SS Valley Camp

The Valley Camp hauled sixteen million tons of cargo over three million miles of Great Lakes water in fifty years — coal, iron ore, limestone, the raw material of the industrial Midwest moving through the Soo Locks on a ship built in Lorain in 1917 for the Producers Steamship Company. She was the Louis W. Hill first, named for the railroad magnate; the Valley Camp name came in 1936 with the coal company that bought her. She retired in 1966, worked-out and obsolete, and two years later she was docked permanently at Sault Ste. Marie as the city's contribution to its own tricentennial.

The museum she's become is the Great Lakes' most complete — the cargo holds that once held coal now hold a hundred exhibits of the lakes' maritime history: shipwreck artifacts, lighthouse lenses, the recovered Vienna Eagle figurehead, and the two lifeboats of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest pieces of wreckage recovered from the most famous shipwreck in Great Lakes history. The Fitzgerald's boats came ashore at Sault Ste. Marie after the November 1975 storm that took the ship and her twenty-nine crew in Lake Superior; they're displayed in the Valley Camp's hold a mile from the locks the Fitzgerald never reached.

The crew's quarters are kept as they were — the cabins, the galley, the wheelhouse with the view up the river toward the locks. Visitors report the standard maritime residue: footsteps on the deck when no one's there, voices in the engine room, the feeling of being watched in the holds where the Fitzgerald exhibit sits.

The ship is the archive's working boat — not a wreck or a legend but a survivor, the fifty-year freighter that ended its career becoming the museum of the ones that didn't survive theirs.