The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - All Aboard the S.S. Keewatin!

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

For nearly 60 years, the S.S. Keewatin took passengers and freight from Port McNicoll in Georgian Bay across the Great Lakes to Thunder Bay, Ontario. After being setup as a floating museum in Michigan for years, the steamship was on the move again. After months of restoration and a long journey through the Great Lakes, the Edwardian-era steamship, has a new home at the Great Lakes Museum in Kingston, Ontario. This video is brought to you through a partnership with Detroit Public TV's Great Lakes Now. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kingston's newest museum attraction, the S.S. Kewaitan, is the sole surviving Edwardian-era passenger liner in the world. As part of the Canadian Pacific Railway fleet operating in the Upper Great Lakes in the early 1900s, it's fitting that she finally found her forever home in Canada's museum capital. Doug Cowey is the manager of the Great Lakes Museum in Kingston, which now owns the Kewaitan. The ship was built in Glasgow, Scotland,

at the Fairfield Shipbuilding Engineering Company. It came over under its own power. Knowing the Kewaitan would be too large to fit through the St. Lawrence Seaway canals and then later the Welland, bulkheads were designed into her hull so she could split into two pieces when she reached Montreal. It was riveted together.

They took out all the rivets. It was pulled apart and then it was towed in two halves, two sections, through the canal system and put back together again in Buffalo. In 1907, the Kuwaitin was put into service to transport passengers from Georgian Bay westward and returned from Lake Superior with grains for export. After World War I, she was primarily used as a cruise ship. Dan Rose is the coordinator of collections and programs at the Great Lakes Museum. Early on, passengers travelling on board the Kuwaitin were kind of a mishmash.

Canadian Pacific was one of the first companies to try and sell Canada to Canadians by promoting Canadian tourism. They were encouraging folks to take their tour on the ship, pass through the beautiful natural scenery of the Great Lakes, and of course end up at one of Canadian Pacific's fine luxury hotels. By the 1960s, trains, planes and automobiles became the preferred method of travel and steam ships like the Kewaitan were decommissioned and sold for scrap. The Kewaitan's fate looked bleak.

It would take no less than three miracles for her to find her way to Kingston, Ontario. The first one took the key weight into Douglas, Michigan. This ship was basically in the scrap yard when this gentleman, this American from Michigan bought it, took it down and had it in his marina as a museum. That American was R.J. Peterson, a community leader, history buff, and owner of Tower Marine. The Kuwaitin remained a feature of the Saugatuck Douglas community until 2012,

when Peterson retired at 85. Once again, the Kuwaitin's future looked dire until Skyline Investments purchased her and towed her back to Georgian Bay. Then another miracle that found another home. The ship was run by the friends of Key Waiten. And they did a great job of preserving the ship all those years until COVID came along in 2020.

COVID shut the ship down. When the pandemic eased, the labor required to reopen the ship was beyond the capabilities of the Friends Group. Once again, the key waitants' future was in debt. And once again, she was acquired by a new owner, this time the Great Lakes Museum. The museum acquired the ship in 2023 when it was donated by Skyline Investments. This is the third miracle that it arrived here. But the journey to Kingston wasn't easy.

Over two dozen friends of Kuwait and volunteers worked seven days a week for nearly two months to secure the ship and pack all its historical contents. The ship was towed down to Hamilton out of Georgian Bay, then out in the Lake Heron, down through the St. Clair River, through the Detroit River, in the Lake Erie, and then all the way through the Welland Canal and up to Hamilton. By April of 2023, the Keewayton had been a museum exhibit for almost as long as she'd been a working vessel sailing the Great Lakes.

Time had taken its toll, and she needed a lot of work. We're at the Heddle Shipyard in Hamilton to have some major repairs done to it that we don't want to get involved in in Kingston. Things such as sandblasting the tall funnel, the smokestack to some people. The two masts were also sandblasted and painted, along with all the davits that hold the lifeboats. We also had the wooden fur deck, which was two and a half inches thick, completely removed because it was in pretty bad shape. It took like a crew of shipyard workers to work on it.

By the fall of 2023, the shipyard repairs were done and the Kuwaitin was ready for her final voyage to Kingston. A dedicated crew of volunteers eagerly awaited her arrival in Kingston, where months of labor were still required before the ship would be ready for public tours. Almost three and a half years of dust accumulated inside,

and then you had a whole summer of activity in the shipyard, of workers going up and down. And so it was a huge effort just to clean the ship at all deck levels. You can't make a project like this work without the volunteers. You can't hire people to do all the work that they're doing. A lot of volunteers over its history have really connected with this ship. The hours are unbelievable. The final step before opening? Carefully unpacking all the ship's artifacts and putting everything back on display. A core group of the friends of Key Waiton came down to help

us stage the ship, which was another big operation that we had never done. Today, visitors can choose between two 40-minute guided walking tours. They all have headsets on and the docent is speaking through a microphone so that everybody isn't straining to hear. It gives them some space to spread out and look into different cabins and so forth and wander around in little nooks and crannies. The engine room experience is much more focused in the actual science and engineering of how a high-pressure steam ship was able to operate. In the early years of steam power experimentation, there was all manner of disasters that occurred. These boilers would often become so compressed

and so sensitive that it's very easy for them to explode. So that tour was more focused on the science of this, whereas the passenger experience is focused on what life was like for those who were actually traveling on board. The Kuwaitin was not as large or as grand as the Titanic. But the design of their engines, grand staircases, and dining parlors was the same, as was their adherence to the rigid class structures of the time. This is an Edwardian ship by virtue of its elegant details,

from the fine wood trim that you'll find throughout the vessel, to even elements of the design of the ship itself. The smokestack, for example, is set at an angle to make it look as though it's going faster. Those of the serving class were meant to be seen when they were serving and then not seen otherwise. So believe it or not, the promenade was partially designed to allow crew to pass through different sections of the ship without being spotted by the passengers. The plates were actually heated in a warming drawer inside the kitchen. The tables would actually have been sprayed, the tablecloth specifically, by the waiters

when the hot plates met with the tablecloth. The liquid tension would meet with the plate to actually secure it to the tablecloth so that it wouldn't slide around while the ship was in transit. It's special to know that you're on a ship that many travelled across in order to get to new homes and new beginnings. More than 4,000 steamships were built during the Edwardian era. Of all those vessels, the SS Kiewetan is the last. It's crazy to think that there were

ships that were larger, faster, more impressive, more historically significant, but despite it all, Kiewetan is the only one that survived.