SS St. Marys Challenger

The SS St. Marys Challenger was a working lake freighter operating on the North American Great Lakes from 1906 until 2013. As she approached the end of her 107-year-long working career as a self-propelled boat, she was the last freight-carrying vessel on the Great Lakes to be powered by steam engine. The owner has taken steps to refit the vessel as an articulated barge for potential return to service in 2015.

Working boat
The vessel was launched on February 7, 1906 by Great Lakes Engineering Works in Ecorse, Michigan. The shipyard had received an order to rivet together the plates of a 551-foot (168-meter) hull for what was then the booming Minnesota iron ore trade. Soon the large boat, christened William P. Snyder, was shuttling hematite for the Shenango Furnace Company. The Snyder was beginning its working life at the same time as the development of the assembly line for bolting together consumer goods made with steel, such as automobiles. Iron ore boats would have plenty of work to do. The Snyder also carried iron ore to furnaces to make munitions used in World War I and World War II.

Originally powered by two Scotch boilers, the vessel, by now renamed the Elton Hoyt II, was repowered in 1950 with a Skinner Marine Uniflow steam engine and two watertube boilers. This would be the first of five separate re-namings as the vessel repeatedly changed owners. Too stubby by the 1960s to serve as a profitable ore boat, the vessel was laid up and then, in 1966, plucked out of a freshwater boneyard for reconversion and new life as a cement carrier. Now based in Charlevoix, Michigan, the aging steamship shuttled powdered cement from northern Michigan to a wide variety of roadbuilding contractors in various port locations on the Great Lakes.

During its second half-century of life the vessel, which took on the final name of St. Marys Challenger, became a favorite of boatwatchers up and down the Great Lakes as a final example of the riveted steamships of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Barge
In November 2013 the Challenger reached the end of its working life as a self-propelled vessel. It steamed to the Bay Shipbuilding Co. in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin to be cut down to a articulated lake barge. It was expected that as a barge, the vessel would be pushed by a dedicated tugboat and would resume the dedicated transport of powdered cement on the Great Lakes.