher William J. Conners of Buffalo, who had acquired the Buffalo Enquirer in 1895, began the Morning Enquirer in 1896, merged it with the Buffalo Courier, after which it became the Buffalo Courier-Record—was purchased by the Navy on 28 May 1898.
Commissioned on 22 June 1898, Lt. William H. Stayton, USANF, in command, Enquirer served on patrol out of New York from Newport, R.I., to Seabright, N.J., until placed out of commission at New York on 9 August 1898. She was sold to the War Department for use as a survey ship on 20 July 1899, and received assignment to the Engineer Corps a little over a month later, on 28 August 1899.
Renamed Search, the former yacht conducted river and harbor surveys for the improvement of the waterways in the northern and northwestern lakes, serving with the Army Corps of Engineers through the Great War [World War I). She operated with the Army until 1929.
A decade or so later (1939), the ship was registered to Loretta Gorsuch, who employed the erstwhile pleasure craft and survey ship as a freighter, under her original name Enquirer, sailing from Detroit, Michigan. Taken out of documentation in 1941, the vessel was ultimately scrapped during 1942-1943, the dismantling taking place at Port Clinton, Ohio.
Robert J. Cressman
Updated, 12 September 2022
