Every year since 1969, the Marine Historical Society of Detroit has named an Historian of the Year. The award is voted on by past winners, and honors those who have contributed significantly to the research, presentation or publication of Great Lakes ships and the shipping history.
2022 Historian of the Year
Great Lakes marine historian and author William M. Worden is Great Lakes Marine Historian of the Year for 2022.
Bill was born to a Great Lakes family that included a captain, two mates, a 19th century shipbuilder at Mount Clemens, Michigan, a stevedoring executive and a U.S. Coast Guard officer. He is considered an expert on Great Lakes passenger vessels, and in 2020 was chosen to receive the 2020 C. Patrick Labadie Award for the preservation of Great Lakes history by the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History. A native Detroiter, he served from 1977 to 2006 as Director of the Historic Designation Advisory Board of the City of Detroit, which operates the city’s program of designation of historic districts and landmarks. He has also served as a consultant in the fields of historic preservation and maritime history.
He first published an article on Great Lakes subjects in Inland Seas at the age of 14. He has published work in Steamboat Bill, Telescope, The Detroit Marine Historian, Paddle Wheels (Great Britain) and Dampferzeiting (Switzerland). He served as a director of the Steamship Historical Society of America during two separate periods and was Editor-in-Chief of Steamboat Bill from 1996-2006.
He sailed part of a summer on the passenger ship ERIE QUEEN in 1962. He also He sailed part of a summer on the WALTER A. STERLING in 1966. He worked on a number of the Detroit-based Gaelic Towing tugs, including the original TIPPERARY and the second tug, DONEGAL. He was part of the crew that abandoned the sinking tug KILLARNEY, which foundered on Lake Erie on September 12, 1974.
Bill was also co-chair of the committee that raised the money for the purchase by Dossin Great Lakes Museum of the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Co. collection that included the Gothic Room from CITY OF DETROIT III. He was a long-time secretary of the Michigan Historic Preservation Network and served a term as chairman. He chaired the Network’s first UP conference, which was devoted to Maritime History.
He attended Ohio University, spent a semester in Copenhagen, and graduated from The Ohio State University with a major in Art History; he continued at Ohio State for graduate study. He is an alumnus of the London (England) Summer School of the Victorian Society and the Architectural Conservation Summer School at West Dean College, near Chichester, England.
In 1975-76, he was administrative coordinator of the Detroit/Urban Conservation project, a city-wide survey of historic resources. He also operated his own pipe organ business, with emphasis on the restoration of historic instruments. In 1978, he restored Detroit’s oldest organ, and he has partially restored Michigan’s largest 19th century organ.
Active in the history of steam navigation, he served as president of the Steamer Columbia Foundation, which acquired one of the Bob-Lo boats, the National Historic Landmark steamer COLUMBIA, in hopes of active operation as a living museum. He has served as a board member of the Steamship Historical Society of America and is former editor-in-chief of its journal Steamboat Bill as well as columnist on maritime preservation; he was named an honorary life member of the society by the board of directors. He is a life member of the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society (Great Britain), and a member of the Marine Historical Society of Detroit, the Great Lakes Historical Society, the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History, the Virginia V Foundation (Seattle), and the Internationales Bodensee-Schiffarts Museum (Lake Constance) as well as other maritime history organizations.
Mr. Worden is also a past Chairman of the Board of the Michigan Historic Preservation Network, the statewide preservation organization, having been secretary from 1988-1995. He is an advisor emeritus of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, having served on that board from 1978 to 1987. From 1981-85, Bill was corporate secretary of Maintenance Central for Seniors, a non-profit which budgeted over $3 million annually for free home repairs for senior citizens. He has served as board member for the Detroit Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, Detroit Landmarks Inc., Cass Community Methodist Church, and is past chairman of the Parish Council of St. Joseph Church, Detroit, where he directed interior restoration in celebration of the centennial of the parish church. He also served as Director of Music at St. Joseph from 1997 to 2006, maintaining a distinguished program of choral and orchestral music dating back almost a century and a half.
Mr. Worden directed the $600,000 renovation of Detroit’s Most Holy Trinity R.C. Church, a National Register property with a long-standing reputation for social service programs. That parish’s “Sharin’ O’ the Green” Committee for 1986, co-chaired by Michigan Gov. James Blanchard and Thomas Monaghan, honored him with its “Samaritan of the Year” award. A charter member of Partners for Sacred Places, he remains active as advisor to a number of churches of various denominations on renovation and maintenance issues and is a former member of the Architectural Review Committee of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit. He has received recognition from the Detroit Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration (Career Civil Servant of the Year, 1985) and has received two testimonial resolutions from the Detroit City Council. He was inducted as an honorary affiliate member of the Detroit chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1995 and was honored by the chapter again in 2003 for his contribution to the AIA Guide to Detroit Architecture, published by Wayne State University Press. In 2020, he was awarded the C. Patrick Labadie Lifetime Achievement award for maritime history for the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History.
Bill is married to Barbara W. Worden; the couple are slowly restoring a large Edwardian house in Detroit’s historic Indian Village. He is a past president of the Indian Village Association, a pioneering neighborhood association dating from 1937.