Titanic-era steamship to set sail for Kingston museum, but rough waters loom | CBC News

At the end of a dead end street in the small community of Port McNicoll, Ont., a vast steamship older than the Titanic sits in the cold Georgian Bay waters.

Once a vital stop along a Canadian Pacific Railway shipping route, Port McNicoll is now home to only a few thousand people, along with one of the world’s largest remaining Edwardian steamships: the S.S. Keewatin.

But not for much longer.

The Keewatin is bound for a new home, having been donated by longtime owner Skyline Investments Inc. to the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes in Kingston, Ont., some 350 kilometres away.

If it makes the voyage on schedule, the 107-metre-long ship will open as a museum exhibit at a Kingston dry dock in the spring of 2024.

“When everybody realized that there was no other option, this had to be the way that the ship was saved,” said Eric Conroy, founder of the volunteer group Friends of Keewatin.

“The ultimate goal is to save the ship. It’s Canadian heritage. It belongs to Canada.”

Not everyone in Port McNicoll, however, believes the small community is out of options. Keep Keewatin Home, a local advocacy group, opposes the move, claiming it represents an “appropriation” of the historical artifact.

But local volunteers, politicians and the Kingston museum all argue the S.S. Keewatin’s survival depends on the ship setting sail from Port McNicoll one last time.

Ship ‘would fall into disrepair’ in Port McNicoll

The Keewatin is older than the Titanic and shares the same type of steam engine with the much larger vessel.

For nearly 60 years, it transported passengers and freight from Port McNicoll across the Great Lakes to Thunder Bay, Ont. The ship was decommissioned in the 1960s and purchased by a wealthy American who turned it into a floating museum on Michigan’s Kalamazoo Lake.

In 2012, Conroy helped American ownership sell the Keewatin to Skyline, which made it the centrepiece of its extensive waterfront redevelopment plans for Port McNicoll.

After a change in management, those plans fell through. The company then tried — and failed — to offload the ship to nearby communities.

“The thing that I was always worried about is that proper management couldn’t be found in a small place like this,” Conroy said. “Eventually, whether it was five years or 10 years or 15 years, it would fall into disrepair.”

After securing a heritage designation for the Keewatin, the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes accepted the ship on a donation and will fund $2 million in major repairs.

‘Anchor’ of the community

Some Port McNicoll residents are fighting to keep the ship.

Speaking on behalf of Keep Keewatin Home in an interview with CBC’s Ontario Morning, Dan Travers, a history professor at Georgian College, said the ship is “literally and figuratively the anchor” of Port McNicoll.

Over several years, Travers has collected thousands of signatures calling for the ship to stay where it is. He said the Keewatin is the community’s “most prized heritage asset.”

“We wish [the museum] all the best success and we wish them well,” Travers said. “But we also don’t want them to take our ship.”

Travers said Skyline should instead donate the ship to any of several local heritage organizations he believes are “more than capable” of managing and operating it. Travers did not name any specific organizations.

In a written statement, the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes said it was accepting the ship as a donation and that it couldn’t stay in Port McNicoll “as there is no qualified or resourced organization to care for it.”

“If the Keewatin wasn’t coming to Kingston, it would be going somewhere else or would be scrapped.”

‘Transformational’ acquisition, museum says

Ted Walker, mayor of Tay Township, which includes Port McNicoll, counts himself among those sad to see the ship go.

He said nearly everyone in the area has some connection to the ship. Walker’s mother was a server on the Keewatin, he said, and his brother a bellhop.

“So many people have relatives that worked on the ship and, if they’re my age, remember going to watch it come in and out,” Walker said. “It’s kind of like losing a member of the family.”

Ultimately, though, Walker believes Kingston has the resources needed to extend the Keewatin’s life.

For Kingston, the ship represents a potentially “transformational” acquisition, according to the museum’s manager Doug Cowie.

Cowie said unlike Port McNicoll, Kingston has five qualities that make it the right home for the Keewatin: financial resources, plenty of tourists, a dry dock, an exclusive heritage designation and decades of expertise.

Artifacts being packed up

During the ship’s tenure in Port McNicoll, painstaking maintenance fell to the Friends of Keewatin.

“The wear and tear on a ship that was built of timbers and steel has been immense,” Conroy said. “There’s a million little things with a ship like this to keep it top notch.”

A crew of about 35 is now readying the ship for the move. Workers are carefully packing up its contents down to the smallest silverware — each piece an artifact on its own.

Until the work is complete, Conroy is sleeping in a trailer next to the ship.

“I’m very pleased for Kingston,” he said. “This is the best way to keep Keewatin around for another 100 years.”