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. When she was retired, she came to rest on the Kalamazoo River, right across the water from Saugatuck. She was 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. She carried overnight passengers across the upper Great Lakes, between Ontario ports. She was so long that a canal along the way was too small to take her whole. So the builders cut her in half, floated the pieces past, and bolted her back together at Buffalo. Inside she had the works. There was a grand staircase, a dining saloon, staterooms, brass and varnished wood — a slice of the early 1900s preserved afloat.

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 and peer into the cabins. Belowdecks, you could see Great Lakes lore and Saugatuck history laid out. She was, and is, one of the very last surviving Edwardian-era passenger steamships anywhere in the world. It is 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. Eventually she 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.