page_title: Lake freighter
section_title: Lifespan
hierarchical_section_title: Lake freighter / Lifespan
caption_attribution_description: Cement carrier and storage vessel, Lake Superior, Duluth, Minnesota J.B. Ford IMO number 5166378 J.A.W. Iglehart IMO number 5139179
context_page_description: Lake freighters, or lakers, are bulk carrier vessels that ply the Great Lakes of North America. These vessels are traditionally called boats, although classified as ships.
  Since the late 19th century, lakers have carried bulk cargoes of materials such as limestone, iron ore, grain, coal, or salt from the mines and fields of the upper Great Lakes to the populous industrial areas farther east. The 63 commercial ports handled 173 million tons of cargo in 2006. Because of winter ice on the lakes, the navigation season is not usually year-round. The Soo Locks and Welland Canal close from mid-January to late March, when most boats are laid up for maintenance. Crewmembers spend these months ashore.
  Depending on their application, lakers may also be referred to by their type, such as oreboats, straight deckers, bulkers, sternenders, self unloaders, longboats, or lakeboats, among others.
  In the mid-20th century, 300 lakers worked the Lakes, but by the early 21st century there were fewer than 140 active lakers. SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in 1975, became widely known as the most recent and largest major vessel to be wrecked on the Great Lakes.
context_section_description: Since the freshwater lakes are less corrosive to ships than the salt water of the oceans, many of the Lakers remain in service for long periods and the fleet has a much higher average age than the ocean-going fleet. The average lifespan of a laker is 40–50 years. Until 2014, SS St. Marys Challenger, built in 1906 as William P. Snyder (552 ft, 168 m), was the oldest ship in active duty on the Lakes. She was managed by Port City Steamship and owned by St. Mary's Cement, a subsidiary of Votorantim Cimentos. E. M. Ford had one of the longest careers, having been built in 1898 (as Presque Isle – 428 ft, 130 m) and still sailing the lakes 98 years later in 1996. In 2007 she was still afloat as a stationary transfer vessel at a riverside cement silo in Saginaw. She went to the scrap yard in November 2010 at Purvis Marine (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario}). J. B. Ford, built in 1904, last sailed in 1985 and in 2007 served in the same capacity as E. M. Ford at a different cement silo in Superior, Wisconsin. Several decorated World War II veteran ships are still in active, although civilian, use such as the tankers Chiwawa and Neshanic (scrapped 2018), now the bulk freighters Lee A. Tregurtha and American Victory, respectively, and the Landing Craft Tank 203, now the working vessel Outer Island.
caption: In 2006, J. B. Ford (left) in use for cement storage at age 102 with J. A. W. Iglehart (right) in her last month of a 70-year sailing career, which included surviving a U-boat attack in the Atlantic during World War II.
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