SS CLIPPER

About this property

The SS Milwaukee Clipper, also known as the SS Clipper , and formerly the SS Juniata, is a retired passenger ship and automobile ferry that sailed under two configurations and traveled on four of the five Great Lakes, excluding Lake Ontario. The vessel is now docked as a museum in Muskegon, Michigan. The Juniata was launched on December 17, 1904, in Cleveland, Ohio, at the shipyards of the American Shipbuilding Company. Christened Juniata when she was launched, she was built for the Erie and Western Transportation Company, also known as the Anchor Line. This was the Great Lakes passenger and shipping division of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Her sister ships were the SS Tionesta of 1902 and SS Octorara of 1910. The ship is 361 feet (110 m) in length, and 45 feet (14 m) in beam, with a gross tonnage of 4333 tons. In her original configuration, she carried 350 passengers in staterooms at a cruising speed of 13.5 knots. As originally built, she had a riveted steel hull and a wooden superstructure. For the Pennsylvania Railroad, she carried passengers and package freight between Buffalo, New York and Duluth, Minnesota until 1915. That year, the anti-monopoly Panama Canal Act, which forbade railroads from owning steamships, went into effect. Forced to divest from its marine divisions, the Pennsylvania Railroad sold its Anchor Line along with four other railroad-owned company fleets, to the newly formed Great Lakes Transit Corporation. Under this flag, she carried passengers along her old routes for another 20 seasons. For the duration of the 1933 season, Juniata carried passengers to and from Chicago for the Chicago World's Fair. Juniata was laid up in 1936 due to poor economic conditions as well as new regulations on wooden passenger ships following the Morro Castle disaster. Juniata was moored in Buffalo until being sold in 1940 to Wisconsin & Michigan Steamship Company, a subsidiary of the McKee family-owned Sand Products Corporation of Detroit, MI. She was rebuilt and used as a passenger ship on Lake Michigan. Juniata was extensively modernized at the yard of the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company. Her boilers were converted to burn fuel oil instead of coal, and the old cabins and wooden superstructure were removed and replaced with steel to meet the new maritime fire safety standards created after the SS Morro Castle fire off Asbury Park, New Jersey in 1934. The streamlined forward stack is false and does not ventilate engine exhaust. It is a signature of naval architect George Sharp, whose ideas regarding fireproof ships were first incorporated into Juniata. This stack became standard on many new ships that were to come. Sharp is credited with three historic vessels, Milwaukee Clipper, SS Lane Victory, and NS Savannah.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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