Sixty years ago this month an era or Great Lakes travel came to an end with the burning of The Greater Detroit steamship.

Once called “The Jewel of The Great Lakes” the ship was set on fire on December 12th 1956 in the middle of Lake St. Claire as a means of disposal to obtain the scrap metal without the laborious effort of stripping the once mighty vessel.

A little history

If you wanted to get around the country in the early 1900s, you didn’t board a jetliner, you’d either catch a lift on a train or hop aboard a steamship. And of all the steamship lines plying the waters across the country, the biggest in the Midwest was the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Co. And of D&C’s Big Six steamers, the biggest and grandest was the SS Greater Detroit.

Aboard the great D&C line, passengers would board in the evening, maybe eat dinner and then sleep the night away. The next morning, they’d be at their destination. D&C passengers took overnight trips from spring through fall, enjoying dinner and drinks as the ship steamed onward east to Cleveland or Buffalo, New York, or north to the Straits of Mackinac.

According to the Historic Detroit Website:

The D&C line was born in 1850 as the Detroit & Cleveland Steamboat Line, when Capt. Arthur Edwards began operating two small paddle vessels — the Southerner and the Baltimore — with overnight service between Detroit and Cleveland. The line was incorporated in 1868 as the Detroit & Cleveland Steam Navigation Co., but about 10 years later, it was taken over by James McMillan, one of the most influential figures during Detroit’s rise to wealth and prominence. McMillan was the line’s principal figure and would later become a Republican U.S. senator and co-found the Union Trust Co., which built the city’s landmark Guardian Building.

He also was president of the Detroit Dry Dock Co., which, conveniently enough, built steamships. With McMillan’s family at the helm, the D&C line would flourish and become the stuff of Detroit legend. The fleet had “the largest boats, the heaviest traffic, and, save for the Old Bay Line, the longest survival of any of the major lines,” George W. Hilton wrote in “The Night Boat,” a book chronicling overnight steamers of the United States.

The Greater Detroit was one of the two largest side-wheel steamers ever built -- the other being her sister ship, the Greater Buffalo -- and made her maiden voyage in August 1924, according to the GLMI.

The steamer could carry more than 2,100 passengers, had 625 staterooms and was ultimately towed into Lake St. Clair in December 1956, where it was set ablaze to make scrapping her hull easier.

It seems that, while the memorabilia found plenty of eager buyers, “apparently, no one was interested in buying” the steamers themselves, Norman Siegel told the Free Press in late November 1956, “at least, not interested enough to put up any money. We would much rather have seen them back in operation, but the economics of the situation were stacked against that. The present high value of scrap metal dictates our decision.”

That decision was to sell the boats for scrap.

On the night of Dec. 12, 1956, the Greater Detroit and Eastern States were taken out into Lake St. Clair and set a blaze. Burning away all the splendor made it easier — and cheaper — to get to the steel.

As the Greater Detroit was being hauled away, its anchor was cut and left at the bottom of the Detroit River — there was no steam to power the hydraulic to raise it. It remained there until Nov. 15, 2016, when the Great Lakes Maritime Institute raised the anchor to be put on display at the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority.

In 1960, D&C Navigation was absorbed into the Denver-Chicago Trucking Company. The boats were gone, and now even the name of the once-proud company was no more.

There is a new effort to raise one of the anchors from the ship. Read more about that effort.

Read more about The Greater Detroit.