The Edwardian ocean liner that spent 45 years docked in Douglas

For 45 years, the little village of Douglas had a 350-foot ocean-style steamship parked in its river. The SS Keewatin was built in 1907 on the Clyde in Scotland, and when she was retired she came to rest on the Kalamazoo River, right across the water from Saugatuck — a grand Edwardian liner moored against the trees of Allegan County.

She was no ordinary boat. The Canadian Pacific Railway ran her as a floating link in its cross-Canada route, carrying overnight passengers across the upper Great Lakes between Ontario ports. She was so long that to get her from the ocean into the lakes, the builders had to cut her in half, float the pieces past a canal too small to take her whole, and bolt her back together at Buffalo. Inside she had the works — a grand staircase, a dining saloon, staterooms, brass and varnished wood — a slice of the early 1900s preserved afloat.

When her passenger days ended in 1965, a West Michigan man named Roland Peterson bought her, and in 1967 she was towed down to Douglas to become a museum. For decades you could walk her decks, peer into the cabins, and see Great Lakes lore and Saugatuck history laid out belowdecks. She was, and is, one of the very last surviving Edwardian-era passenger steamships anywhere in the world — a class of ship that has otherwise been scrapped down to almost nothing.

In 2012, Canada wanted her back. She was towed out of the Kalamazoo and up to Ontario, near where she’d once worked, and eventually opened again for tours on her home waters. Douglas lost its strangest landmark — a transatlantic-looking liner that somehow ended up in a small Michigan resort town — but for nearly half a century, she was the most surprising thing on the river.