Page 39 - 2010 Lake St. Clair Guide Magazine

S. S. Lake St. Clair - Served as "USS" Lake St. Clair in 1918-1919

Lake St. Clair, a 2308 gross ton (4880 tons displacement) freighter, was completed in April 1918 at the Great
Lakes Engineering Works, Ecorse, Michigan, (who also built the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1958).
The ship was initially manned by a U.S. Shipping Board crew (known today as the U.S. Dept. of Commerce) and
took an Army cargo to Europe during the summer of 1918, a year into the U.S. involvement of World War I.
Placed into commission by the Navy at Cardiff, Wales, in October 1918 as USS Lake St. Clair, she was assigned
to the Army coal trade, carrying coal from Cardiff, Wales, and Belfast, Northern Ireland to French ports. In mid-
February 1919 Lake St. Clair was reassigned to the Food Administration, for whom she operated between French
ports, The Netherlands, and England.
Returning to the United States in late August, Lake St. Clair was decommissioned in September 1919. She was
sold to the Ford Motor Co. in 1926 and scrapped. Ford also bought nine other Naval ships around that same
year for scrap metal. As a side note, working with Ford Motor..... the River Rouge's steel-making facilities were
operational and the first "heat," or batch, of steel was poured on June 21, 1926.

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