Hull 17 is still sailing in steam. She's had many names. Launched Feb. 7, 1906 as William P. Snyder, later Elton Hoyt II, Alex D. Chisolm, Medusa Challenger, Southdown Challenger, and St. Mary's Challenger. Built as a traditional bulker, later converted to a specialized cement carrier.

She currently has a 4 cylinder Skinner Unaflow (or Uniflow) steam engine.

Note that many Great Lakes freighter names were reused on several different boats, thus if you try to look up a specific boat name, you need to check the dates that a boat carried the name. On the lakes, renaming apparently had no superstitious stigma.

This is probably early winter 1906 at Ecorse, since the James Laughlin would be launched on April 6, GLEW's hull number 16 for Pittsburgh's Jones & Laughlin Steel Company and operated by its subsidiary, the Interstate Steamship Company of Duluth. Sold Canadian in 1964 and renamed Helen Evans for Captain Norman Reoch's Hindman Transportation Co., Ltd., of Owen Sound, Ontario, she was scrapped in 1981 at Cartagena, Colombia. The vessel to the right on the ways is almost certainly the Michigan, hull number 20, being constructed for the Grand Island Steamship Company, part of the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company, which would launch on May 26. Also sold Canadian in 1965 and renamed Goudreau, she would last until 1969 when scrapped at Santander, Spain. The vessel to the far left is the Charles B. Hill of 1878, launched as the Delaware and previously featured on Shorpy, being rebuilt into a more modern appearing freight carrier for John Boland of Buffalo. Less than a year after this photograph was taken, the Hill, coal-laden and towing the barge Commodore, would be purposely run aground when her seams began to open during a gale on November 22, 1906. All crew survived. Her remains still exist in shallow water about a half mile offshore of North Madison, Ohio, west of Ashtabula, in Lake Erie.

I just watched the 1014 foot long PAUL R TREGURTHA come into Duluth. Zounds, what a large ore boat!